Jars_15.1_final.pdf

THE Journal of

Ay n R a n d S t u d i es V o l u m e 1 5 , N u m b e r 1 , j u ly 2 0 1 5

issue 29

T h e P e n n s y lva n i a S tat e U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

Editors

Board of advisors

Robert L. Campbell Psychology, Clemson University

David T. Beito History, University of Alabama

Stephen Cox Literature, University of California, San Diego

Peter j. Boettke Economics and Philosophy, George Mason University

Roderick T. Long Philosophy, Auburn University

Susan Love Brown Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University

Chris Matthew Sciabarra Ph.D., Politics, New York University Brooklyn, New York

Douglas J. Den Uyl Philosophy, The Liberty Fund Mimi Reisel Gladstein English and Theatre Arts, University of Texas, El Paso Hannes H. Gissurarson Politics, University of Iceland Robert Hessen History, Emeritus, The Hoover Institution Steven Horwitz Economics, St. Lawrence University Lester Hunt Philosophy, University of Wisconsin Eric Mack Philosophy, Tulane University David N. Mayer Law, Emeritus, Capital University Douglas B. Rasmussen Philosophy, St. John’s University

CELJ An affiliated journal of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals

CONTENTS THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES VOL. 15, NO. 1, 2015

Editor’s Introduction

Assessing the Legacy of Nathaniel Branden  1 Chris Matthew Sciabarra ARTICLES

Ayn Rand and Rape  3 Susan Love Brown Beauvoir and Rand: Asphyxiating People, Having Sex, and Pursuing a Career  23 Marc Champagne and Mimi Reisel Gladstein Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov: The Issue of Literary Dialogue  42 Anna Kostenko The Prohibition Against Psychologizing  53 Robert L. Campbell Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”: A Critique of the Objectivist Theory of Volition  67 Roger E. Bissell

JARS_15.1_FM.indd 1

15/06/15 7:40 PM

BOOK REVIEWS

Liberating Capitalism?  97 Why Not Capitalism? (Jason Brennan) Reviewed by Gary Chartier Freedom and Fiction  103 Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism (Allen P. Mendenhall) Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film (Edward W. Younkins) Reviewed by Troy Camplin Russian Radical: Twenty Years Later  107 Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, second edition (Chris Matthew Sciabarra) Reviewed by Wendy McElroy symposium

Marsha Familaro Enright’s essay, “The Problem with Selfishness”  117 Arnold Baise, Merlin Jetton, and Marsha Familaro Enright CONTRIBUTORS 126

JARS_15.1_FM.indd 2

15/06/15 7:40 PM

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is a nonpartisan journal devoted to the study of Ayn Rand and her times. The journal is not aligned with any advocacy group, institute, or person. It welcomes papers from every discipline and from a variety of interpretive and critical perspectives. It aims to foster scholarly dialogue through a respectful exchange of ideas. The journal is published biannually.

Submission Information Submit both solicited and unsolicited research papers, articles, symposia, and comments on papers previously published in this journal directly to Chris Matthew Sciabarra at [email protected]. Send proposals for book reviews and queries about the appropriateness of an article to the same email address. Submissions or correspondence with the journal’s editorial board can also be mailed to: The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, P.O. Box 230052, Brooklyn, New York 11223. Only contributions not under consideration elsewhere will be accepted, and these will be subject to double-blind peer review. Replies and rejoinders are not usually subject to such review, but they will be evaluated by the editorial board for appropriateness. All submitted papers must conform to the style guidelines below. Preparation of article: Place all tables, figures, and notes at the end of the manuscript. Manuscripts should be between 4,000 and 15,000 words. A 50–100 word abstract or summary statement of the essay’s central argument should be included at the beginning of the paper, along with a 50–100 word biographical sketch that includes email and street addresses, academic affiliation, telephone and telefax numbers, titles, publishers, and years of relevant publications. Authors who want their manuscripts or other media returned must enclose postage. Stylistic Considerations: Page citations should be included in-text, in the following format: “20–22,” “201–2,” “413–14,” “552–53” without “p.” or “pp.” abbreviations. The journal uses a dual system of notes as outlined by the Chicago Manual of Style. Citations and references should follow the “author-date” system in-text as seen in the pages of this journal. Explanatory notes should be in the form of endnotes, not footnotes. A list of sources should be placed at the end of the manuscript, titled “References,” and should follow the reference-list style of the Chicago Manual. Please use italics for book titles and emphasis. Please leave right margins ragged, rather than justified. Tables, figures, and photos must be submitted in their original format (.tiff, .jpeg, .eps) at the size the author would like them to appear. Digital images must be submitted at a minimum of 300 d.p.i. (dots per inch). Visit

our

Home

Page,

designed

by

Michael

E.

Southern:

http://www

.aynrandstudies.com.

Subscriptions The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is published by the Pennsylvania State University Press (PSUP). All PSUP journals are distributed by The Johns Hopkins University

JARS_15.1_FM.indd 3

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Press Fulfillment Services. Orders can be processed online from the links ­provided on the PSUP website (see http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_JARS.html). Mail orders should be addressed to The Johns Hopkins University Press, P.O. Box 19966, Baltimore, Maryland 21211. Make checks payable to “JHU Press.” JHUP can also be contacted by phone (1-800-548-1784, inside the United States; 410–516-6987, outside the United States and Canada), fax (410-516-3866), and email ([email protected]). Correspondence of a business nature, including permissions and advertising, should be directed to: Pennsylvania State University Press, 820 North University Drive, USB 1-C, University Park, PA 16802-1003, www .psupress.org, [email protected].

Abstracting and Indexing The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies is an affiliated journal of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. It is abstracted and indexed in whole or in part by: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents/Arts & Humanities, EBSCO, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, International Political Science Abstracts, JSTOR (both the Current Scholarship Program and the back issue archive), The Left Index, MLA Directory of Periodicals, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index, Project Muse, ProQuest, Scopus, Social Sciences Citation Index, Stanford’s CLOCKSS, and Women’s Studies International. Website linked to EpistemeLinks.com, The History Journals Guide, Intute (Social Sciences), and Literature Online.

Rights and Permission The journal is registered under its ISSN (1526-1018 [E-ISSN 2169-7132]) with the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 (www .­copyright.com). For information about reprints or multiple copying for classroom use, contact the CCC’s Academic Permissions Service, or write to the Pennsylvania State University Press, 820 North University Drive, USB 1-C, University Park, PA 16802. Copyright © 2015 by the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies Foundation. All rights reserved. No copies may be made without the written permission of the publisher.

JARS_15.1_FM.indd 4

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Editor’s Introduction Assessing the Legacy of Nathaniel Branden Chris Mat thew Sciabarra

On 3 December 2014, Nathaniel Branden, a towering figure in the history of Objectivism, passed away at the age of 84. In Objectivist circles, the mere mention of Branden’s name could set off fiery debate, primarily because of his acrimonious break with Ayn Rand in 1968. In a future issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, we will be less ­concerned with that break and more focused on the work and legacy of Nathaniel Branden. With several articles already in the planning stages for this forthcoming s­ ymposium, we invite readers to submit papers for consideration as ­contributions to that forum. In the interests of objectivity, I should mention that Nathaniel Branden was my friend, and I deeply mourn his loss. Whatever one thinks of Branden ­personally, however, there are several issues that should be acknowledged, in my view. As I wrote on the occasion of his passing, It was Branden who created the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which brought Rand out of her post–Atlas Shrugged depression, and catapulted her into the role of public philosopher. It was Branden who presented the first systematization of the philosophy with his “Basic Principles

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_01_Editor's_Introduction.indd 1

15/06/15 7:38 PM

2  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

of Objectivism” course [later published as The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism; see Branden 2009], a course that was given live, and heard by thousands of others on audio recordings, both on vinyl records and tapes. It was Branden who explored the psychological implications of Rand’s exalted conception of self-esteem, and whose work was fully and unequivocally endorsed by Rand during her lifetime (indeed, his book, The Psychology of Self-Esteem [Branden (1969) 1979] is largely a collection of all the work he did while under Rand’s tutelage, and it is, in many ways, the popular launch of the selfesteem movement in modern psychology). He also conducted, with the late Barbara Branden [who passed away in December 2013; see Sciabarra 2013], a series of interviews that have formed the basis of nearly every biographical work that has been published. (Sciabarra 2014) Yet, it was, perhaps, in his post-Randian years that Branden made his biggest impact, by analyzing earlier events in the Objectivist movement (and his role in them) and endeavoring to separate it from what he regarded as p ­ sychologism and a use of rationalism at odds with independent thought (see especially Branden 1970; 1971). I will have more to say when our planned symposium is published. Until then, I look forward to seeing a discussion that will honor our commitment to fostering scholarly dialogue through a respectful interdisciplinary exchange of ideas, drawn from a variety of interpretive and critical perspectives. References

Branden, Nathaniel. [1969] 1979. The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A New Concept of Man’s Psychological Nature. Los Angeles: Nash. ———. 1970. Breaking Free. Los Angeles: Nash. ———. 1971. The Disowned Self. New York: Bantam. ———. 2009. The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Gilbert, ­Arizona: Cobden Press. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 2013. Life, death, renewal. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 1–4. ———. 2014. Nathaniel Branden: Love and friendship eternal. Notablog (3 ­December). Online at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/notablog/archives/0019 53.html.

JARS 15.1_01_Editor's_Introduction.indd 2

15/06/15 7:38 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape Susan Love Brown

ABSTRACT: The first sexual encounter between Dominique Francon and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is known as the “rape scene.” From the time of the novel’s publication, some readers have found a contradiction between Rand’s views on freedom and the violence within the novel. The ambiguity arises from the way in which the scenes leading up to the event are constructed, the sadomasochistic context of the novel, and Rand’s views of gender and romantic relationships. Although Rand repeatedly denied that any rape occurred, this article concludes that a rape did occur and that Rand fully intended it to be so.

Ayn Rand was no stranger to controversy. Her unrelenting and ­uncompromising defense of capitalism has been the focus of current commentary, but long before Rand proffered her political opinions to the public, her fiction gained their attention, particularly her first successful novel, The Fountainhead, in which the first sexual encounter between hero Howard Roark and heroine Dominique Francon is known as the “rape scene”—a shocking designation for a work by a defender of individual rights and liberty. A number of people, ­including Rand herself, have defended Rand against charges that the scene depicted an actual rape. To make matters worse, the scene is embedded in a ­sadomasochistic atmosphere that pervades the novel and reinforces the view that there is something The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 3

15/06/15 7:39 PM

4  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

unhealthy in this relationship. This confusion arose from Rand’s own gendered views, her propensity for trying to shock her public, and the psychological and cultural environment in which she operated. From the evidence available, it appears that Rand fully intended this scene to depict an actual rape. The Fountainhead was published in 1943, when the United States was in the middle of World War II, but the novel was written throughout much of the 1930s, and its theme of individualism not only reflected a general American core value but presaged the concern that many social scientists would later have about social conformity. The battle that Rand waged against c­ onformity (­ “second-hand lives”)1 called for extreme measures of a dramatic nature. And, so, Rand made her mark not only by proffering a novel of ideas, but by ­justifying such antisocial acts as blowing up a building intended for poor people and ­constructing the rape of her heroine by her hero. Rand explained Howard Roark’s justification for blowing up Cortlandt Homes in an eloquent courtroom speech. However, she never really justified Roark’s rape of Dominique Francon, and to this day that scene remains a contested one. In fact, Rand denied that the sexual encounter between Roark and Dominique was rape. Rand is reported to have said in response to a question about this scene that if it was rape, “it was rape with an engraved invitation” (Branden 1999, 37). That she should have had to explain at all requires explanation. There are at least four reasons why Rand failed to convince some of her ­readers that the relationship between Dominique and Roark was voluntary. First, Rand herself uses the word “rape.” Second, The Fountainhead is suffused with sadomasochism so strong that it reinforces the cultural assumptions about rape. Third, although there appears to have been evidence that Rand intended the relationship to be purely voluntary, she removed evidence of consent, ­leaving the reader uncertain. Fourth, Rand was part of a generation in which cultural understandings of rape were exacerbated by Hollywood mores and the fiction of her day that glamorized male dominance and rape as a sign of ­masculinity. However, before addressing these factors, it is important to look at the way in which others have viewed the controversy. Rand, Defense and Offense Barbara Branden (1999), in “Ayn Rand: The Reluctant Feminist,” notes, in ­reference to The Fountainhead, But aspects of the relationship of Dominique Francon and Howard Roark . . . have troubled many feminists. In the notorious “rape scene,” Roark takes Dominique by force. She resists him with all her strength, despite her clearly expressed passionate sexual desire for Roark. Ayn later remarked, “If it’s rape, it’s rape by engraved invitation.” (37)

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 4

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 5

But Branden is wrong when she states, “Without exception, in every sex scene Ayn Rand wrote, the woman resists, and the man physically forces her ­submission” (37). This is simply not true, as I have shown (Brown 2007). However, Branden does give us insight into Rand’s own psychology—that, to her, surrender to a man signified femininity and vulnerability (Branden 1999, 31, 38). Douglas Den Uyl, in his book The Fountainhead: An American Novel (1999), provides an extensive analysis of both the character of Dominique and the rape scene. He considers Dominique, not Roark, “the central character of this novel” (63), which is a very keen insight that most people miss. Thus, he devotes an entire chapter to her and discusses the rape scene in a subsequent chapter. What is significant about Den Uyl’s critique is that he acknowledges that the dramatic device of pitting Dominique against Roark is “not ­consistent with some of Rand’s views” (64). While trying to understand and even salvage the character of Dominique, Den Uyl admits that “Dominique lacks a certain development as a whole person” (73). However, from another perspective, Dominique can be seen as a whole person—just one who is not admirable. It is interesting to note that Roxanne J. Fand (2009) reports that on the reading of The Fountainhead in her classes at the University of Hawaii, many of her students respected Roark for his hard work but they did not like Dominique at all (491, 493). Den Uyl, in discussing Rand’s sex scenes, states that “the intensity of passion between Roark and Dominique is meant to signify emotionally a concordance with basic values, not great lustfulness” (73). Yet, although he too concludes that the sexual encounter between Dominique and Roark is voluntary, he ­acknowledges “readers having trouble sympathizing with the characters in the text” in the “‘rape’ scene” (80). In his article, “Understanding the ‘Rape’ Scene in The Fountainhead,” Andrew Bernstein (2007) begins by noting that he has been repeatedly asked about the rape scene. However, he attributes this questioning to “these ­students’ ­indoctrination with ‘politically correct’ dating codes” (201), even while ­ admitting that others have questioned the scene—people who are “longtime admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy” (201). He reports Rand’s response to a letter written in 1965: “It was not an actual rape, but a symbolic action which Dominique all but invited” (cited in Bernstein 2007, 201; cf. Branden 1999, 37). He then states, “Roark does not rape Dominique” (201). Bernstein provides an explication of the text of the scenes leading up to the rape scene to d ­ emonstrate that, in fact, Dominique maneuvers Roark into the action that he takes. “Based on the evidence, it is clear that Dominique desires desperately to sleep with Roark,” Bernstein tells us and then goes on to explain Dominique’s resistance in spite of her supposed desire in terms of her optimism and ­pessimism (203). He essentially recounts Rand’s own gender role

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 5

15/06/15 7:39 PM

6  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

model—the model in which femininity is marked by the desire of a woman to be conquered by a man. In this model, masculinity is marked by a man’s physical strength. “That Dominique’s character stands in utter c­ ontradiction to the philosophy of ­feminism helps to explain why many readers find the ‘rape’ scene inexplicable. Feminism essentially constitutes a war against ­metaphysical reality. It holds that males and females should be equal, not just in moral and legal rights, but in their biological nature and physical abilities” (209). By this, Bernstein means men’s superior physical strength. Like Rand, he assumes that this justifies the conquering of the feminine by the masculine. In short, Bernstein attributes the misreading of Rand to feminist ideology that denies the biological differences between women and men. “But those willing to ­question the feminist ideology and look objectively at the facts of the story can understand the truth about this scene” (207). Wendy McElroy, in her article “Looking through a Paradigm Darkly,” takes a similar tack to that of Bernstein in attempting to attribute the misreading of Rand’s sex scenes to “radical” feminists. She characterizes the sexual encounters between Dominique and Roark as “rough sex,” which is consensual. She states, “With these ‘rough sex’ encounters being so graphically described, it is easy to understand why most feminists, along with many nonfeminists, consider these scenes to be depictions of rape. Indeed, my contention that the scenes have no real connection to actual rape is the hypothesis that requires proof ” (158). She then proceeds to explain how Rand’s “paradigm” differs from that of feminists. McElroy practically repeats Rand’s own words from “About a Woman President” (Rand 1989) when she writes, In her role as a foil to the ideal man, the heroine’s disadvantage is not due to anything that one could normally call inferiority. It derives from what Rand conceives to be the key psychological difference between men and women. The true woman worships the true man. And the purest act of worship for a Randian heroine is when she overcomes her own strength and surrenders on the altar of sex to the appropriate hero. It is this act of worship alone that mitigates an otherwise stable state of equality between the man and the woman. (159) In other words, McElroy is arguing that it is Rand’s model of femininity to which feminists and others object and not to the specifics of the rape scene in The Fountainhead. While McElroy makes a point about Rand and feminists holding d ­ ifferent paradigms (although there is no single feminist paradigm about sexuality as McElroy implies), she also misses a point: it is the particulars of the rape scene that bother people, not sexuality. McElroy further confuses the issue

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 6

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 7

by bringing the relationship between Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged into the discussion. She does not make the distinction between the two scenes. In The Fountainhead, Rand explicitly calls the act rape. In Atlas Shrugged, she does not. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Brown 2007), in Atlas Shrugged Rand actually rises above the perversions of The Fountainhead, and, in fact, Hank Rearden explicitly asks Dagny Taggart for permission before having sex with her.2 However, McElroy (1999) concludes, “The issue of rape, ­therefore, comes down to a pure question of consent. In every one of Rand’s sex scenes, a clear indication of consent is present either in the revealed thoughts of the c­haracters or in behavior” (161). But this is ­precisely the bone of c­ ontention—that consent is not explicit in the first encounter between Dominique and  Roark, and Dominique’s thoughts are ambiguous and hard to read. McElroy refers to “the intellectual values being stylized in the initial sex scene between Dominique and Roark.” (169). But what are those “intellectual values”? Dominique “revels” in the fact that she has been raped by a lowly quarry worker, not by her highest value; thus, the argument about “enraptured surrender” or being captured and overpowered by your ideal man cannot possibly apply here, since Dominique does not know Roark at all. For Rand’s “paradigm” to have any positive value, the woman would have to know the man (which is the case with the sexual relationships in Atlas Shrugged). All of the authors discussed here conclude that the first sexual encounter with Roark is voluntary and not rape. But each one (even Den Uyl with his more extensive analysis) fails to fully explain why readers are confused and often read the scene as a real rape. Bernstein and McElroy lay responsibility for ­misunderstanding at the door of “feminists” or “feminism.” However, this ignores the fact that long before second-wave feminism got under way, people were questioning both the characters of Dominique Francon and Howard Roark and the rape scene. In a letter to a fan, Lilian Koch, on 28 August 1943, Rand stated, obviously in response to a question about Dominique’s character, “I am afraid I cannot explain her any better than I did in the book. I could add only that the greatness of her love for Roark made her want to destroy him because she could not bear the thought of his existence in a world dominated by second-handers” (Rand in Berliner 1995, 92).3 Rand seems to think that this is an explanation that others should understand, even though it is perverse. In a letter from Rand written in response to Waldo Coleman on 5 June 1946, Rand noted that he has “misunderstood the relationship of Roark and Dominique in a very improper way. . . . But the fact is that Roark did not ­actually rape Dominique; she had asked for it, and he knew that she wanted it. A man who would force himself on a woman against her wishes would be

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 7

15/06/15 7:39 PM

8  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

committing a dreadful crime. What Dominique liked about Roark was the fact that he took the responsibility for their romance and for his own actions” (282; my ­emphasis). Again, note the language that Rand uses—“she asked for it,” “she wanted it”—language that seems to deny the act of rape while replicating the phrases frequently used by men to deny rape, although Rand does not explain why she used the word “rape” in the first place. Another male writer, Robert Bremer, who was only sixteen, who ­presumably liked The Fountainhead, nevertheless had questions about the humanity of Dominique. Rand responded, “Dominique potentially is not less human than Roark, but in the period covered by the book, she functioned on an extremely wrong premise, on a very mistaken idea about life. Roark is the genuine human being, because he exemplifies a man who has reached perfection” (341). Rand’s explanation implies that she herself does not comprehend that Dominique’s behavior is not simply a question of holding a wrong idea but of emotionally wanting to suffer and inflict pain on others. On 13 March 1965, Rand wrote a letter to another fan, Paul Smith, who had asked if “the rape of Dominique Francon by Howard Roark was a violation of Dominique’s freedom.” Once again, Rand denies the scene depicted an actual rape but does not explain why she used symbolically what most people ­consider a coercive criminal act. Once again, Rand is forced to explain: “It was not an actual rape, but a symbolic action which Dominique all but invited . . .” (631). This same writer questions the fact that Karen Andre in The Night of January 16th states that she could commit murder, requiring Rand to explain, “Yes, murder is a violation of the Objectivist ethics. . . . It is not to be taken literally”  (631). So here is another case in which Rand has used an extreme and violent and criminal action to shock the reader, only to have to explain later that she didn’t really mean it. In a letter to Professor John O. Nelson (2 May 1964), Rand explained the difference between “collective” and “common” (624–26). If we accept Rand’s distinction of these terms, then both Bernstein and McElroy treat feminists as a “collective” rather than as individuals with a “common” but independently arrived at view. As far as I know (and, yes, I consider myself a feminist), there is no collective opinion about Ayn Rand among feminists. Bernstein and McElroy have constructed a straw woman to assist in their arguments rather than letting their arguments rest on their merits. If any particular feminists happen to hold a common view of Rand (and there is no specific evidence given by either Bernstein or McElroy that they do), then that commonality is perfectly legitimate. Still, the interpretation of the rape scene depends not on how many feminists affirm or deny such an interpretation but on the evidence from the book itself. Clearly, some men as well as women questioned the act; this occurred shortly after the book appeared and has carried on to the present.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 8

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 9

In The Ayn Rand Companion, Mimi Reisel Gladstein, in summarizing The Fountainhead, states, Dominique Francon, Rand’s heroine, is an interesting case study in perverseness. She is so convinced of the triumph of evil that she submits herself to every possible degradation lest she chance to hope. She is physically and psychologically masochistic: she is raped by Roark; she marries two men she despises. (36) Once again, Gladstein is merely reading what Rand herself has written in the text. As we shall see, Rand herself has written that Dominique is masochistic, and Rand herself uses the word “rape.” Gladstein is not imposing a “feminist” reading onto the text but is extrapolating from what is actually there. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in a sarcastic piece, “Psyching Out Ayn Rand,” states, “Roark and Dominique don’t waste any time talking before their first sexual encounter—which consists, as it happens, of Roark’s raping Dominique. Roark’s physical presence hits Dominique like ‘a slap in the face.’ . . . She sees him working in a stone quarry . . . and she’s a goner . . . all before she knows whether . . . he has passed third-grade math” (71–72). Harrison notices what Rand’s defenders seem to ignore—that Dominique does not know Roark at all. Her “rapture” cannot be a response to values, because Roark is a stranger. It is the work of Shoshana Milgram that lends the most credibility to the ­position that Rand intended the encounter to be consensual and desired by both parties. In her “The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel: The Composition of Ayn Rand’s First Ideal Man,” Milgram informs us that Rand removed many of the passages that would have informed the reader that Dominique and Roark understood each other’s intentions. For e­xample, Milgram explains, Rand had originally included dialogue between Dominique and Roark (“What do you want?” “You know what I want”) and then repeated it when Dominique first goes to Roark’s apartment after learning who he is; only the words are reversed between them. Rand cut out these words. Milgram states, “In the final text, they say nothing; at this dramatic moment, they understand each other without words, and the novel stresses that silent understanding” (18). However, from other details that Milgram provides, it becomes clear that this is another case in which men and women know each other’s characters w ­ ithout literally knowing anything about one another—it is magic. Readers are not made privy to this mind reading; therefore, they do not necessarily know that Dominique and Roark share a common knowledge, because it is never said. Likewise, according to Milgram, Rand also cut a passage that read, “She fought because she could not bear the pleasure. She fought because she hated ­herself

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 9

15/06/15 7:39 PM

10  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

for that pleasure. She fought him because she wanted him too much”  (18). Milgram describes this passage as “over-explicit” (18). But even though “Roark, of course, understands without words everything that Dominique does not say” (18), the reader does not! Milgram makes the argument, “In the final text, Ayn Rand makes clear Dominique’s willing embrace of Roark not only through the entire context of the Connecticut episode, but also through a phrase added for the final text: ‘the kind of rapture she had wanted’” (19). Milgram adds, “No part of ‘she had wanted’ is hard to understand; that some readers have missed the point does not mean Ayn Rand did not make it” (19). But consider the passage in which this phrase occurs: It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted. Then she felt him shaking with the agony of a pleasure unbearable even to him, she knew that she had given that to him, that it came from her, from her body, and she bit his lips and she knew what he had wanted her to know. (220) This would seem to make Rand’s case. However, Rand cut so much of the ­evidence of mutual consent that she left enough doubt. Although Milgram has a point, this could also be read as Dominique’s submission to an act of rape. It does not deny that force was used, only that Dominique eventually gives in to it. Unfortunately, even knowing that Rand at one point clearly indicated for the reader that the relationship was consensual and then added the meager phrase “the kind of rapture she had wanted,” this does not solve her problem, for she herself made the decision to excise these parts of the novel and did such a fine job that the reader is left without any clear indication of consent, only the nuances that Rand thinks she left in as indicators. Yet, there is the evidence from Rand’s journals that she was thinking in terms of rape. For example, Rand clearly states the following in expressing Howard Roark’s attitude toward Dominique: It is primarily a feeling of wanting her and getting her, without great concern for the question of whether she wants it. Were it necessary, he could rape her and feel perfectly justified. Needless to say it is she who

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 10

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 11

worships him, and loves him much more than he loves her. He is the god. He can never become a priest. She has to be the priestess. (Rand in Harriman 1997, 96) Rand’s notes to herself reveal a certain pattern of thought regarding Dominique’s sexuality, and it has all of the hallmarks of perversion. Yet, there is a logic to it, and I submit that it is within the context of this logic that we see the necessity of rape play itself out. When we look at the words that Rand chooses—“contempt,” “humiliation,” “violating an enemy woman,” “an act of scorn,” “defilement”— the reader is once again thrown into confusion by all of the negatives that ­characterize the act. It is the scorn and defilement that lead to Dominique’s ­rapture. “They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of his action” (221). When Rand uses terms like “violence” and “deliberate obscenity” to describe the act, she is loading the interpretation against herself and in favor of rape. Finally, in a quotation from one of Rand’s question-and-answer periods from a 1974 Ford Hall Forum lecture, “Egalitarianism and Inflation,” Robert Mayhew (2012, 230) notes how sarcastic Rand could be when confronted with certain kinds of questions. A member of the audience asked Rand, “In the event that you re-wrote your novels, would you liberate your heroines, and change the way they subject themselves to passive behavior in romance?” Rand’s answer, as quoted by Mayhew, was, “Dagny is very passive: In Atlas Shrugged, she’s nearly raped three times, by the three men in her life. Dominique, the heroine of The Fountainhead, is raped. If this is passivity, make the most of it.” Mayhew ­dismisses Rand’s answer as an act of defiance on Rand’s part and her refusal to be moved from her position. But whereas Mayhew denies the meaning of “rape” as used here, I submit that this not only is one more instance of Rand’s cavalier way of treating the public, but also suggests that she may not have understood the meaning of the term “rape” to Americans—that it involves victimization and constitutes a criminal act. She seems here to attach a notion of activity rather than passivity to the act of rape, perhaps alluding to Dominique’s initial physical defiance of Roark before she submits. Otherwise, what she says to the questioner—who was a man—makes no sense. Rand, nevertheless, admitted (after so many other denials) that Dominique was raped. How then do we resolve the ambiguity of the rape scene? Anatomy of a Rape In order to understand the so-called rape scene and to determine whether there is sufficient evidence of mutual consent, one has to include the p ­ receding and following scenes—the first encounter between Dominique and Roark at

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 11

15/06/15 7:39 PM

12  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

her father’s stone quarry and the subsequent interchanges before their sexual encounter in her bedroom, the bedroom scene itself, and the scene that ­follows. At play here are implications of heights and depths that constitute ­important clues to Rand’s construction of the relationship through the actions of Dominique and Roark, and which formulate its internal logic drawn from her notions of masculinity and femininity.4 Rand makes use of contrasting high and low status, which becomes an important part of the reversal that takes place between Roark and Dominique, both during the scenes under discussion and in the novel as a whole. Part 2 of The Fountainhead begins with a description of Howard Roark’s life as a quarry worker. Rand equates this physical labor with low status. Roark works an exhausting physical day drilling granite in the sun. He lives in a worker’s town in a boarding house garret. He eats his meals in a common kitchen with other workers but sits alone. He is doing this to earn a living while waiting for more architectural commissions. Dominique, on the other hand, lives in a mansion with servants. She dines in an elegant dining room, but she too eats alone. Roark bathes after work in an attic bathroom, while Dominique bathes in the morning in a sunken tub. This alternation of high and low is not coincidental. Roark’s lowly status ­contrasts with his lofty ideals. His place in earth at the quarry contrasts with the skyscrapers he builds. His story is of one who rises to great heights—all the more impressive because of the distance he has had to travel. In contrast, Dominique is born at a great height socially, enjoying privileges, but she wishes to debase herself and anything else that would remind her of the world’s imperfections. Rand’s use of status difference—of high and low—constitutes part of the structure of relations between Dominique and Roark, and this structure of ­relations provides the context within which the rape occurs. The first time she sees Roark, Dominique is looking down (Rand [1943] 2005, 207). She feels hatred for him because of her physical attraction to him. She sees Roark as a lowly worker, and she even reflects that her position almost gives her o ­ wnership of him. Now, note this antiquated view—that workers somehow belong to their employers (208). Also note, that even though she is attracted to Roark, he is a total stranger to Dominique; thus, her attraction cannot be based on values but only on some kind of sexual appeal. Dominique’s first encounter with Roark is ambiguous for the readers. Yes, she is attracted to him physically, but she is also attracted because of his ­lowliness. Dominique knows nothing about this man—nothing—except how he looks and what he does. Thus, she is attracted and repelled at the same time. His presumptuousness—the way he looks directly at her—­generates attraction and hatred (207). But this is the first clue that Dominique may be courting her own fall from grace—that she wants to suffer and is making

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 12

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 13

arrangements to do so at the hands of someone beneath her. Rand also clearly thought in terms of masochism and sadism. In her journals, Rand says of Dominique, “Like most women, and to a greater degree than most, she is a masochist and she wishes for the happiness of suffering at Roark’s hands” (Rand in Harriman 1997, 231). Later, when Dominique is sitting at her dressing table, it appears that her attraction to Roark’s body (especially his hands) has everything to do with the degradation she seeks. “She stressed the contrast, because it degraded her” (Rand [1943] 2005, 209). “She thought of the quarry worker. She thought of being broken—not by a man she admired, but by a man she loathed. She let her head fall down on her arm; the thought left her weak with pleasure” (209; my emphasis). Please note: Dominique seeks degradation, not love or romance. She “wants to be broken,” but by someone she does not admire in order to become degraded. Her attraction, then, is based on her desire to be degraded by a man she hates. This is Dominique’s masochism laid bare. Now the taunting begins. After three days, Dominique cannot resist ­returning to the quarry, and a cat-and-mouse game begins. She stands over Roark. He sees her but ignores her. “She wanted him to look up. She knew that he knew it. He would not look again” (209). It is impossible to tell here what the game is about, and what the taunting is meant to achieve. The only clue Rand has given us is the earlier statement about “being broken . . . but by a man she loathed.” Dominique keeps thinking “of the granite being broken by his hands” (209). The superintendent reinforces Dominique’s attraction to what she assumes is a lowly worker by stating that some of the workers have jail records. One gets the sense that she would be even more attracted to the man if he did. “She ­wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did” (209–10). Rand clearly presents Dominique also as a sadist. Indeed, even her name “Dominique” sounds like “dominate” or “dominatrix.” It is clear right from the start, then, that this relationship is based not on admiration of values but on the wish to degrade and be degraded. Once again, Dominique stays away from the quarry for days. In her third encounter with Roark, Dominique actually talks to him. But the dialogue is not straightforward. Dominique’s dominant stance is not s­ ustained. Her threat to fire him has no effect on him. Roark’s p ­ resumptuousness angers her once again, and she does have the desire to feel her skin against his. But Rand tells us that “the desire went no further” (211). Once again, Rand reveals the desire for physical intimacy, but puts on the brakes in terms of the ­possibility of sexual intercourse. This scene is fraught with ambiguity. Dominique guesses  that Roark is out of place in the quarry after talking to him, but it is hard to know what it means to “talk like a worker.” Once again, Dominique walks away.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 13

15/06/15 7:39 PM

14  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Rand tells us, “She found a dark satisfaction in pain—because that pain came from him” (212). Now we are thrown back into the masochistic world of Dominique where the infliction of pain is perceived as a kind of pleasure. Dominique takes pleasure in thinking of what people would think if they knew she was thinking about a quarry worker. In fact, she seeks the company of her socialite friends expressly for this purpose. But note, she risks nothing, because she keeps her thoughts to herself. On the way home, after spurning the ­attention of a poet (whom it is clear Rand finds contemptible), Dominique acknowledges that “the man in the quarry wanted her” (213). This is a crucial statement because it makes it clear that Dominique, in acknowledging Roark’s desire, now once again holds the upper hand. Eventually, to get Roark into her presence and to taunt him further with what he desires but cannot have, Dominique scratches her fireplace in order to have an excuse within the safety of her house to invite Roark right into her bedroom. She makes a point of first directing him to the servants’ entrance, once again emphasizing the difference in their social status. When he arrives after having been rerouted, she stands on the staircase looking down at him. In her bedroom, Roark breaks the marble slab that she had only managed to scratch. After watching him work, Dominique engages him in conversation. Dominique sits provocatively on her bed as Roark gives her a lecture about the process by which marble is formed, noting, “Pressure is a powerful factor. It leads to consequences which, once started, cannot be controlled” (216). He tells her she should be careful—a clear warning about the consequences of the game she is playing with him. But this can also be construed as a not-so-veiled threat. When Dominique sends Roark a note to set the stone, another worker arrives in his place. Note that the caretaker’s wife is the one who admits the worker, so it is clear that although she may have wanted Roark to come that evening, she had asked the caretaker and his wife to remain again for her own safety. Roark has now thwarted Dominique’s ambition to control him. Days later, Dominique goes on horseback to the quarry only to find that Roark has gone. In a fury, she takes her anger out on her horse until she runs into Roark on the road. She slashes him across the face for his insolence, ­treating him as she has treated her horse—an animal under her control. Note that once again Rand has placed Dominique in the higher position—that of a dominatrix wielding a whip. Once again, there is ambiguity. Is Dominique angry because Roark p ­ urposely disobeyed her, or because he is once again presumptuous? Even if she felt desire, Dominique was the one in control of the situation. It was the wresting of control from her by Roark that incurs Dominique’s wrath. What could she have been hoping for had he come? After all, she had her housekeeper there with her. Although clearly enjoying taunting the lowly Roark, Dominique had been

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 14

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 15

careful to always remain in control, even while gaining pleasure from her own desire. She had avoided all chances of being alone with him. When Roark finally does arrive, it is completely unexpected by Dominique. Roark comes up the terrace steps and through the French doors into her ­bedroom, grimy and dusty straight from the quarry, implying that his dirtiness will soil Dominique. The sexual encounter ensues. The language that Rand uses creates ambiguity: “she fought like an animal”; “the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood”; “the sudden pain shot up, through her body, to her throat, and she screamed” (220). After Roark leaves, Dominique lapses into a dry sob and begins shaking, and her first impulse is to take a bath, but after seeing the bruises on her body, she decides to keep the evidence of Roark on her. Dominique now lies on the tile floor until morning (221). Throughout the sex act, Rand describes what is happening to Dominique and Dominique’s reactions in violent and degrading terms: “a symbol of ­humiliation and conquest”; “the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman”; “as defilement.” Rand makes it clear that Dominique would not have responded had Roark shown her tenderness, but this merely reminds us of her m ­ asochism. She submits to “the thing done to her body”—an objectification of the act itself—because it is an act of contempt and possession, which generates “the kind of rapture she wanted” (220). So the one thing that cannot be denied here is the sadomasochistic nature of the act—pleasure derived from the infliction of pain; rapture as the result of defilement. What Rand describes here is sexual perversion. But is it an act of rape? Alas, Rand calls it rape. Why, one wonders, if each character is so sure that he or she is clearly understood by the other, does Rand use that term? Why does Rand call it “a deliberate obscenity”? Where is the logic of conquering someone you care about by violent force? Where is the logic of resisting someone you really care about and sexually desire? And even more mysterious, how did they both know this from their very brief and sarcastically attenuated encounters? Rand has asked her readers to understand what amounts to motivations arising from a perverse psychology rooted in her own sadomasochistic views and then further confuses the situation by calling it rape. It follows, then, that readers will take Rand at her word and assume that a rape has taken place. But even in her journals, after writing in notes for the film version that Dominique is in conflict between her own passion and despair (Rand in Harriman 1997, 236), Rand describes her attitude when she goes to Roark’s apartment. “At the beginning of the scene, Dominique is coldly, arrogantly defiant. This is her way of paying Roark for the rape” (236; my emphasis). But if it was not rape, what has she got to pay him back for? Clearly, Rand herself thought of this scene in terms of rape.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 15

15/06/15 7:39 PM

16  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Dominique’s “pleasure” derived solely from her own degradation. But instead of love, hatred was the emotional response. Hatred for the pleasure and hatred for him for giving her the pleasure. The hatred and the pleasure are reactions to Roark’s subordinate social status and to the fact that he brought Dominique down to his own level and so, in fact, rose above her. Later, when Dominique thinks of Roark as she moves among people of her own social class, she thinks, “If they knew . . . those people . . . I’ve been raped. . . . I’ve been raped by some redheaded hoodlum from a stone quarry . . .” (Rand [1943] 2005, 223). If, in fact, Roark had not raped Dominique, she would not have received satisfaction from it. For me, Dominique’s behavior makes sense only if, in fact, Roark raped her, because the act of rape fits so well into the ­psychological perversion of sadomasochism that Rand so clearly lays out in this novel. The logic used by Rand in constructing the relationship testifies to her intention. Why Rape Is a Reality in The Fountainhead Rand has left us ample evidence that the rape of Dominique by Roark was real. She uses the word over and over, in the novel and in her journal and in a public forum. Even when Rand says that Roark raped Dominique because he knew she wanted it (Rand in Harriman 1997, 238), she contradicts her own logic—the logic of Dominique Francon herself. Rand has revealed that she thinks most women are masochistic—that is, they seek and enjoy pain. She also ­acknowledges that Roark is a sadist. Rape, therefore, becomes an emblem of an old-fashioned romantic notion about man conquering woman, both sexually and (in the case of Dominique) emotionally and intellectually. In The Fountainhead, Rand’s sadomasochism reaches its peak, and although she will retain her idea of hero worship in romantic relationships after this novel, she will create only voluntary romantic relationships in the future. One could argue, in Rand’s defense, that it is necessary to make a d ­ istinction between the author herself and the character she has created—that what Dominique concludes about her first sexual encounter with Roark—is not a reflection of Ayn Rand’s own beliefs. After all, Rand has repeatedly explained that she believes rape is a criminal act and that she has merely used it ­symbolically. But why use a criminal act symbolically and expect a positive understanding of it? Indeed, why associate herself with the character of Dominique by e­ xplaining that Dominique was herself in a bad mood? (Branden 1986, 135–36). Rand clearly identified with Dominique, but her choice to have Dominique think of the sexual encounter with Roark as rape—and rape by someone utterly beneath her, at least as far as she knew—was an authorial choice, and even if we claim it was merely a reflection of Dominique’s peculiar personality that she thinks she was raped, it still informs the reader.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 16

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 17

One can easily fit Ayn Rand into the social and cultural context of her day, and even by taking something as socially unacceptable as rape and situating it at the core of this romantic relationship, Rand was displaying a ­conventionality that escaped her great intellect because of her inability at this point to ­incorporate a proper ethics into her vision of individualism, as well as her inability to accept the normal human emotion of love or an independent view of gender relations. Leonard Peikoff (1997, ix) sees the relationship between Dominique and Roark as the last vestige of the Nietzschean outlook that had afflicted Rand in her earlier works (for example, The Night of January 16th and We the Living). He sees Rand as developing over time from this perspective to a more ­comprehensive one. However, this too is an acknowledgment that her earlier views predominated at the time she wrote The Fountainhead. So, when Rand later realized her mistake in placing an act of violence—the i­ nvoluntary act of rape—at the center of this important romantic relationship, she ­rationalized the act as one committed by “engraved invitation,” which turns an i­ nvoluntary act into a voluntary and complicit one. Ironically, Rand ­re-created the excuse of many a rapist that the woman really wanted it—and that is what some ­readers are sensing in the story. Michelle A. Massé (1992), in speaking about ­masochism in gothic novels, shows insights that seem to fit Rand’s case: “I want to ­emphasize that the intertwining of love and pain is not natural and does not originate in the self: women are taught masochism through fi ­ ction and ­culture, and masochism’s causes are external and real” (3). In words that echo statements by Rand herself, Massé states, “The ideology of romance insists that there never was any pain or renunciation, that the suffering they experience is really the love and recognition for which they long or at least its prelude” (4). Yes, one could argue that Dominique brought this on herself. One can also see Dominique as flirting with danger, or even just flirting. All of her ­encounters with Roark were engineered to keep Dominique safe. But none of this would justify rape. In the end, any critique of Rand with regard to her views on gender must acknowledge that hero worship combined with a ­sadomasochistic Nietzschean outlook created a fictional sensation but a moral dilemma that Rand herself acknowledged by demurring from her original position. Some readers in the 1940s saw the same things as some readers in the 1960s and some readers today. Some men saw the same thing as women, then and now. In reality, even romanticized rape is a reflection of a cultural ­understanding that undermines the full humanity of women. In embracing it, Rand made a mistake. In denying it, she also denies what her journals tell us was on her mind. The fact that both men and women—feminists and nonfeminists

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 17

15/06/15 7:39 PM

18  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

alike—are reading the scene as a real rape means that the problem lies with Rand ­herself and not with the skewed perspective of a single group. The “politically ­correct” ­paradigm that McElroy presents as a straw woman seems to simply be that women don’t want to be sexually attacked by men. Women, feminist or ­otherwise, do not have a problem distinguishing rough sex that is ­voluntary from rape, even though they might find rough sex distasteful. However, when the author herself uses the word “rape” and constructs a ­scenario that is ­psychologically accurate, one is hard-pressed to see it otherwise. Neither Bernstein nor McElroy offers a convincing argument, because they take Rand’s own explanations at face value, but ignore what other people are seeing and fail to explain why the perception of rape is widespread and cuts across time, space, and gender. The boy whose letters to Rand McElroy cites, some men, Susan Brownmiller, other feminists (alluded to but not named), and some nonfeminists all seem to be seeing the same thing: rape. The problem with Rand’s later justification of the rape scene and its meaning is that Roark is a stranger to Dominique. She thinks of him as a lowly stranger even after she has talked to him. She holds him in contempt because of what she assumes to be his low status. In fact, if we follow the logic of Dominique’s ­thinking, she is debasing herself by accepting Roark’s raping her, just as she is when she marries Peter Keating and Gail Wynand. After she discovers who Roark is, she wants to destroy him. Her acts of destruction against Roark are on a par with her destruction of the beautiful vase, once she knows who he is. Thus, Rand is caught in a contradiction of her own making—the rape was meaningful only because of Dominique’s self-hatred and Roark’s low status. Therefore, once Dominique discovers Roark’s high status (because of his values and talent), she should want to destroy him—but she should also lose her sexual attraction to him, since she can no longer be defiled by him. This doesn’t happen. Rand engages in a novelistic bait and switch with the reader, and turns the hatred into love. This romantic relationship is a travesty that subverts Rand’s later ideas of sex as a positive value. Rand as deus ex machina magically ­converts the relationship into a positive, romantic one in defiance of the logic she herself has laid down before. Nathaniel Branden’s own words are telling. In his Basic Principles of Objectivism Lecture 16, “The Psychology of Sex,” Branden states, Do not make the error of believing that sadism and masochism are merely exaggerated extensions of healthy masculine dominance and feminine submissiveness. Sadism and masochism are the exact antithesis—the expression, not of self-esteem, but of self-contempt.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 18

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 19

The power of a healthy man over a woman is the power to produce pleasure. This is the diametrical opposite of the power sought by the sadist. The sadist’s goal is the power to inflict pain. A healthy woman expresses her love by her acknowledgment of the pleasure the man has the power to give her, and of her need for that pleasure. But a masochist’s expression of love is her willingness to endure suffering. (2009, 430)5 What Nathaniel Branden describes here is exactly the psychology exhibited by Dominique in The Fountainhead. If Branden is correct, then Rand failed to construct a romantic relationship based on highest values but rather one based on degradation and defilement, which, of course, the readers already knew. The perversion itself leads some readers to the conclusion that the relationship between Dominique and Roark was one sealed by an act of rape. Ayn Rand often did things for effect, especially when it involved turning basic moral presumptions on their ear—calling selfishness a virtue, blowing up a building meant to house the poor, and using the heinous act of rape as the first sexual encounter between her hero and her heroine, who later turn out to be each other’s highest values. Rand embraced the shock value that her views had for the American public without much regard for their inability to make sense out of what was essentially a case of perversion. As a kind of reverse ­psychology, this strategy didn’t work. Rand got herself into a bind. I think the material that she cut from The Fountainhead illustrates that she backed away from a “normal” romance and went for the shocker—the rape of her heroine by her hero. Cutting Roark’s prior romantic relationships from the final novel might have c­ ontributed. Later, ­realizing from reader reaction that she had made a mistake, she ­rationalized the rape into a voluntary act. But by doing so, Rand also ­contributed to and ­exhibited the age-old mythology that Susan Brownmiller talks about in her sweeping survey of rape in history—that Dominique wanted to be raped, that she was asking for it, that this act of sexual force awakened Dominique’s s­ exuality in a way that nonviolent sex could not. “These are the deadly male myths of rape, the distorted proverbs that govern female sexuality,” Brownmiller (1975, 311–12) says. Brownmiller’s own discussion of The Fountainhead is a very small part of a chapter that begins, “Women are trained to be rape victims,” which ­follows a lengthy chapter about the preponderance of rape scenes in ­fiction and film (309). Rand’s view that the man conquers the woman as an assertion of masculinity over femininity completely aligns with the age-old assumption (which some consider male propaganda and justification to which women have themselves subscribed over the centuries) that women want to be raped. Rand’s gender

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 19

15/06/15 7:39 PM

20  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

i­deology also accords with the structural foundations for rape discussed by Peggy Reeves Sanday (1986) in “Rape and the Silencing of the Feminine”: Men whose masculine identity and sense of self is predicated on exerting dominance and control over others will undoubtedly at some times express these characteristics in sexual interaction. In societies like the United States, where sexual success is integral to the profile of the “successful man,” it is not surprising that some men rape women. (98) It is also interesting to note that in her own studies of rape across cultures, Sanday has found that “[r]ape-free societies are characterized by sexual ­equality and complementarity” (93)—a finding that would seem to call into question the v­ iability of Rand’s idea of the metaphysical superiority of men as a basis for gender relations. For example, among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, a modern society in which she did 24 months of ­ethnographic research in the 1980s, which she describes as “the largest and most modern matrilineal society in the world today,” Sanday found virtually no rape, ­according to police reports and interviews that she conducted (2003, 338). Her conclusion was further supported by a cross-cultural study of rape that she ­conducted in 1981 among 95 band and tribal societies, finding that 47% of them could be classified as “rape free.”6 Thus, male dominance over women is not a universal as some would have us believe, and even though its significance seems to wax and wane in our own society, it is nevertheless ­considered a criminal act and was classified as such at the time that Rand wrote The Fountainhead. The truth is, the so-called feminists who have commented on The Fountainhead have hit the nail on the head. Rand’s use of rape to portray a ­romantic ­relationship—to illustrate her dominant and submissive view of romantic relationships—fits right into the mind-set that has kept women ­subordinate for centuries. Rape as a show of masculinity means that women must always be victims of rape in order to assert their femininity. That is the truth that Rand could not grasp but nevertheless perpetuated in The Fountainhead. There is nothing heroic or “politically correct” about it. Notes

An early and briefer version of this article was given at the annual conference of the Popular Culture Association in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2006. 1. Second-Hand Lives was the working title of The ­Fountainhead. See ­Milgram 2007, 3. 2. See Brown 2007, 286. Hank Rearden ascertains Dagny’s desire to make love with him by asking her and receiving her consent. Perhaps Rand made a point of this because of the misunderstandings she had encountered previously with The ­Fountainhead.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 20

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Ayn Rand and Rape  |  Brown 21

3. This strikes me as pathological—the same attitude as is held by some men who would kill their whole families rather than see them suffer humiliation. 4. An excellent interpretation of the use of class and its association with ­architecture, especially in the film of The Fountainhead, is provided in Schleier 2002. 5. I have never agreed with Branden and Rand that the need to be conquered by a man is a universal feminine desire. It is no doubt the way some women feel, and it is a ­remnant of an internalized cultural understanding generated at a particular time and place, or a psychological feature of a particular temperament or experience. This ­particular preference cannot be designated healthy or unhealthy outside of the ­context in which it occurs. Nor is it beyond understanding that a man might have these same feelings of wanting to surrender without impugning his masculinity. Masculinity and femininity are cultural constructs, not fundamental features of our biological or ­psychological natures. They are conventional and arbitrary in their origins. Men and women tend to share the whole range of human emotions but are culturally induced to manifest them in different ways according to gender role models. But it is always a mistake to extrapolate what is “natural” from these cultural models. 6. See Sanday 2002 for her study of the Minangkabau society and Sanday 2003, in which she summarizes the results of her 1981 study. See Sanday 1981 for the study itself. Sanday also mentions a similar study conducted by Broude and Greene 1976. Sanday found that 45 of the 95 societies she studied, or 47%, could be classified as ­rape-free (“reported rare or absent”). Some examples of rape-free societies for which data were available at the time were the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Mbuti of Central Africa, the Jivaro of South America, the Ashanti of Africa. In any case, Rand’s contention that “metaphysical differences”—­meaning a male’s greater size and strength—can account for the necessity of a man c­ onquering a woman is bogus. How people express their sexuality has e­ verything to do with their cultural context and the position in which women are held in a given society. References

Berliner, Michael S., ed. 1995. Letters of Ayn Rand. By Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. Bernstein, Andrew. 2007. Understanding the “rape” scene in The Fountainhead. In Mayhew 2007, 201–8. Branden, Barbara. 1986. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ———. 1999. Ayn Rand: The reluctant feminist. In Gladstein and Sciabarra 1999, 25–45. Branden, Nathaniel. 2009. The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Gilbert, Arizona: Cobden Press. Broude, Gwen J. and Sarah J. Greene. 1976. Cross-cultural codes on twenty sexual ­attitudes and practices. Ethnology 15, no. 4: 409–29. Brown, Susan Love. 1999. Ayn Rand: The woman who would not be president. In ­Gladstein and Sciabarra 1999, 275–98. ———. 2007. Beyond the “stillborn aspiration”: Virtuous sexuality in Atlas Shrugged. In Younkins 2007, 279–91. Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Fawcett Books.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 21

15/06/15 7:39 PM

22  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Den Uyl, Douglas J. 1999. The Fountainhead: An American Novel. New York: Twayne. Fand, Roxanne J. 2009. Reading The Fountainhead: The missing self in Ayn Rand’s ­ethical individualism. College English 71, no. 5 (May): 486–505. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. 1984. The Ayn Rand Companion. Westport, Connecticut: ­Greenwood. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, eds. 1999. Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Harriman, David, ed. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand. By Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti. 1999. Psyching out Ayn Rand. In Gladstein and Sciabarra 1999, 68–76. Massé, Michelle A. 1992. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Mayhew, Robert, ed. 2007. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Lanham, M ­ aryland: Lexington Books. ———, ed. 2012. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living.” 2nd edition. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. McElroy, Wendy. 1999. Looking through a paradigm darkly. In Gladstein and Sciabarra 1999, 157–71. Milgram, Shoshana. 2007. The Fountainhead from notebook to novel: The composition of Ayn Rand’s first ideal man. In Mayhew 2007, 3–40. Peikoff, Leonard. 1997. Foreword. In Harriman 1997, vii–xiii. Rand, Ayn. [1943] 2005. The Fountainhead. Centennial edition. New York: Plume. ———. 1989. About a woman president. In The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. Edited with an introduction by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Penguin/ Meridian, 267–70. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 1981. The sociocultural context of rape. Journal of Social Issues 37, no. 4: 5–27. ———. 1986. Rape and the silencing of the feminine. In Rape: A Collection of Essays. Edited by Roy Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli. London: Basil Blackwell, 84–101. ———. 2002. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Ithaca: Cornell ­University Press. ———. 2003. Rape-free versus rape-prone: How culture makes a difference. In Travis 2003, 337–62. Schleier, Merrill. 2002. Ayn Rand and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead: Architectural modernism, the gendered body, and political ideology. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 3 (September): 310–31. Travis, Cheryl Brown. 2003. Evolution, Gender, and Rape. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Younkins, Edward W., ed. 2007. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and Literary Companion. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.

JARS 15.1_02_Brown.indd 22

15/06/15 7:39 PM

Beauvoir and Rand Asphyxiating People, Having Sex, and Pursuing a Career Marc Champagne and Mimi Reisel Gl adstein

ABSTRACT: In an attempt to start rectifying a lamentable disparity in ­scholarship, we evince fruitful points of similarity and difference in the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, paying particular attention to their views on long-term projects. Endorsing what might be called an “Ethic of Resolve,” Rand praises those who undertake sustained goal-directed actions such as careers. Beauvoir, however, endorses an “Ethic of Ambiguity” that makes her more skeptical about the prospects of carrying out lifelong ­projects ­without deluding oneself. Our study teases apart the strengths and drawbacks of these views.

Ask a random sample of people on an English-speaking university campus to name two women philosophers, and chances are Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand will be the figures named most often. Beauvoir and Rand have more in common than this name recognition. Both were teenagers when they rejected religious doctrines and became atheists. Both excelled, not only in the ­male-dominated field of philosophy, but also in creative writing. Their first major novels, L’invitée (She Came to Stay) and The Fountainhead, were ­published in the same year, 1943. By the time Beauvoir and Rand passed away

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 23

15/06/15 7:42 PM

24  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

in the 1980s, they had each made their intellectual mark. Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) is a foundational text for feminism (Hatcher 1989), while Rand’s Atlas Shrugged propelled political libertarianism (a movement/ party that Rand would later denounce). Freedom and emancipation from oppressive forces are the common themes of both works. Those themes are glossed in radically d ­ ifferent ways. Indeed, “Ayn Rand has gained fame—and infamy—for her defense of rational selfishness and laissez-faire capitalism. But the Randian philosophy is much broader in its scope” (Sciabarra 1989, 32). Rand and Beauvoir would have probably disliked each other. Debra Bergoffen singles out “the works of Ayn Rand” as an example of “the bourgeois humanism to which Beauvoir is opposed” (1997, 58 n. 25). For her part, Rand considered Existentialism a “disease” in the history of philosophy (in Mayhew 2005, 167). There is, however, much to be gained by re-creating an exchange of ideas. We can all agree that the two women would have held each other in philosophical (and perhaps even personal) contempt. The more interesting question is why—what are their reasons? This is where polemics end and scholarship begins. When we actually do that scholarly work, we quickly realize that the area of overlap is more significant than might at first appear. In addition to theoretical works like Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology ([1966–67] 1990) and Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity ([1948] 1976), both thinkers felt at home in the medium of fiction. In an essay titled “Literature and Metaphysics” (reprinted in Beauvoir 2004, 269–77), Beauvoir insists on the philosophical relevance of individual human experience as portrayed in myth and literature. Indeed, “Beauvoir takes seriously [Henri] Bergson’s criticism of intellectual understanding and accepts his implicit challenge to do philosophy through the novel” (Simons 2003, 108). Similarly, Rand chose excerpts from her four novels as the substance of her first nonfiction book, For the New Intellectual (1961). She explains in her preface to that book that “[i]n a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher”—whether one is aware or not that the fictional world one projects implicitly favors a metaphysical stance (for more on literature as a vehicle for philosophical edification, see Dadlez 2013). Rand and Beauvoir thus present us with comprehensive worldviews, expressed in both artistic and theoretical idioms. Given that many turn to their essays and novels for guidance, it behooves scholars to examine the substance of their prescriptions. Alas, despite the fact that Rand and Beauvoir are among the most widely read (male or female) philosophers, no one has, until now, essayed a serious comparative study. Rand’s personal flaws and contempt for the establishment have been amply documented, but that hardly excuses academic neglect (scholars have certainly managed to move past the initial shock of more controversial figures). It takes hard work to figure out what are the good and bad elements in any system of thought (Branden 1984), and historically that

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 24

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 25

verdict is rarely settled once and for all. Indeed, Edward Fullbrook remarks that “[u]ntil quite recently, getting anyone to read a Beauvoir text for its ­philosophical  content was nearly impossible. And reading one with a view to finding in it philosophical originality was deemed laughable” (in Beauvoir 2004, 34). This is the stage Rand’s work is currently in, so it can be sobering to know that Beauvoir’s work had to go through that stage too. Fortunately, things are changing. Pennsylvania State University Press ­publishes this double-blind peer-reviewed journal devoted to Rand, and she is the only woman represented in the twenty-volume Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers series (Gladstein 2010). Cambridge University Press ­published a monograph on Rand’s virtue ethics (Smith 2006), and Oxford University Press followed suit with a biography (Burns 2009). The ­controversial 1995 study of Rand’s Russian background by Chris Matthew Sciabarra has remained in such demand that it has undergone a second, ­augmented ­edition (Sciabarra [1995] 2013). In response to this growth in ­scholarship, W ­ iley-Blackwell is just about to release A Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri 2015). There is no question that Rand is now being ­incorporated in the canon. Rand and Beauvoir are on equal footing in Wadsworth’s Philosophers series (Gotthelf 2000; Scholz 2000), for example. Still, in comparison with Rand,  the  secondary literature on Beauvoir has a ­considerable head start. Asphyxiating People To appreciate the extent of the discrepancy, consider Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which was met with a negative reception by critics when it first appeared in 1957. The most vitriolic review was penned by Whittaker Chambers, who c­ ontended that “[f]rom almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’” This, to put it mildly, is a strong interpretation, not to mention an “insulting assessment, given the author’s Jewish background” (Gladstein 2000, 21). Unless one invokes extravagant theories to justify anything-goes ­hermeneutics, the only plausible textual support for Chambers’s claim comes from a scene where, having each willfully abdicated their responsibility to think, engineers and executives send a passenger train pulled by a coal-burning engine into a long tunnel, resulting in suffocation. What Rand was trying to show by means of this fictional account was that complex societal divisions of labor do nothing to diminish the vital importance of grasping ­mind-independent facts (which is why she named her philosophy “Objectivism”). No murderer can be ­identified: it is the world that destroys the characters by purely causal means. Rand is saying that social conventions are neither the sole nor the primary

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 25

15/06/15 7:42 PM

26  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

constraint on knowledge claims (for an extended discussion, see Champagne 2015). The scene, then, articulates a thesis in metaphysics and epistemology, not ethics. There is no question that Rand was a provocative thinker, even in those drier branches of philosophy concerned with knowledge and reality. The ­asphyxiation scene is admittedly controversial, so it is still debated (see, for example, Bertonneau 2004, 303–5). However, given that human agency fi ­ gures in the scene only in absentia, as a refusal to assume the burden of facing ­mind-independent facts, to infer that Rand is somehow advocating a policy involving “gas chambers”—rooms constructed by political regimes for the express purpose of genocide—is simply irresponsible (a reply to Chambers by the philosopher Leonard Peikoff was published, and is now reprinted in Mayhew 2009, 145–47). Now, contrast this with She Came to Stay by Beauvoir ([1943] 1990; [1943] 2006). This novel describes the attempts by characters to implement various threesomes that would presumably foster greater existentialist authenticity. One of the characters, Françoise, feels that Xavière, her young female partner, is so self-assured that she has bewitched Françoise’s inner world. At one point, Françoise is dismayed by the recognition that her thoughts are not about where she currently is in Paris, but are rather directed at wherever Xavière might be. Since Françoise does not obtain the sort of attentive reciprocity she yearns for, she uses a gas range to asphyxiate Xavière. The end. Unlike Atlas Shrugged, no gratuitous interpretations are needed to establish the presence of murder in this book. In fact, Beauvoir’s novel originally opened with the following epigraph from Hegel, now absent from recent English ­editions: “Each conscience seeks the death of the other” (Beauvoir [1943] 1990, 7). To be clear, neither Rand nor Beauvoir ever killed anyone—both were ­novelist-philosophers; nothing less, nothing more. Still, the reception to their works has been inconsistent. Usually, killing is regarded as more r­ eprehensible than letting die (see, for example, the intuitions teased out by Thomson 1976). In the tales we have recounted, Beauvoir “kills” her character whereas Rand “lets” hers “die.” Strangely, She Came to Stay was greeted warmly, its overt murder scene causing no discernible hoopla among critics. When it comes to Rand, though, many in lay (Moen 2012) and academic (Campbell 1996) ­circles feel satisfied with rehearsing tenuous dismissals gleaned only by ­hearsay. Beauvoir is, by comparison, treated to a red carpet reception. In fact, one i­ntroductory textbook suggests that “Françoise might . . . be seen as justified in her use of ­violence against Xavière. Xavière is, after all, a freedom that is denying Françoise of hers” (Scholz 2000, 29). Rand rejects the initiation of force in all human affairs, because she glosses the attempt to bypass individual judgment as the ultimate expression of

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 26

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 27

contempt for the demands of human life. It is no accident, for example, that the copper magnate who blows up his mines in Atlas Shrugged waits for them to be vacant—acting otherwise would have forfeited the moral rectitude he displays. The only killing that is condoned in the novel occurs when the protagonist Dagny Taggart shoots an armed man denying her access to a room where her lover is being tortured. It is, on Rand’s account, a purely retaliatory act, made necessary by the circumstances. Interestingly, Beauvoir’s working title for She Came to Stay was Self Defense. It is worth stressing, though, that the alleged transgressions for which Xavière is blamed unfold squarely in Françoise’s mind. “Indeed, the novel ­rigorously refuses ever to focalize anything through Xavière, so we never see a ­representation of their relation from Xavière’s point of view” (Lucey 2010, 113). Françoise’s ­imaginings and ensuing emotional states are nevertheless ­presented as a motive—and perhaps even a license—for deploying the ultimate form of physical harm. Maybe “license” is too strong. After all, “She Came to Stay is not a novel written to prove any point” (Sirridge 2003, 134). Even so, Beauvoir has given us textual cause to argue the matter. By parity, either Rand’s ­writings and ideas deserve a fairer hearing, or Beauvoir’s writings deserve a less timid critique. Having Sex Thankfully, morbidity and violence form only a minor slice of the Rand/ Beauvoir thematic pie chart. Both Beauvoir and Rand portrayed strong female protagonists in a sex-positive manner that broke with the fictional and ­societal standards of their time. Rand’s character Dagny Taggart, who has been described as “probably the most admirable and successful heroine in American fiction” (Gladstein 2000, 64), has several male lovers. Beauvoir’s protagonist in She Came to Stay, Françoise, agrees to a ménage à trois and then has a sexual relationship with not only Xavière, but also Xavière’s male lover. Beauvoir’s call for (and practice of) sexual independence was acknowledged and celebrated by some. Life mirrored fiction. Beauvoir and Sartre’s liaisons, for instance, were an accepted part of their mutual pact. Rand was married to the same man all her life, but she had an affair with a younger man that was kept secret from all but their spouses (Branden 1986). Rand and Beauvoir are also notable for having chosen not to do the one thing men cannot do, that is, give birth. Indeed, when Rand and Beauvoir discuss sex, they rarely have procreation in mind. While many have found Beauvoir’s fiction and lifestyle liberating, Rand has been taken to task in conservative circles for not saying enough about motherhood and family (see, for example, Touchstone 2006). According to Rand, building a career, not a family, should

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 27

15/06/15 7:42 PM

28  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

be a person’s first priority. This applies to men and women alike. Indeed, her character Dagny Taggart is so career-oriented that “there’s really no difference between her and her male counterparts” (Michalson 1999, 217). Pursuing a Career Clearly, in their writings as well as in their personal lives, Beauvoir and Rand championed independence. They both held that one should freely elect the end(s) that one pursues. However, as philosophers, they disagreed on how much leeway such freedom licenses. It is in assessing the viable duration of pursuits that Beauvoir and Rand part ways. Beauvoir draws on Hegelian and Sartrean ideas (Lundgren-Gothlin 1994) to develop an “Ethics of Ambiguity,” whereas Rand draws on Aristotelian and Nietzschean ideas (Machan 2001) to develop what might be called an “Ethics of Resolve.” To illustrate the difference at hand, we can look more closely at career choices. When we undertake long-term projects like careers, we effectively promise that we will continue to act a certain way. Promise-making and ­promise-keeping are distinct moments—one short-term, the other long-term. Promise-keeping of course presupposes promise-making, but it seems the latter can be had on the cheap: all one needs to do is make the right speech act and the deed is done. Of course, saying one will be an architect is one thing; actually becoming an architect is quite another. Still, in the very moment that it asserts itself, the will acts as its own tautological guarantor of rectitude. However, once made, such gratuitous promises seemingly limit one’s ­freedom. Promise-keeping thus requires that one bring one’s conduct into c­ onformity with the content of a foundational speech act over a sustained period of time. Absent the passage of time, there would be no need for a ­constant ­reaffirmation of an initial project or vow, no taxing effort to ensure fidelity, no anguish in seeing that aspiration possibly fail. Because the passage of time s­upplies renewed opportunities to change one’s mind about one’s ­pursuits, long-term projects like careers require agentive effort. Beauvoir therefore holds that “[f]reedom must project itself toward its own reality through a c­ ontent whose value  it ­establishes” ([1948] 1976, 70). Philosophically, we can thus q ­ uestion whether prior acts bear on subsequent ones in a way that is genuinely binding. A promise made when deviation from the action promised is (and is known to be) physically impossible would sound hollow, just as a promise kept in such circumstances would hardly count as praiseworthy. For instance, if a father “promises” his child that he will keep the earth in orbit, he does not deserve credit for its continued rotation. Seen in this light, promises are devices meant to corral human actions when genuine alternatives are possible. Hence, for a promise to be sustained from beginning to end, freedom must in some way

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 28

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 29

undercut itself. As Beauvoir writes, “If I leave behind an act which I have accomplished . . . [i]t is no longer anything but a stupid and opaque fact. In order to prevent this metamorphosis, I must ceaselessly return to it and justify it in the unity of the project in which I am engaged” ([1948] 1976, 27; see also her 2004, 93). Like handcuffs, constraint from without is, we can assume, fairly ­straightforward (Kruks 1987). When one is deprived of freedom of action, responsibility vanishes. However, once we realize that in promise-keeping the “master” and the “slave” are one and the same person, don’t these labels/ roles cease to make sense? As such, it seems we can meaningfully ask whether ­honoring one’s word constitutes a limit on or an expression of freedom. As an existentialist, Beauvoir is open to the idea that we can always redefine ourselves. Our essence as humans, she argues, lies precisely in not having an essence (see Nuyen 1985, 174). Hence, Beauvoir would hold that, if the projects we undertake are ever binding, it is in virtue of the fact that we watch over each other’s pronouncements. Rand also endorses freedom, but since she wants to assign primacy to the individual, she is reluctant to see promises as merely socially binding. Even so, verbalized promises are crucial to enabling the coordination of individual and collective action. In a way, the entire plot line of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged emanates from promises. As a young engineer, John Galt promises to stop “the motor of the world” by gradually removing productive and inventive people from ­society. Reacting against the collectivist credo put in effect at the a­ utomotive company he works for, he publicly declares, “I will put an end to this, once and for all” ([1957] 1999, 671). Of course, no one present at the time holds him ­accountable for making good on this bold (and unlikely) ­proclamation. The twists and turns of the storyline nevertheless trace the various steps Galt takes to keep his pledge. Likewise, the machine that powers everything in Galt’s ­utopian ­compound is revealed only to those who take an oath—one that must be uttered with a full grasp of the long-term actions it requires (731–32). It could be read as a ­metaphor for a perpetual motion machine, set in motion by the will. Like Rand, Beauvoir construes commitment to any activity as a decision. Yet, Beauvoir is aware that, if the specific target of a committed attitude is to remain constant, one must decide in its favor again and again (2004, 93). To learn how to play the piano, for instance, one does not show up at the first lesson only to thereafter coast on behavioral cruise control. Rather, ­attendance is taken at each keystroke. This voluntarism, however, militates against ­achieving ­consistency, since nothing constrains one to abide by one’s previous action(s). Notwithstanding a measure of habitual inertia, sudden ­about-face always remains an option. In the case of careers, this means that one will end up having

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 29

15/06/15 7:42 PM

30  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

jobs, but steadfast commitment to a single vocation is neither m ­ andatory nor likely. Rand (1961, 160) would agree with Beauvoir that agentive involvement is needed, but in keeping with her Aristotelian allegiances, Rand would add that a human is bound to experience sustained goal-directed movement as most rewarding. Her reasons are mainly biological. The finitude of the individual who wants to live, Rand (1964) argues, is the wellspring of all valuations, since it is only when considered in light of the fundamental alternative of its life or demise that objects and events become good or bad. In principle, these ­assessments of what is a value or disvalue are perfectly soluble (Champagne 2011). Rand therefore holds that freedom must in the end settle on a distinct course of action, and that there is moreover some standard by which to appraise whether or not the path taken is appropriate. Beauvoir would disagree. She writes that “the epithet useful . . . has no more meaning if taken by itself than the words high, low, right, and left” ([1948] 1976,  49). The indictment here seems to be that, since these are ­ego-centric (­ literally “self-centered”) predicates, they fall short of having moral ­significance. Beauvoir is thus much more skeptical about the prospects of confidently u ­ ndertaking long-term projects without deluding oneself. Hazel Barnes captures this ­divergence well when she contrasts the respective slogans of Objectivism and Existentialism: “‘Existence is identity.’ ‘Existence precedes essence.’ There is the heart of the difference” (1967, 128). Constant actions are obviously more suspect on the latter view than on the former. According to Randian metaethics, the objects and events in an individual’s surroundings have normative valences only because they stand to further or hinder that individual’s own life (Smith 2000). Rand thus held that if ­someone did not want to live, that fabric of values would unravel. In this (limited) sense, she agrees with Beauvoir that “there exists no absolute value before the ­passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful” (Beauvoir [1948] 1976, 11). Yet, despite placing inchoate ­self-affirmation at the root of her ethical system, Rand regards every judgment that comes afterward as determined by purely descriptive considerations. As such, the Randian view “may be reduced to two points: the choice to live, and the law of causality. Once we accept life as our ultimate goal, we discover what it requires by discovering the causal connections between man’s nature and his life” (Kelley 2000, 54). One’s natural endowments presumably count among the many facts to be considered when deciding how to structure one’s actions into a lifelong ­project like a career. Beauvoir acknowledges this when she writes that “[d]oubtless, every one casts himself into [the world] on the basis of his physiological ­possibilities” ([1948] 1976, 41; see also her 2004, 163). Still, she holds fast to

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 30

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 31

her existentialist allegiances by immediately adding that this “determines no behavior” ([1948] 1976, 41; emphasis in original). If this is right, then one can in principle refuse to accept (what appears to be) a natural inclination (Beauvoir [1949] 2010, 21–48). Beauvoir thus sees a person’s will as supplying the very content(s) of the norms humans should abide by, insofar as “human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself ” ([1948] 1976, 49; see Prosch 1961, 158–60). Rand is not a determinist. Still, in her philosophy, dispositions and innate skills seem to carry more weight. Her hero John Galt, for example, is depicted as having always enjoyed a sense of certitude and efficacy ([1957] 1999, 786). In this respect, it might be said that “Rand’s view of man retains the old [Aristotelian] acorn theory. Man’s potentialities may be hidden, but they resemble the embryo oak tree” (Barnes 1967, 128). Nevertheless, because it is the individual who ultimately supports and shapes the actualization of that embryonic potential, the trajectory of her leading characters is never described in a deterministic idiom. Indeed, “[t]o live a purposeful life is, to some extent, to plot one’s own life story,” such that “[t]he success or failure of the characters in Atlas Shrugged is tied to their ability to do just that” (Breashears 2014, 31). Because an exercise of the will is constantly required to fuel personal growth, the exact dynamics of the narrative self-constitution are by no means given. Until it runs out of canvas, the ongoing project of painting a life portrait is never complete. Rand’s aim is thus to give new meaning to the economic simile “self-made man” (see Burns 2011, 340). Bearing sole responsibility for shaping one’s life does not, however, give the individual free rein. Reality is an ever-present constraint (Champagne 2015). Rand’s Objectivist philosophy thus sees the mind as primarily fact-directed. Because Rand takes rationality to be the “master virtue” (Smith 2006, 52–61), she construes freedom very differently from Beauvoir. Now, a psychological subject is, in one sense, just another fact in the ­universe. Hence, psychological facts admit of an objective treatment. Of course, ­figuring out such high-level truths is, like all truths, an a­ ccomplishment. A  fallible mind must actively gather facts (e.g., Am I any good at math?), actively ­synthesize their meaning (e.g., Might I be poor at math because of a lack of training?), actively judge them (e.g., Would it be worth my while to ­rectify my lacuna?), and actively act on them (e.g., Now I must take extra math ­tutoring). There is ample room at each step for u ­ ndetermined ­expressions of the will. Still, ­assuming all those steps are carried out, the best result should be constant: fix the nature of the person and the nature of the world and, presumably, you thereby fix the best path to be taken. After all, if something as elusive as art can be judged objectively good or objectively bad, as Rand ([1969] 1975) contends, then surely a question like “Is X the

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 31

15/06/15 7:42 PM

32  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

proper career for me?” is not exempt from the demands of objectivity. Hence, when one decides to change course, there is a real risk of distancing oneself from ­happiness, ­putting unneeded ­distance between the experiential self and a state of flourishing. A character like Dagny Taggart could perhaps spontaneously decide to become, say, a veterinarian. Doing so certainly would not violate the laws of physics. The question is, if Dagny did so and adduced only her sovereign will as her reason, would that be consistent with her extant characterization? If the answer is no, then something external to her will must be generating some friction. Perhaps the source of this friction is no more ontologically exotic than the drag of personal history (as captured in artifacts, past conversations, etc.). Still, rightly or wrongly, Rand believes it is possible to negotiate an acceptance of one’s conditions and an initiative in the reshaping of those conditions. The Nietzschean call, taken from Pindar, to “become what/who you are” would seem applicable here (see Hunt 2006). For Beauvoir, a sudden and arbitrary career change would simply be an affirmation of freedom. Many who have been inspired by Beauvoir’s radical philosophy of self-determination have been moved to switch career paths. Existentialism cannot demand that such a sudden transition be preceded by a fact-gathering phase since, according to the existentialist ontology, the truth about such matters is made, not discovered. If Beauvoir is right, there is no stable gauge that can ensure that one’s choices and undertakings make any sense. All human meaning is bootstrapped. Realizing that there is such circularity might cause vertigo. Still, on Beauvoir’s existentialist view, retaining confidence in objectivity would at best be a naive/misguided delusion—and at worst a cover for oppressive ­tactics. Given that “the rejection of existence is still another way of e­ xisting” ([1948] 1976, 43), Beauvoir thinks the only philosophically responsible policy is that “man must  not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the ­contrary, accept the task of realizing it” (13). Barnes explains the divergence well: Rand is right in insisting that we have certainty about many specific things even if absolute certainty is lacking. Rand goes much farther than this. For her, values and morals are subject to the same sort of rational appraisal as tables are. In many ways, it would be a great relief if this were so. It would all be so easy. . . . The existentialist, on the other hand, confronts his freedom in anguish. . . . He realizes that all is open. His freedom is not just the choice between thinking and not thinking, between seeing what is right or refusing to see it. He knows that being free means creating standards of right and wrong. (1967, 132–33)

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 32

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 33

A common locution like “figuring out what to do with your life” is, from this standpoint, a holdover from misguided essentialist views of human nature. The attraction of Rand’s writings would therefore owe primarily to the ­conveyance of a false sense that such locutions make sense—that there is some ­objective truth of the matter about what career one ought to pursue. In the eyes of Beauvoir, only a child-like mind would reify patterns of habituation into an essential (and not accidental) part of what it is ([1948] 1976, 35). Philosophically, healthy adulthood requires a measure of confusion, as distressing as that might be, psychologically speaking. As a prominent site of vocational entrenchment, universities are where most people carve their life-long personal identity. The promise-making implicit in admission is easy, whereas the promise-keeping marked by ­graduation is ­arduous. We nonetheless make choices that, socially at least, will ­continuously define us. Beauvoir thus observes that such decisions “can always be ­reconsidered, but the fact is that conversions are difficult because the world reflects back upon us a choice that is confirmed through this world which it has fashioned. Thus, a more and more rigorous circle is formed from which one is more and more unlikely to escape” (40). A university education is not legally binding, so the glue that holds a student’s project together over time has to come from elsewhere. Are professors promoting or hindering freedom when they enjoin their ­students to go from one point to another as originally planned/agreed? It is hard to say which is sadder: dutiful resignation to a sphere of activity for which there is no passion, or constant reorientation bearing no fruit(s). Of course, this may rest on a false dichotomy. Another possible scenario could be passionate long-term commitment—a sense that one is traveling in a straight line and that, while nothing prevents one from altering one’s course, there is nowhere else one would rather go. Indeed, “[i]f one never becomes who one is, but is always, inevitably becoming and revising a practical identity in exercising this c­ apacity, if one is always in a kind of suspense about who one will turn out, yet again provisionally, to be, what is the proper acknowledgment of this state of affairs?” (Pippin 2006, 132). Keeping selfhood in a state of perpetual flux just for the sake of feeling oneself free can seem like a form of psychological torture. Why not instead marshal a kind of fallible inference to the best explanation and settle on a personal identity until and unless one is given tangible cause to engage in revisions? Constantly calling into question one’s chosen path is nonetheless what Beauvoir’s existentialist ethic recommends. Since the lone person has no stable compass, Beauvoir concludes that “[m]an can find a justification of his own existence only in the existence of other men” ([1948] 1976, 72; see also Arp 2001). It is because one publicly told other people that one would do such and such that one ought to do such and such. Promises

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 33

15/06/15 7:42 PM

34  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

to others are therefore deemed more binding than promises to oneself. Rand would ardently disagree. She argues that a promise made to another is to be kept precisely because one has first seen the independent merit—the personal gain—that results from honoring promises silently made to oneself (see Smith 2006, 176–97). This Randian shift to inner honesty has far-ranging practical ­consequences. In venues lacking informed scholarly oversight, we often read about how Rand supposedly advocated the accumulation of material wealth, come what may (see, for example, the straw Rand erected by Sheehy 2004). However, this i­nterpretation is flatly contradicted by her written work (a fact recently highlighted by Khawaja 2014, 218). For instance, the architect Roark in The Fountainhead ([1943] 1994) secretly transfers all the public credit (and ­monetary remuneration) to another person in exchange for seeing his own design built. To be clear, Roark does not want to starve in anonymity. Yet, when forced to choose, he prizes realizing his vision over any societal reward. We are thus quite far from the mistaken popular view of Rand as an advocate of crude ­consumerism (the point is also made well in Heller 2009). In fact, the ethicist Neera Badhwar (1998) thinks Rand’s greatest contribution has been her ­portrayal of flourishing as a state of inner tranquility and contentment. Since, according to Rand, the self is the primary recipient of values, the self is also the primary party harmed by a broken promise. She claims that, as ­reflective beings, we do irreparable harm to ourselves when we fail to follow through on our commitments. For instance, when the character Peter Keating confirms late in life that he should have been a painter all along ([1943] 1994, 609), he confronts an inner truth, which he had known but suppressed in his youth (20). His prereflective inclination for art beckoned acknowledgment as a species of psychological fact. Hence, it would seem that Keating’s evasion is blameworthy, even if the whole affair transpires at a private level. No one can detect or police this moral transgression—except the agent in question. Even so, it betokens a tragedy. Keating thereby becomes an allegory of the waste occasioned by ­following a life plan that others find worthy instead of one that reflects individual judgment and inclination(s). Keating is “selfless,” in that his self is made up of what others think—which is why Rand titled her main ­treatise on ethics The Virtue of Selfishness (1964). There are parallels between Keating and Beauvoir’s character Françoise. Indeed, “[t]he habitual nature of Françoise’s denial of her feelings is evident in scene after scene of the novel, as she chooses to deny her own feelings rather than inconvenience others” (Simons 2003, 113). One could perhaps argue that Beauvoir’s philosophy is capable of reprimanding this as “bad faith.” It is unclear, however, if and how an existentialist could support such a reprimand (see Shabot and Menschenfreund 2008). “It is, after all, up to you to decide

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 34

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 35

whether you want to live an authentic life” (Eshleman 2009, 75). Perhaps on the joint assumptions that (1) one should be happy and that (2) bad faith is not conducive to happiness, the reprimand can have some traction. Beauvoir might admit (2), but she would probably not endorse (1). In She Came to Stay, Françoise is described as having a “bias” in favor of being happy. Interestingly, there seems to have been some hesitation on this last point. In the 1990 edition of Beauvoir’s novel, the passage in question reads, “Françoise was cut to the quick. Was it possible that her bias in favor of happiness, which seemed to her so obviously compelling, was being rejected with scorn?” ([1943] 1990, 101). If a mere “bias” is what prompts one to pursue happiness instead of, say, melancholy or angst, then the compass of one’s action is ultimately one’s personal preference(s), which might conceivably shift. However, in the more recent 2006 edition of She Came to Stay, the same passage reads, “Françoise was cut to the quick. Surely she couldn’t contemptuously push aside the acceptance of this happiness that seems to her so clearly to be asserting itself ” ([1943] 2006, 96). Here the term “bias” has been deleted, and greater emphasis is put on the force with which hedonistic impulses assert themselves. In the French original, however, we find the equivalent of “bias” (“partis pris”): “Françoise fut touchée au vif; ce parti pris de bonheur qui lui semblait s’imposer avec tant d’évidence, on pouvait donc le repousser avec mépris?” (1943, 122–23; for ­editorial ­comments on the poor state of such translations, see Beauvoir 2004, 4–5). Seeing how evading one’s attitudes with regards to happiness cannot be characterized as blameworthy without endorsing a tacit form of o ­ bjectivism (or a closely related form of eudaemonism), is the only remaining stance one of ambiguity, as Beauvoir maintains? The state to be sought, a­ccording to Beauvoir, is not nihilism, which would merely be the “stationary” o ­ pposite of dogmatism. Instead, like many French intellectuals influenced by the ­phenomenological inquiries of Edmund Husserl (Weiss 2008, 26–38), Beauvoir wants to ­ countenance a fundamental experiential indeterminacy. Feasibly or not, Beauvoir’s ideal subject strives to keep the Hegelian dialectic at the ­vacillating moment prior to synthesis and thereby “remains at a distance; he is never ­fulfilled” (Beauvoir [1948] 1976, 65). The idea of a unique lifelong vocation would make little sense to such a person. An existentialist inspired by Beauvoir would therefore regard the promise-keeping heroes discussed by Rand as fictional portrayals detached from actual human nature, whose powers of resolve are to be taken no more seriously than those of comic book figures able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. The fact that Rand ([1969] 1975) described her fiction as falling in the Romantic tradition might spare her this charge (although perhaps at the price of Platonizing ideals, which Rand would have disavowed). However, the absence of any truly supernatural endowments in Randian characters makes it hard to

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 35

15/06/15 7:42 PM

36  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

see how one could sustain a strong claim of metaphysical impossibility. A better response would therefore be to see long-term resolve as a feat that is admittedly great and/or exceptional, but which nonetheless falls within the ambit of human capabilities. It may be true, as one critic put it, that “‘[e]conomic men’ proved to be a scarcer commodity than the theory takes for granted” (Fletcher 1974, 373). But, on the terms it has set, the radical freedom espoused by Beauvoir cannot rule out the conduct of a person like Dagny Taggart. Now, regardless of whether one’s conduct is predominantly erratic or ­cohesive, Beauvoir and Rand both recognize that life inherently repels ­inaction. Humans may have free will, but one decision they cannot make is standing still. For Rand, this has to do with our biological nature (Binswanger 1990). For Beauvoir, this is simply in virtue of the fact that time marches on (see her [1970] 1977; as well as Deutscher 1999). Thus, in “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” Beauvoir (2004, 89–149) resigns herself to the agentive movement of Pyrrhus, because the ­contrasting idleness of Cineas is simply not feasible. In the course of this ­inevitable movement, one can deny a natural impulse or “bias in favor of ­ happiness” (Beauvoir [1943] 1990, 101). Tragically, Beauvoir’s character Françoise “retreats to subjective idealism in order to suppress the regret that accompanies her dutifulness” (Simons 2003, 114). This, however, is discordant with the phenomenological compact to accept experience as it presents itself. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another disciple of Husserl (and friend of Beauvoir), reviewing She Came to Stay in an essay on “Metaphysics and the Novel” (reprinted in his 1964, 26–40), praised Beauvoir for trying to develop a moral code centered on ambiguity. Yet, a Randian might say that, just as M ­ erleau-Ponty realized that “[t]he most important lesson which the ­[phenomenological] reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction” ([1945] 1974, xiv), the attempt to remain “unbiased” about happiness teaches us the i­ mpossibility of a complete ambiguity. Conclusion It is often remarked (by admirers and detractors alike) that Rand’s novels appeal particularly strongly to the young. According to Rand, the ability to keep a firm handle on one’s long-term personal projects and ambitions means that “spiritual” aging is not mandatory: “To hold an unchanging youth is to reach, at the end, the vision with which one started” (Rand [1957] 1999, 724). So, while Camille Paglia has decried “the dour adulthood of both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand” (1995, 44), a careful study of their lives and works actually speaks to an opposite conclusion. Rand was a young immigrant who wanted to write for the movies. She not only achieved that, but went on to be a successful playwright and world-famous

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 36

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 37

novelist. Later, she rendered the technical aspects of her underlying p ­ hilosophy explicit in nonfiction essays. Beauvoir’s early goals to teach and to write were readily achieved. Although Beauvoir was eventually dismissed from her ­teaching job, she too went on to be a celebrated writer; her novel The Mandarins ([1954] 1999), for instance, was awarded the Goncourt Prize. Beauvoir was never as comfortable as Rand with the idea of being a philosopher, but there is no doubt that Beauvoir also made major advances in that field. Both women consciously gave themselves central parts in the script of their own lives. Once Beauvoir decided to become a writer, her subject, more often than not, was ­herself. Similarly, Rand’s work of fiction, We the Living ([1936] 1996), was openly a­ utobiographical, and she even makes a “cameo” in Atlas Shrugged as the ­“fishwife” of Galt’s Gulch ([1957] 1999, 720). In a context of long-term p ­ lanning, both women achieved the early career goals they had set for ­themselves. And they knew it. Beauvoir nevertheless celebrates an ethos that is completely alien to Rand’s thought. Beauvoir maintains that “[v]iewed by reflection, all human ­projects . . . seem absurd because they exist only by setting limits for themselves, and one can always overstep these limits, asking oneself derisively, ‘Why as far as this? Why not further? What’s the use?’” (2004, 90). Discovering that we are our own source of constraint should, for an existentialist, be a profoundly ­disturbing discovery, one that no reflective adult should take lightly. To go on in an unswerving line after such a realization would be to perpetuate a caricature of the human condition. The optimistic worldview expressed in Rand’s work thus stands in sharp ­contrast with Beauvoir’s focus on the abortive aspect of the human condition, “the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal” ([1948] 1976, 42). Beauvoir enjoins Americans in particular to awaken to “the tragic sense of life” (2004, 314). Rand—who defines a “sense of life” as an “emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence” (1984, 205)—celebrates the fact that while “Europeans do believe in Original Sin . . . Americans do not” (1984, 211; for more on Rand’s optimism, see Den Uyl 1999, 96–97). Ostensibly, the rift here runs deeper than an ocean. Despite these important differences, Rand and Beauvoir agree that all the facts in the world do not add up to a decision. So, when adopting a given life plan, are those facts still relevant? The ethicist of ambiguity will naturally point out that framing the question in such black-and-white terms assumes that ­clear-cut answers can be had, and thus begs the question in favor of ­Objectivism. Yet, the same reproach holds the other way round: to assume that no tangible resolution is in the offing is to beg the question in favor of Existentialism. Thus, by its nature, our study cannot claim a conclusive resting place. Still, given that scholars (like Schor 1995, 3–27) have begun to critically reconsider Beauvoir’s stance,

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 37

15/06/15 7:42 PM

38  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

it might be worthwhile to fold the ideas of Ayn Rand into that ­reconsideration. Clearly, on this and other fronts, there is much work to be done. Note

The authors would like to thank Debra Bergoffen, Lorraine Code, Imola Ilyes, Abigail Klassen, Sonia Kruks, Alice MacLachlan, Elisabeth Paquette, Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Jim Vernon, and the anonymous referees from this journal. References

Arp, Kristina. 2001. The Bonds of Freedom: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialist Ethics. Chicago: Open Court. Badhwar, Neera K. 1998. Ayn Rand’s contribution to philosophy. Reason Papers 23 (Fall): 75–78. Barnes, Hazel E. 1967. Egoistic humanism: Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. In An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, 124–49. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1943. L’invitée. Paris: Gallimard. ———. [1943] 1990. She Came to Stay. Translator unacknowledged. New York: Norton. ———. [1943] 2006. She Came to Stay. Translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger H. P. ­Senhouse. London: Harper. ———. [1948] 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. ———. [1949] 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier. New York: Vintage. ———. [1954] 1999. The Mandarins. Translated by Leonard M. Friedman. New York: Norton. ———. [1970] 1977. Old Age. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2004. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Margaret A. Simons, ­Marybeth ­Timmermann, and Mary Beth Mader. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bergoffen, Debra B. 1997. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered ­Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Bertonneau, Thomas F. 2004. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: From romantic fallacy to ­holocaustic imagination. Modern Age 46, no. 4 (Fall): 296–306. Binswanger, Harry. 1990. The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Binswanger, Harry and Leonard Peikoff, eds. 1990. Introduction to Objectivist ­Epistemology. 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Branden, Barbara. 1986. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Branden, Nathaniel. 1984. The benefits and hazards of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. ­Journal of Humanistic Psychology 24, no. 4 (Fall): 39–64. Breashears, Caroline. 2014. Why James Taggart is no prince charming: Ayn Rand and fairy tales. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 10–37.

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 38

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 39

Burns, Jennifer. 2009. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011. The root of all good: Ayn Rand’s meaning of money. Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no. 3 (August): 329–47. Campbell, Robert L. 1996. When avoiding scholarship is the academic thing to do: Mary Midgley’s misinterpretation of Ayn Rand. Reason Papers 22 (Fall): 53–60. Chambers, Whittaker. 1957. Big sister is watching you. National Review (28 December): 594–96. Champagne, Marc. 2011. Axiomatizing Umwelt normativity. Sign Systems Studies 39, no. 1: 9–59. ———. 2015. Experience and life as ever-present constraints on knowledge. ­Metaphilosophy 46, no. 2 (April): 235–45. Dadlez, E. M. 2013. Literature, ethical thought experiments, and moral knowledge. Southwest Philosophy Review 29, no. 1 (January): 195–209. Den Uyl, Douglas J. 1999. “The Fountainhead”: An American Novel. New York: Twayne. Deutscher, Penelope. 1999. Bodies, lost and found: Simone de Beauvoir from The Second Sex to Old Age. Radical Philosophy 96 (July–August): 6–16. Eshleman, Matthew C. 2009. Beauvoir and Sartre on freedom, intersubjectivity, and normative justification. In Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of Influence. Edited by Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 65–89. Fletcher, Max E. 1974. Harriet Martineau and Ayn Rand: Economics in the guise of ­fiction. American Journal of Economics and Sociology 33, no. 4 (October): 367–79. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. 2000. “Atlas Shrugged”: Manifesto of the Mind. New York: Twayne. ———. 2010. Ayn Rand. New York: Bloomsbury. Gotthelf, Allan. 2000. On Ayn Rand. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. Gotthelf, Allan and Gregory Salmieri, eds. 2015. A Companion to Ayn Rand (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hatcher, Donald L. 1989. Existential ethics and why it’s immoral to be a housewife. ­Journal of Value Inquiry 23, no. 1 (March): 59–68. Heller, Anne C. 2009. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. New York: Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. Hunt, Lester. 2006. Thus Spake Howard Roark: Nietzschean ideas in The Fountainhead. Philosophy and Literature 30, no. 1 (April): 79–101. Kelley, David C. 2000. The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in ­Objectivism. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction. Khawaja, Irfan. 2014. Randian egoism: Time to get high. Reason Papers 36, no. 1 (July): 211–23. Kruks, Sonia. 1987. Simone de Beauvoir and the limits to freedom. Social Text 17 (Autumn): 111–22. Lucey, Michael. 2010. Simone de Beauvoir and sexuality in the third person. ­Representations 109, no. 1 (Winter): 95–121. Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir and ethics. History of European Ideas 19, nos. 4–6 (July): 899–903. Machan, Tibor R. 2001. Ayn Rand. New York: Peter Lang.

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 39

15/06/15 7:42 PM

40  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Mayhew, Robert, ed. 2005. Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A. New York: New American Library. ———. 2009. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1945] 1974. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith and Forrest Williams. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Michalson, Karen. 1999. Who is Dagny Taggart? The epic hero/ine in disguise. In ­Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand. Edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ­199–219. Moen, Ole Martin. 2012. Did Ayn Rand eat babies for breakfast? Forbes (19 June). Nuyen, Anh Tuan. 1985. Sociobiology, morality, and feminism. Human Studies 8, no. 2 (June): 169–81. Paglia, Camille. 1995. Interview with the vamp. Reason (August–September): 37–44. Pippin, Robert. 2006. On becoming who one is (and failing). In Philosophical ­Romanticism. Edited by Nikolas Kompridis. London: Routledge, 113–39. Prosch, Harry. 1961. The problem of ultimate justification. Ethics 71, no. 3 (April): 155–74. Rand, Ayn. [1936] 1996. We the Living. New York: Signet. ———. [1943] 1994. The Fountainhead. New York: Plume. ———. [1957] 1999. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Plume. ———. 1961. For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House. ———. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet. ———. [1966–67] 1990. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. In Binswanger and Peikoff 1990, 1–87. ———. [1969] 1975. The Romantic Manifesto. 2nd edition. New York: Signet. ———. 1984. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet. Scholz, Sally J. 2000. On de Beauvoir. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. Schor, Naomi. 1995. Bad Objects: Essays Popular and Unpopular. Durham, North ­Carolina: Duke University Press. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1989. Ayn Rand’s critique of ideology. Reason Papers 14 (Spring): 32–44. ———. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park: ­Pennsylvania State University Press. Shabot, Sara Cohen and Yaki Menschenfreund. 2008. Is existentialist authenticity unethical? De Beauvoir on ethics, authenticity and embodiment. Philosophy Today 52, no. 2 (Summer): 150–56. Sheehy, Benedict. 2004. The challenge of Objectivist ethics: Ethical thinking in business, rationalism, and Ayn Rand. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 18, no. 2 (Fall): 231–40. Simons, Margaret A. 2003. Bergson’s influence on Beauvoir’s philosophical m ­ ethodology. In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Edited by Claudia Card. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 107–28. Sirridge, Mary. 2003. Philosophy in Beauvoir’s fiction. In The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Edited by Claudia Card. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 129–48.

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 40

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Beauvoir and Rand  |  Champagne and Gladstein 41

Smith, Tara. 2000. Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2006. Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1976. Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem. The Monist 59, no. 2 (April): 204–17. Touchstone, Kathleen. 2006. Then Athena Said: Unilateral Transfers and the ­Transformation of Objectivist Ethics. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. Weiss, Gail. 2008. Refiguring the Ordinary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

JARS 15.1_03_Champagne_Gladstein.indd 41

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­Nabokov The Issue of Literary Dialogue Anna Kostenko

ABSTRACT: Ayn Rand is often put on a par with Vladimir Nabokov, ­proceeding from the similarity of their creative destinies. The general vicissitudes of life forced the two writers to converge on one theme—the indisputable ­statement of the supreme value of a human life, by understanding the importance of the individual “I” over the public. The main problem of their poetic worlds is the question of self-identification. As Russian immigrant writers, both occupy the position of “estrangement” in relation to both their own heritage and the environment to which they immigrated.

For a long time, Ayn Rand, the famous American literary writer and creator of the philosophic system of Objectivism—based on the principles of reason, individualism, and rational self-interest—attracted the attention of her ­critics and readers only with her ideas, while her fiction remained beyond the scope of research and literary interests (though see, for example, Cox 1986). In recent years, interest in her novels has grown among literary critics outside of the former Soviet Union (primarily among American scholars). Collections of ­articles on Rand’s literary art (see, for example, Mayhew 2005; 2006; 2009; 2012; Thomas 2005; Younkins 2007; Gladstein 1999; 2000; 2010) can be regarded as

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 42

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­N abokov  |  Kostenko 43

some evidence of this increased scholarly interest. However, despite several recent translations of her novels into Russian, Rand remains little known in Russia and other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Literary study of her works is nonexistent in these countries. Rand is often put on a par with Vladimir Nabokov because of s­ imilarities between their creative destinies. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg and, in spite of her Jewish origin, received an excellent education: Alissa briefly went to school with one of Nabokov’s sisters, Olga. But Rand’s life subsequently followed a different course from Vladimir Nabokov’s. The Nabokovs emigrated from Russia in 1918; Alissa Rosenbaum graduated from Petrograd University in 1924, majoring in a specific subject of “social pedagogy,” and only in 1926, unable to bring other family members with her, did she head to New York via Riga, Latvia. Nabokov began writing in English only in 1940, well after he had established himself as a writer in Russian. Alissa Rosenbaum had never written novels in Russian, although see Rand 1999, which compiles monographs she wrote in Russia, having studied at the State Technicum for Screen Arts in Leningrad. Her first English-language novel, built on memories about Russia, was w ­ ritten in 1934 and published in 1936 (the first Nabokov novel in Russian had been ­published ten years earlier). During her life, Rand wrote four novels, one play, and one short story. The writer never focused attention on her Russian (or Jewish) origin, and only in the novel We the Living was the action set in her motherland or the temperament of the protagonist (Kira) similar to Alissa Rosenbaum’s. In 1964, Rand spoke in her Playboy interview about Nabokov as a brilliant stylist—whose subjects, sense of life, and view of man were so evil that no amount of artistic skill could justify them. She admitted that she had read only one and a half of his books: it was Lolita that Rand was not able to finish reading. Summarizing Nabokov’s and Rand’s literary conceptions, D. Barton Johnson noted that Nabokov wrote modernist novels that broke new ground in both Russian and American literature; Rand wrote Russian novels in English, ­transforming the traditional Russian didactic novel of ideas into something that we might loosely label “Capitalist Realism.” While the Russian-American Nabokov stands at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism, his ­compatriot Rand remained stalled at the intersection of ideology and ­aesthetics (Johnson 2000, 64). In his important work On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind, Bell-Villada tries to “pair” the two writers, but views Nabokov as the canonical figure, albeit somewhere near the edge of the canon (2013, 4). In one of Bell-Villada’s earlier articles, which appeared in this very ­journal, the scholar noted a major disjunction between the stances taken by each of these authors toward their Russian roots. Nabokov saw himself first and

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 43

15/06/15 7:42 PM

44  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

foremost as a Russian author; in his 1967 autobiography Speak, Memory, he lovingly evoked his idyllic, privileged childhood and youth in that country. By contrast, Rand had little to say about her country of her origin, and on the Phil Donahue show, she dismissed Russia—both czarist and Bolshevik—as a land of “mysticism.” Later in the same article, Bell-Villada (2001, 188) added that for all their differences, Nabokov and Rand continued, each in their fashion, the Russian tradition of the novel of ideas, be it Chernyshevsky’s or Dostoyevsky’s. The last remark can easily be disputed if one recalls Nabokov’s attitude toward Chernyshevsky and his “poetic” and ideological views, clearly presented in Gift. A further aspect, emphasized by Jane Yoder (2003), in her reply to Johnson (2000) and Bell-Villada (2001), is that both authors miss Nabokov’s ­adoration of the poet Alexander Pushkin (2003, 398). Pushkin is interesting for Nabokov not only as the author of Eugene Onegin (1833), where the prototype ­superfluous man was born; he expressed his adoration of Pushkin in the same Gift, where the protagonist Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev “feeds on” Pushkin, learning from him the appropriateness of words and the marginal clearness of their ­connection (1990, 87). The same words can refer to Nabokov himself, for whom Pushkin was to some extent an idol, a teacher, even an icon of tradition, and not just Russian tradition.1 However, the general vicissitudes of life forced Nabokov and Rand to ­converge on one theme—an indisputable statement of the supreme value of human life, by understanding the importance of the individual “I” over the group, as proven by a preference for the English form of the pronoun “I,” which is always spelled with a capital letter. However, in approving the priority of the individual, according to Mimi Reisel Gladstein (2000, 29), Rand is too ­categorical: goodness is measured by the value and uniqueness of an individual life, notably everything that supports and enriches life is good, and anything that interferes with or destroys life is evil. The artistic works of a philosopher style their position as a thinker to one degree or another. But Rand’s novels in their poetics and themes are more complex than a simple listing of the main provisions of a philosophical ­ ­doctrine. Speaking about her novel We the Living, the writer did not consider it to be a product of Naturalism, even though it depicts many accurate details of Russia during the time and place in which she lived. Rand is interested in human values and the choices characters face. She views herself as a “Romantic Realist” ([1958] 1996, xvii). Rand characterized her first novel as being as close to an autobiography as she would ever write (xviii). But for Rand it is not even a story about Soviet Russia in 1925; it is a story that encapsulates the theme of the individual versus dictatorship (xvii). We the Living is a novel about memory, where imagination turns real, ­experienced events into the artistic ideas. In this sense, it is similar to Nabokov’s

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 44

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­N abokov  |  Kostenko 45

novels of the “Russian” period, especially his Mashen’ka. As ­immigrant writers, both Nabokov and Rand occupy the position of ­“detachment” or ­“estrangement” in relation to their own cultural and historical heritage as well as to the culture, history, and present situation of another environment, which the authors enter with the intention not only to observe but also to exist within. The novels even present similar realities of life. An exit visa is a l­onged-for object for Rand’s heroine, for whom a foreign country becomes a bizarre paradise, a promised land, something mysterious and unattainable. Kira ­ ­associated all the best with the word “foreign,” but another meaning of the word is “strange, supernatural,” even “alien.” At the cinema, Rand’s heroine ­manages to peep into this “otherworldly” life, the life in which people are happily ­laughing and dancing in the glittering halls, running along the sandy beaches, their hair flying in the gentle breeze. But gradually, the word “foreign” in Kira’s story is replaced by the word “other” (that other world), and Kira understands more clearly the strangeness of life in which neither she nor her favorite places exist. Consequently, the protagonist’s death on the way to a distant dream about foreign countries is necessary. Kira’s words echo in Mashen’ka’s letter to Ganin: she is cold, creepy, sad, but the idea pierces her mind that “somewhere far, far away, people are living in a completely different way, having another life” (Nabokov [1926] 1989, 82). But for Mashen’ka, this “other” life is associated not with an u ­ nattainable dream of foreign lands, but with the love that she has lost, and in fact, “if there is no love—there will be no life” (83). Only when they reach the so-desired “abroad,” Nabokov’s characters tend to go somewhere further, ­somewhere, no matter where, just to leave. “Let me just get to Paris—says the poet Podtyagin— there’s free and untrammeled life” (58), but he does not know that the ordeal of ­obtaining a visa will send him to a completely different world. Ganin goes somewhere else too, realizing that there is no return to the past and there is no other life. The past for Nabokov’s heroes lives in reminiscences and dreams, distorting images and feelings in a world of memories. Podtyagin dreams of a Petersburg, a Nevsky, that doesn’t resemble itself, “houses with oblique angles, with solid ultrageometrical shapes, and the sky is black. . . . It’s scary— ooh, scary—that when we dream of Russia, we remember not its beauty, but ­something monstrous” (77–78). Podtyagin’s nightmare comes true in Rand’s novel; the Argunovs return to the starving, ruined postrevolutionary Leningrad. Structurally, the description and characterization of Petrograd (as Rand and her heroes continue to call it) are placed exactly in the middle of the book; they seem to divide the first bright period of Kira Argunova’s life, full of love, hope, and belief, and the second period of life, built on lies, losses, and deaths. And the symbolic entry into this new phase of life is the story of Petrograd “­ standing on skeletons,” raised by man against the will of nature, the city where trees

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 45

15/06/15 7:42 PM

46  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

seem to be “rare strangers, sickly foreigners in a climate of granite, forlorn and ­superfluous” (Rand [1958] 1996, 217). Irina calls Kira “the recluse of Petrograd” (232). These words can lead to ­certain parallels with the final unfinished autobiographical poem by Wordsworth “The Recluse.” It is a poem about a man, nature, and human life, showing alienation from urban life and longing for something true and real. It is significant that characterizing Kira, the word “recluse” is intertwined with the city, because the author called Petrograd “a monument to the spirit of man,” the city that has no legends, no folklore, no soul, but mind. And who knows, as Rand writes, perhaps it’s a coincidence, but “in the language of the Russians Moscow is ‘she,’ while Petrograd has always been ‘he’” (220). This city is ­becoming an integral part of Kira’s life, a symbol of her strength and d ­ etermination, and eventually the reason for her destruction, because she is only a weak woman, unable to resist male power. Kira’s story is to a certain extent a representation of what Nabokov’s Mashen’ka had to pass through before she was able to rejoin her husband. Alferov wonders how his wife was able to survive the years of terror, yet he was sure that she would arrive b ­ looming, cheerful, because “­ femininity, beautiful Russian femininity is s­tronger than any revolution, misery and terror” ([1926] 1989, 30). Reading Rand’s novel we realize how right and wrong Alferov was: Kira was able to ­survive everything—misery, terror—but the soul of a man is dying from ­everyday contact with evil. And the only thing that can give a person some strength is the belief in life, a deep feeling that you are still alive. The understanding of the importance of life permeates the entire novel from the first page to the last, strengthening the existential effect of Rand’s work. The first, not quite conscious, feeling that she holds an unprecedented gift, comes to Kira when she is thirteen years old reading the legend of the Viking, the final words of which are a call to “a life which is a reason unto itself ” (1983, 180). Admitting this thought unreservedly, Kira cannot share the views of the new government, which wants her to fight for life, to kill for its sake, and even to die. Kira is just dreaming of her life. The right to life is as inseparable from the person as the right to be born. “We the Living” is not just a phrase in the title of the novel; it is the sense given to a man by a power higher than any p ­ olitical party, and therefore not coming under ordinary earthly laws. Kira’s cousin Irina, about to be exiled to Siberia, knowing that she will never come back, cannot get rid of the strange feeling that she can be deprived of her life, so ­precious and rare, so beautiful for her, only because somebody doesn’t u ­ nderstand life’s significance. And the only thing she continues doing is repeating the question, “What is it, Kira? What?” ([1958] 1996, 324). Kira is also not destined to find the answer to this question. In the scene where she indicts Andrei, whom she used to consider her true friend, and even

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 46

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­N abokov  |  Kostenko 47

more, she states the basic postulate of human life: we feel alive, not when we eat and digest food, or work and produce more food, but when we know what we want, and we want to turn our desires into reality. However, Kira does not understand that in their essence, Andrei’s views of life are not so far different from her own. Back at the beginning of their relationship, Andrei told Kira that if their souls met and after heavy fighting had torn each other to pieces, they would see that they had the same root (97). Rand wants to show that a person may have the right thoughts and even do the right things, but yet the evil around him consumes all the best he could do. The language of this work helps the writer visualize the correctness of her position—a living voice coming from the heart, and the dead language of bureaucracy. For the first time, this contrast is shown in the scene where an ­official completes a form for Kira. With dry, harsh words the official describes her appearance (medium height, gray eyes, ordinary mouth, no particular signs), but the narrator keeps intervening, as if to save the reader from his ­narrowness of perception. For Kira is not just of average height but slender, with sharp swift movements that seem to be “an unconscious reflection of a d ­ ancing, laughing soul”; and her eyes are not just gray but dark gray, ­resembling the color of “storm clouds, behind which the sun can be expected at any moment”; and her mouth is not just ordinary, but thin, long, and “at a slight movement made a wrinkle in the corners of her lips” (27). Andrei Taganov, appealing to his comrades in the battle near Melitopol, calls them brothers and in simple words speaks about the life for which they are fighting, for bread and the land on which it is grown, the possibilities that a new state opens for them. Then his colleague Pavel Serov takes the floor, his speech brimming with clichés: “Down with the damn bourgeois e­ xploiters! . . . Who does not toil, shall not eat! Proletarians of the world, unite!” (­ 99–100). Perhaps an American reader cannot fully experience this scene, not being familiar with the triviality of these phrases, but by repeatedly using them in the course of the novel, Rand could not better reproduce the deadening ­atmosphere in which the events of the story take place. This feeling is at its peak in the funeral scene after Andrei has committed suicide, no longer ­willing to serve evil. The words are another level of reality of Rand’s novel, the illusory nature of the world emphasized by the frequent use of the “as if ” construction. Talking of his counterrevolutionary activities and the need to leave, Leo Kovalensky speaks as if biting into every word, as if all the hatred and despair came from the sounds themselves, not their meaning (100). Eventually Leo, who has lost his sense of life, yawns while discussing, as if not hearing his own words (300–301). Without sense, words lose their meaning; he who has nothing to say would rather remain silent.

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 47

15/06/15 7:42 PM

48  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Leo seems to Kira a being from another world, from many centuries distant, when he is standing near the table with the Primus (308). As if from another life, one without wars and revolutions, Andrei talks to Kira. And Andrei ­himself is compared to those who had once worn Roman armor; now, it was not armor but a leather jacket, serving the same function (287). Through Irina’s words, Rand states an important truth—time is an illusion, it can pass very quickly if one stops thinking of it (325). Ganin from the novel Mashen’ka is also experiencing the transience, the uniqueness of human life, but in Nabokov’s novels everyone is a whole world, and these worlds are unknown to each other, “not a reveler, not a woman, not just a passerby—but a tightly locked-up world full of wonders and crimes” ([1926] 1989, 38). Only the power of literature to display this wonderful world by holding back time at least for a moment gives the illusion of real memory that is able to overcome feelings of unreality and estrangement. The song “Little Apple,” which rolls across the novel, becomes the leitmotif of memory and a warning to the main character. At the beginning of the novel, Kira hears this jingling melody on a train taking her to Petrograd; the song is heard next on a train taking Irina and Sasha to a labor camp in Siberia, with the famous refrain repeated: “Hey, little apple, where are you rolling?” (Rand [1958] 1996, 10, 325). The song is known to have many versions: Makhno’s couplet, couplets from the Reds, their opponents’ couplets, and others. In the first scene on the train, Rand offers her own modification: “And now there is no Russia, / For Russia’s all sprawled, / Hey, little apple, where are you rolling?” (11). Thus, the writer laments the ruined country and crushed lives of people who did not know “where it was rolling.” “Little Apple” is heard several times in Nabokov’s works as well. First, it sounds in the novel Bend Sinister in the scene where Krug learns of his son’s death, and on his way meets the soldiers, uttering the famous refrain of the song: “Hey, little apple, where are you rolling?” ([1947] 1964, 201). In Look at the Harlequins! the main character, Vadim Vadimovich, traveling abroad in 1918, meets a Red Army soldier, who refers to him with the same words: “Where are you rolling, little apple?” (Nabokov [1974] 1996, 572). The novel’s hero is forced to shoot the soldier, and at this point, according to Johnson (2000, 49), some researchers find parallels with the event in Nabokov’s life that was described in his novel Speak, Memory. This episode is inserted into the Russian version of Other Shores (Drugiye Berega) as an account of an incident in 1918 in the Crimea, where, as Nabokov described, “some Bolshevik guard, a lame fool with an earring in one ear, wanted to arrest me for signaling it, they say, English ships with a butterfly-net” ([1954] 2003, 127). Perhaps for Nabokov, as for Rand, the foolish song’s tune is directly connected with recollections of destruction and death, crushed homeland, and mangled memory.

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 48

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­N abokov  |  Kostenko 49

Rand’s next work, Anthem, is mostly devoted to the word “I” itself. To some extent, it is the anthem to the art of writing, to people’s skills “to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see” ([1938] 1966, 5). But describing this kind of activity, Rand finds unexpected epithets: “secret,” “evil,” “precious,” as well as calling it a “sin” and “transgression.” The author shows us literally how words, repeated frequently, become worn out; there appears “green mold in the grooves of the letters and yellow streaks on the marble” (6); but, in Rand’s opinion, such decay happens to the words that have no sense, the words that emphasize the importance of the “We” and neglect the “I.” The pronoun “I” emerges only in the last chapter of Anthem, when the ­protagonist, with a number in place of a name, learns the great truth—that many words have been granted him, “and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: ‘I will it!’” (89). Analyzing Nabokov’s heritage and his longing to create a new hero—a strong and positive man in an individualistic sense—Khrushchyova saw the reason why the author rejected the Russian language: for the prime “I” of the Western world, which unlike the tiny Russian “β,” is not the last letter in the alphabet (2008, 11). The same may apply to Rand’s writing as well: they both support an egoistic way of thinking, the Western attitude to the world. Rand’s Anthem has certain parallels to Nabokov’s novel Priglashenie na kazn’ (titled in English Invitation to a Beheading). The protagonist in Anthem states that he was born with a curse—in his case with a mind that is too quick, because “it is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them” (Rand [1938] 1966, 8). So the hero has tried to fight his curse, to forget lessons, but he has always remembered them; he has sought to not ­understand what the teachers have taught, but has understood them even before the ­teachers have spoken. Nabokov’s Cincinnat has differed from other children of his age since ­childhood, but, realizing his difference from others, he has sought to hide this fact. He even learned to pretend he was transparent, using a complicated system of optical illusions, but when he was relaxing, his vigilance, his opacity, became obvious. Being different from others is Cincinnat’s main crime. The whole novel is a peculiar invitation to his execution, to a particular p ­ erformance, a play, that is being staged in the readers’ eyes. In the literature of the twentieth century, the implicit use of theatrical means to build new relations between the narrator and the reader was an ­important theme. The Russian scholar S. Lipnyagova (2006) understands ­ so-called ­“theatricality” as a novel’s poetic category that identifies a special type of inner organization of the text, on the level of structure, plotting, c­ haracters, and ­conflict, following the model of theatrical/stage perception or dramatic text  (284). The artistic world of the novel entirely occupies the space of the

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 49

15/06/15 7:42 PM

50  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

“stage,” on the level of which the use of different languages and cultures is understood as an aesthetic and psychological category, connected with the ­perception of a person’s inner life as a particular game space where the person can play various roles and model life situations through the laws of a theatrical performance directed at the reader. In Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnat, while meeting his mother, calls her irritably “a parody, the same as the rest.” Even her wet ­raincoat is seen by Cincinnat as “the property-man’s failure” (Nabokov [1936] 1989, 323). During the conversation with Monsieur Piers, Cincinnat asks for a three-minute break, after which he will finish this “ridiculous play” (370). Thus, the execution becomes a peculiar performance and acquires the form of a ritual, as a result of which the protagonist joins the creatures that are similar to him. Rand’s hero also passes through a specific ritual, but his is in some ways more complicated than Cincinnat’s. The first stage of this ritual, according to Rand, is love, the discovery of another person for oneself and oneself in another person. The next stage is learning, acquiring new knowledge and new skills, which frees the prospects and inclination for self-development. Then comes the escape into the unknown, figuratively and literally—a walk through the Uncharted Forest, as if through Nothingness—and in the end, the hero and his beloved get the prize, the ability not only to live freely but, more important, to think freely. Thus, to a certain extent the main problem of Nabokov’s and Rand’s poetic worlds is the question of self-identification, through the ­surrounding world and, finally, through language. Their works present existential aspects of human living, even aspects of alienation, because of the motives of ­estrangement, ­otherworldliness, and feelings of unreality that deepen the basic, “real,” plot line. The reality of a new language and immigrant e­ xperiences transforms their own memories into an artistic world, open to any form of the imagination. A Note about Translation The present author has worked with Nabokov’s Mashen’ka, Priglashenie na kazn’, and Dar in Russian and has translated the given quotations herself. All other Russian-language materials are also presented in the author’s translation and interpretation. Note

1. Sciabarra tells us that when Rand studied at the Stoiunin Gymnasium, ­established by the in-laws of her college philosophy professor, N. O. Lossky, she befriended V ­ ladimir Nabokov’s sister, Olga. Rand had taken a course on classical language. Her  teacher

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 50

15/06/15 7:42 PM

Ayn Rand and ­Vladimir ­N abokov  |  Kostenko 51

assigned Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. Rand “wrote a paper on the book’s characters. The teacher gave her a lesson in literary causality, teaching her to judge ­characters and by specific incidents or actions” (Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 66). References

Bell-Villada, Gene H. 2001. Reply to D. Barton Johnson: Nabokov and Rand: Kindred ideological spirits, divergent literary aims. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3, no. 1 (Fall): 181–93. ———. 2013. On Nabokov, Ayn Rand and the Libertarian Mind: What the Russian-­ American Odd Pair Can Tell Us about Some Values, Myths and Manias Widely Held Most Dear. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Cox, Stephen. 1986. Theory vs. creative life. Journal of Libertarian Studies 8 (Winter): 19–29. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. 1999. The Ayn Rand Companion. Revised and expanded edition. Westport, Connecticut: Continuum. ———. 2000. The great American novel. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 1 (Fall): 117–30. ———. 2010. Ayn Rand. Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers. Volume 10. New York: Continuum. Johnson, D. Barton. 2000. Strange bedfellows: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 1 (Fall): 47–67. Khrushchyova, Nina. 2008. V gostyakh u Nabokova [Imagining Nabokov]. Moscow: Vremya. [Published first in English, under the title Imagining Nabokov, in 2007.] Lipnyagova, S. 2006. Kontsept “teatr” v angliyskom romanye XX veka [The concept of “theatre” in the English novel of the twentieth century]. Vestnik Krasnoyarskogo Universiteta, no. 6: 284–87. Mayhew, Robert, ed. 2005. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Anthem.” Lanham, Maryland: ­Lexington. ———. 2006. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. ———. 2009. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. ———. 2012. Essays on Ayn Rand’s “We the Living.” 2nd edition. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington. [First edition published in 2004.] Nabokov, Vladimir. [1926] 1989. Mashen’ka. In Nabokov. Istreblyeniye tiranov [Tyrants destroyed]: Selected prose. Minsk: Mastatska literatura, 19–99. ———. [1936] 1989. Priglashenie na kazn’ [Invitation to a beheading]. In Nabokov [1926] 1989, 251–378. ———. [1937] 1990. Dar [Gift]. In Nabokov, Sobraniye sochineniy [Selected works]. Volume 4. Moscow: Pravda, 5–330. ———. [1947] 1964. Bend Sinister. New York: Time. ———. [1954] 2003. Drugiye Berega [Other shores]. Moscow: AST. ———. [1974] 1996. Look at the Harlequins! In Nabokov. Novels 1969–1974. New York: Literary Classics, 565–747. Rand, Ayn. [1938] 1966. Anthem. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton. ———. [1958] 1996. We the Living. New York: Signet. ———. 1964. Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand. Reprinted by the Intellectual Activist.

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 51

15/06/15 7:42 PM

52  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

———. 1983. Kira’s Viking. In The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished ­Fiction. Edited by Leonard Peikoff. New York: New American Library. ———. 1999. Russian Writings on Hollywood. Marina del Rey, California: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Thomas, William, ed. 2005. The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. Poughkeepsie, New York: Objectivist Center. Yoder, Jane. 2003. Reply to D. Barton Johnson’s “Strange bedfellows” (Fall 2000) and Gene Bell-Vallada’s “Nabokov and Rand” (Fall 2001): The silence of synthesis. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring): 395–404. Younkins, Edward W., ed. 2007. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A Philosophical and L ­ iterary Companion. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate.

JARS 15.1_04_Kostenko.indd 52

15/06/15 7:42 PM

The Prohibition Against ­Psychologizing Robert L. Campbell

ABSTRACT: The prohibition against psychologizing has been a source of ­confusion to many Randians. Psychologizing is the practice of incorrectly or ­improperly inferring motives in other people instead of rendering moral judgment. Rand thought that it could manifest in two ways: inquisitorial and excuse-making. However, Rand’s concrete examples are preponderantly of the excuse-making type; her bright line between psychology and philosophy is unsuccessfully drawn; and in offering extended, strongly condemnatory ­analyses of the supposed motives behind psychologizing, she yields to the very temptation she claims to warn against. “Psychologizing” turns out to be an anticoncept.

For some Randians, the prohibition against psychologizing has become a key ­stricture, to be applied both to intellectual exchange and to everyday social  ­interaction. Under this rubric, all manner of inferences about other ­ people’s motives are criticized and rejected, and “presumptuous” becomes the nicest word applied to the people who make such inferences. The rationale for the prohibition cannot be that Objectivism is a s­pecies of behaviorism. Furthermore, Objectivism does not insist, as some schools of ­philosophy or psychology once did, that all mental processes must be ­conscious. Nor has Objectivism ever shown any regard for the view (e.g., Piaget 1918) that we The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 53

15/06/15 7:41 PM

54  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

must not judge others because we can never know their deepest motives. Quite the contrary, in Objectivism the virtue of justice requires making moral judgments: “judge, and be prepared to be judged” (Rand 1964a, 72; her italics). So any prohibition against inferring motives would have to be cast very narrowly, lest it come promptly into conflict with other parts of the Randian system. Another Bad Kind of Izing “Psychologizing” made its appearance in a 1971 article by Ayn Rand, in which she evidently intended to plant the word among such rooted ­pejoratives as “moralizing” and “philosophizing.” “Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so ­psychological theories become psychologizing. The common denominator is the corruption of cognitive processes to serve an ulterior motive” (1990, 24; Rand’s italics). To date, however, psychologizing has drawn no mentions outside  of Rand-land. And while Randian writers have laid specific charges of ­ ­psychologizing, presumptuous or otherwise, they have offered no further ­coverage of the subject in the abstract. Everyone’s understanding of the notion stems from this solitary article.1 Consequently, any confusion on the subject is also traceable to Rand’s ­original essay. Defining the Practice “The Psychology of ‘Psychologizing’” is a concise article of eight pages in The Objectivist. A careful reading will enable us to understand what p ­ sychologizing was supposed to be, what assumptions lay behind the notion, and how clear or consistent Rand was in her application of it. The chief objective, Rand announced, was to carve a boundary between psychological assessment and moral judgment. Psychologizing misused psychological explanations by improperly intruding them into the moral sphere. “Psychologizing,” she offered by way of definition, “consists in condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual evidence” (24). Her effort immediately raises epistemological questions. If ­psychologizing is what results when the canons of evidence are not heeded and invalid ­inferences are made, we are naturally led to ask what the canons are, and which i­nferences are valid. What kinds of factual evidence will be required

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 54

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 55

to support valid i­nferences about hidden motives or about psychological problems? We are told that the criteria will be stringent: “A conscientious p ­ sychotherapist, of almost any school, knows that the task of diagnosing a particular individual’s problems is extremely complex and difficult. The same symptom may indicate different things in different men, according to the total context and interaction of their various premises. A long period of special inquiry is required to arrive even at a valid hypothesis” (24). But Rand lacked expertise in the field, and provided no indication that she had consulted with anyone who did. She gave no description of the way ­careful and responsible psychotherapists direct their thought processes. It would have been helpful to provide a positive example of clinical judgment; she offered none. Worse than that, from 1964 to 1968 she herself had been functioning— calamitously, it must be said—as a counselor to Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden (Valliant 2005). She had no training in counseling and no ­discernible aptitude for it. Taking either Branden as a client involved gross and palpable conflicts of interest. Her journal entries (Valliant 2005) regarding the ­counseling with Nathaniel Branden (if anything survives from her “sessions” with Barbara, it has not yet been published) yield the starkest evidence of her lack of skill at something she had no business attempting. “Allowing for exceptions in special cases,” she would now say, “it is not ­advisable to discuss one’s psychological problems with one’s friends. Such ­discussions can lead to disastrously erroneous conclusions (since two amateurs are no better than one, and sometimes worse)—and they introduce a kind of medical element that undercuts the basis of friendship” (1990, 29). Rand had never quite publicly acknowledged her role as counselor to Nathaniel Branden. The closest she had gotten was to complain about “a long series of discussions, held at his request to help him solve what he characterized as his ­psycho-epistemological problems” (Rand 1968, 3). She made no reference now to her role as amateur counselor, nor did she indicate whether she believed it qualified for an exception. But “psychologizing” extends well beyond poor or hasty conclusions by trained clinicians, or even by clinical wannabes.2 As an improper substitute for moral judgment in general, psychologizing cannot be contained within the ­clinical setting. It pours over into all of our actions and interactions. When improperly arrived at, the conclusion that someone has a paranoid or a ­narcissistic personality constitutes psychologizing. But so, when ­improperly arrived at, does the conclusion that the person broke the glass on purpose instead of dropping it by accident.

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 55

15/06/15 7:41 PM

56  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

The Practitioners: Inquisitors and Excuse-Makers Some psychologizers (Rand called them “inquisitors”) draw questionable or completely incorrect inferences about other people’s motives in order to ­condemn them and their actions. Others (“moral cynics”) employ ­questionable or bogus psychological judgments in order to excuse people’s actions. Rand rejected what she saw as a false dichotomy between inquisiting and ­excuse-making—between “condemnation without knowledge or the refusal to know in order not to condemn” (1990, 29). The careful reader will note, however, that in Rand’s article actual ­examples of unjust excuse-making substantially outnumber examples of unjust ­condemnation. The diagnosis at a distance of Barry Goldwater as ­mentally unfit to be president of the United States, by 1,189 psychiatrists who were ­foolish enough to respond to a questionnaire from Ralph Ginzburg’s fact: magazine, is the only concrete instance offered for inquisitorial ­psychologizing (26). Instances of excuse-making are more plentiful. From Atlas Shrugged, Rand (23, 30) cites Lillian Rearden, trying to convince her husband that her s­ piteful treatment of him is really motivated by frustrated love (along with Hank Rearden trying, ultimately without success, to convince himself). There are the ­psychologists who defend any murderer (Sirhan Sirhan, who ­assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, was a recent example), because supposedly he was the victim of his social environment or his genes or his upbringing (26). She ­continues (26–27) with amateur excuse-making on behalf of those who commit violent crimes; the production of “psychohistories” and “psychobiographies”; the prevalence of movies that “explain a murderer’s actions by showing that his domineering mother did not kiss him good night at the age of six”; and, by way of a clincher, a playwright who allegedly said “[a]sk my psychiatrist” when an interviewer asked why his plays always had unhappy endings.3 She finds few human beings more insupportable than “the youngish lady who talks on and on about her psychological problems” (30). The excuse-makers carry the day, by a score of 7 to 1. Rand did inveigh, with some force, against the damage that inquisitorial ­psychologizers inflict in general: “observe the almost triumphant glee with which a psychologizer discovers some inevitable evil in some bewildered victim” (25); “the Inquisitor will use [amateur psychological discussions] to frighten and manipulate a victim” (29). But one has to wonder whether the inquisitorial kind of psychologizing was not an awkward subject for her, on account of its incidence and prevalence in her own social circle. Psychologizers, she warned, “sneak along on the fringes of every movement. They exist even among alleged students of Objectivism” (27).4 Did she mean to imply that any of her followers were overly prone to excuse-making?

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 56

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 57

The reader might come away thinking that Rand was more negatively disposed toward the quest for excuses than toward psychodiagnostically ­ ­intensified condemnation.5 But let’s put aside, for the moment, her reluctance to provide examples of inappropriate condemnatory moralizing. Let’s suppose that her definition of psychologizing is valid and evenhanded as stated.

How Do We Avoid Psychologizing? Rand maintained that psychologizing is irrational, immoral, and p ­ sychologically harmful, to both psychologizer and psychologized. She strongly urged e­ veryone to refrain from doing it. How did she think her s­ tricture could be obeyed? She thought it could be carried off if psychology were confined within the tightest of boundaries and blocked it from intruding into moral judgment. “An individual’s consciousness, as such, is inaccessible to others; it can be perceived only by means of its outward manifestations. It is only when mental processes reach some form of expression in action that they become perceivable (by ­inference) and can be judged. At this point, there is a line of demarcation, a division of labor, between two different sciences” (27). On one side of Rand’s bright line, “The task of evaluating the processes of man’s subconscious is the province of psychology. Psychology does not regard its ­subject morally, but medically—i.e., from the aspect of health or malfunction (with cognitive competence as the proper standard of health).” Whereas “[t]he task of judging man’s ideas and actions is the province of philosophy” (27–28; my italics). But in point of fact, human actions are motivated, and it is not just other ­people’s subconscious motives that must be inferred; their conscious motives often have to be as well.6 In her writings, Rand regularly concluded that other people were motivated to evade the truth—which, as she understood it, was a conscious motive. What were her rules of evidence for arriving at that ­conclusion? If she judged that someone was evading when he wasn’t, or she lacked adequate grounds to rule out a different explanation, would her m ­ istaken inference amount to psychologizing? In John Galt’s speech, we read, “A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the d ­ istant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the ­assertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his ­rational ­faculty” (Rand 1957, 1044). For Rand a “mystic” was not necessarily a person who had or claimed mystical experiences; she included in the c­ ategory anyone who professed any kind of religious faith. Did every such person

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 57

15/06/15 7:41 PM

58  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

(by her definition, there have been a few billion mystics during the history of our ­species) renounce reason once and for all, between the ages of three and seven, under the circumstances she described? How would she know? How, in most cases, could she know? Isn’t leaping to such a conclusion exactly what an “inquisitor” would do? Can Psychology Be Roped In? Contrary to Rand’s attempts to rope it in, psychology is concerned with ­conscious as well as subconscious human functioning. It is concerned with normal as well as abnormal functioning. In her essay, Rand defined psychology down. Way down, till nothing remained of it except the study of p ­ sychopathology and the practice of psychotherapy. Amazingly, in light of its role as a cardinal value in the Objectivist ethics (Rand 1964b) and the articles devoted to it in Rand’s periodicals from previous years, the word “self-esteem” never once appears in the essay. Now that Nathaniel Branden was off the scene, she seemed to be ­reverting to the position she had so often taken with him: Her attitude, in effect, was that rational minds do not require psychology. Philosophy is enough. Psychology is essentially for pathology—that is, for the irrational in people. I argued with her about this, and she would always concede that I was right: “Yes, of course, Nathan, we all have a psychology, and the operations of the mind do need to be studied, but. . . .” And a week or two later, she would say, “Oh, how I hate your profession, Nathan. How I hate the irrational. How I hate having to deal with it or to struggle to understand it.” (Branden 1999, 97–98) She seemed to be jettisoning cognitive psychology, which she had ­occasionally alluded to in previous writings, and would actually return to one last time, in the year after this essay (Rand 1972; Campbell 2002). Yet in her article on ­psychologizing, we still read, “It is only a newborn infant that could regard itself as the helplessly passive spectator of the chaotic sensations that are the content of its consciousness (but a newborn infant would not, because its c­ onsciousness is intensely busy processing its sensations)” (30). All of a sudden, Rand is appealing to what she has freshly ruled out of bounds.7 After psychology has been roped off, every conscious thought and motive must belong to philosophy. Why? “Philosophy is concerned with man as a ­conscious being; it is for conscious beings that it prescribes certain ­principles of action, i.e., a moral code” (Rand 1990, 28). Is no other discipline—not ­psychology, not economics, not history, not even literary criticism— allowed to take into account that man is a conscious being?

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 58

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 59

The takeaway: “Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on ­perceivable demonstrable facts. A man’s moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions—not on the basis of ­inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious” (28; her italics). The implication hangs heavy that psychology is not and can never be objective. Judgments about Motives Are Everywhere In reality, judgments about the morality of an action, like judgments about an action more generally, can’t avoid referring to the actor’s motives. Whether ­conscious or unconscious, these motives, in their turn, often have to be inferred. Under what circumstances are such inferences appropriate? Does drawing a bright line between philosophy and psychology, in the place that Rand tried to draw it, help anyone make objective judgments as to which inferences are appropriate? Does pushing psychology off the dock into the subjective swamp help anyone make objective judgments? Rand was surely not assuming that people’s conscious convictions are ­whatever they say they are. She distinguished convictions from statements, and said “conscious” convictions, not “stated” or “declared” convictions. People, we note, may not state their conscious beliefs with complete accuracy. They may hide or misrepresent them. How, then, does one decide when to trust another person’s statements about what he or she believes—and when mistrust is ­warranted?8 If a person’s actions run counter to his stated principles, one might begin to ask some questions. But, even when there is ironclad evidence that he has acted against his declared principles, are the motives behind the act conscious? Subconscious? Could they be both? We further note that many judgments about psychopathology are easily ­construed as morally irrelevant. When we say that a person is engaging in ­compulsive behavior, this is not usually taken as a moral judgment.9 But when a clinician concludes that a person is a psychopath or a sociopath, that j­ udgment is moral as well as psychological. Should the notions of sociopathy and “­ antisocial personality” be permanently stricken from the clinical v­ ocabulary, because they cannot be employed without usurping the prerogatives of philosophy? Did Rand Avoid Psychologizing? Finally, since Rand regarded psychologizing as a terribly improper practice, is there evidence that she made the measliest effort of her own to refrain from it? Her very choice of title brings its own complications. She undertook to explain the entire psychology of everyone who psychologizes! Is there such a thing as metapsychologizing—psychologizing about people you think are psychologizing?

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 59

15/06/15 7:41 PM

60  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

If there is, Rand produced the prize essay on the subject. Having pushed aside the psychology of normal human functioning, dismissed all basic research and every application outside of clinical practice,10 and failed to acknowledge the role of inferences about motives in moral judgment, how could she not have drawn psychological conclusions of the precise kind she insisted must be avoided? In fact, Rand stumbled right in front of her readers: “In dealing with people, one necessarily draws conclusions about their characters, which involves ­psychology, since every character judgment involves man’s consciousness. But it is a man’s subconscious and his psychopathology that have be left alone, ­particularly in moral evaluations” (29). Not only has she fallen back over the line she so recently drew, in conceding that character is a matter of psychology, but now she is compelled to suppose that a person’s character has no ­subconscious aspect, and that any form of psychopathology must always be extraneous to it.11 In the end, one has to ask whether Rand could have complied with her own prohibitions. Could anyone comply with her antipsychologizing directive, as formulated? We can definitely see that she did not: it appears she could not resist analyzing the motives behind every purported act of psychologizing in order to condemn them. She denounced psychologizing, prior to defining it, as “a widespread game that has many variants and ramifications, none of them innocent, a game that could be called a racket” (23; my italics). “Armed with a ­smattering, not of ­knowledge, but of undigested slogans, [amateur psychologizers] rush, ­unsolicited, to ­diagnose the problems of their friends and acquaintances. Pretentiousness and presumptuousness are the psychologizer’s invariable ­characteristics: he not only invades the privacy of his victim’s minds, he claims to understand their minds better than they do, to know more than they do about their own motives” (24; my italics). “With reckless irresponsibility, which an old-fashioned mystic oracle would hesitate to match, [the amateur p ­ sychologizer] ascribes to his v­ ictims any motivation that suits his purpose, ignoring their denials. Since he is dealing with the great ‘unknowable’—which used to be life after death or ­extrasensory ­perception, but is now man’s subconscious—all rules of evidence, logic, and proof are suspended (which is what attracts him to this racket)” (­ 24–25; my italics). “The unearned status of an ‘authority,’ the chance to air arbitrary ­pronouncements and frighten people or manipulate them, are some of the ­psychologizer’s lesser motives. His basic motive is worse. Observe that he seldom discovers any virtuous or positive elements hidden in his victims’ ­subconscious; what he claims to discover are vices, weaknesses, flaws” (25; my italics). “The basic motive of most psychologizers is hostility. Caused by a profound ­self-doubt, self-condemnation, and fear, hostility is a type of projection that directs toward other people the hatred which the hostile person feels toward himself ” (25; Rand’s italics). The inquisitorial psychologizer “deludes ­himself into

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 60

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 61

the belief that he is demonstrating his devotion to morality and can thus escape the necessity of applying moral principles to his own actions” (25; my italics). “The common denominator [for inquisitors and excuse-makers] remains constant: escape from cognition and, therefore, from morality” (26). “While the racket of the philosophizing mystics rested on the claim that man is unable to know the external world, the racket of the psychologizing mystics rests on the claim that man is unable to know his own motivation. The ultimate goal is the same: the undercutting of man’s mind” (27; my italics). The final page of Rand’s article devolved into a nonstop rant against those she deemed guilty of “the lowest type of psychologizing” (30). In her view the lowest type amounted to a chronic unwillingness to account for one’s own actions, off-loading onto others the full burden of discerning their hidden ­meanings. “The unprocessed chaos inside [the psychologizer’s] brain, his unidentified feelings, his unnamed urges, his unformulated wishes, his ­unadmitted fears, his unknown motives, and the entire cesspool he has made of his stagnant ­subconscious are of no interest, significance, or concern to anyone outside a therapist’s office” (31; my italics). Here comes the peroration: The visible image of an “unprocessed” mentality is offered by non-objective art. Its practitioners announce that they have failed to digest their perceptual data, that they have failed to reach the conceptual or fully conscious level of development, and that they offer you the raw material of their subconscious, whose mystery is for you to interpret. There is no great mystery about it. The mind is a processing organ; so is the stomach. If a stomach fails in its function, it throws up; its unprocessed material is vomit. So is the unprocessed material emitted by a mind. (31) Where might we find a more, well, vigorous instance of imputing ­psychopathology to people, without adequate evidence, in order to discredit them and induce others to condemn them? In the end, Rand’s article has become a prime exhibition of the very tendencies that it affects to deplore. Errors and Misuses The present critique forms a delayed sequel to an article examining and ­rejecting the doctrine of the arbitrary (Campbell 2008). Once again there is a known trouble spot in Objectivist philosophy: a conception unclearly

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 61

15/06/15 7:41 PM

62  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

enunciated, supported with arguments of poor quality, untenable going ­forward. And once again the problem conception has encouraged predictable abuses in Rand-land. There are some noteworthy differences. No other hands c­ontributed to the doctrine of psychologizing, nor has it been the subject of ­multiple ­disquisitions: everything is in a single essay by Ayn Rand herself. But similarities are also evident. Psychologizing, like “the arbitrary,” is ­ ­condemned as irrational and immoral in advance of being defined. And, psychologizing, like “the ­arbitrary,” is so muddled a notion its proponents cannot avoid  ­psychologizing about  ­psychologizing, any more than those busy prosecuting “the arbitrary” can avoid making arbitrary assertions about arbitrariness. In Rand-land charges of arbitrariness (Campbell 2008) have most often been brought against those whose statements about Ayn Rand’s life and deeds ­displease the speaker. Correlatively, the charge of psychologizing has been brought against people who draw unwelcome conclusions about Ayn Rand’s feelings and motives. Thus, Allan Gotthelf said of Barbara Branden’s biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand: “The book has numerous factual errors and engages throughout in gratuitous psychologizing which seems to reflect its author’s continued embitterment” (Gotthelf 2000, 27 n. 8). It is impossible to charge someone with psychologizing and not impute a motive for it. What’s more, the motive must be bad—and it must be hidden. For just as no one goes to a counselor and asks for help on account of being ­narcissistic, no one ever announces to the world that she is psychologizing, or urges others to stop her before she psychologizes again. One wonders, in fact, what defense Barbara Branden could have put up against the charge. Gotthelf did not mention a single alleged instance or ­product of her psychologizing. But for the sake of argument let us assume that he would have counted her judgment that Ayn Rand was insecure in her femininity. Since Barbara Branden was expelled from Rand’s presence, after Rand had had an affair with her husband and insisted that she help to ­conceal it, the ­judgment could be explained away as psychologizing ­motivated by Ms.  Branden’s e­mbitterment. But suppose that Barbara Branden had remained in good odor with Ayn Rand until the philosopher’s death, then made the same public ­judgment of insecure femininity? Wouldn’t Gotthelf have been able to accuse her of psychologizing on account of ingratitude? Or perhaps of e­ mbitterment that she had successfully kept hidden from Rand all those years? And what, in turn, prevents us from concluding that Gotthelf ’s judgment of embitterment, as the motive for everything he disliked about Barbara Branden’s book, was itself an instance of psychologizing?

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 62

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 63

Cleaning Up and Getting to Work We may fairly conclude that Rand’s notion of psychologizing presupposes an inadequate and impoverished conception of psychology; it fails to acknowledge the role of inferences about motives in everyday functioning as well as in moral judgment; and Rand commits multiple violations of her own prohibitions in the very article in which she puts them forward. Which is not to say that excuse-making is a good thing. But there are ample arguments of good quality against it already in the Randian canon. Nor is it to say that inquisitorial condemnation is a good thing. There are fewer arguments against that from Rand, but she did occasionally make some that are sound. It is not even to say that care should not be taken with the differences between psychological assessment and moral evaluation. But here is work that remains unfinished and that Objectivism demonstrably hasn’t done. It is certainly not to say that psychology, as presently constituted, has all the answers. Rand’s twin bêtes noires, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, have long since slipped from their ascendancy (Campbell 1999). Yet in 2015 we cannot seriously disagree with her judgment that “psychology has not yet found a Plato, let alone an Aristotle, to organize its material, systematize its p ­ roblems, and define its fundamental principles” (1990, 24). Psychology also hasn’t found a Galileo or a Newton or an Einstein. It does not follow that philosophy can do what psychology needs to do but has not yet done, or that philosophy may ­dictate to psychology what its content will be. Which quality—hubris or ­befuddlement—could we say is more prevalent in the next sentence? “[O]ne grants a man the respect of assuming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are—not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning” (26; Rand’s italics). We have a long way to go, but cleaning up this mess will help us get started. “Psychologizing” is a fatally confused notion. In Rand’s own terms, it is an anticoncept, best abandoned because it relies on muddled thinking and ­ ­promotes further muddled thinking. We will not conclude, though Rand (1964c) herself did, that anticoncepts are always perpetrated—that someone is always unleashing them on purpose. For that truly would be psychologizing, at Ayn Rand’s expense. Notes

1. It is the source of all four passages quoted in the entry on psychologizing in the Ayn Rand Lexicon (Binswanger 1988, 394–95). 2. With the exception of the psychiatrists who offered their vicarious diagnoses of Barry Goldwater to fact: magazine, leading to his successful libel suit against that

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 63

15/06/15 7:41 PM

64  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

­ ublication, and the psychologists who tried to excuse the actions of Sirhan Sirhan, p Rand directs her fire at “amateur psychologizers.” 3. Rand calls the psychobiographies, the movies, and the playwright’s comments “eclectic mixtures” (26), but there is no inquisitorial element in these examples. 4. Just a few months after Rand’s essay first appeared, it drew these pointed comments from Nathaniel Branden: reason: What was your reaction to [the article]? branden: I laughed when I read it because I don’t know anyone who is more prone to practice the very “psychologizing” she denounces than Ayn Rand herself. I mean the policy of informing people what their motives are, what their mental state is, and so forth, and doing so in an intimidating manner. I can scarcely d ­ isagree with Miss Rand’s criticism of this policy, but it sounds a bit strange coming from her. (1971, 11–12) 5. “As to the other side of what she calls ‘psychologizing,’ that is, using alleged ‘­psychological’ explanations to justify or excuse some form of irrational behavior, Miss Rand does not do that—not about herself—since it is not her policy to acknowledge that she ever acts irrationally” (Branden 1971, 12). 6. Not to mention the implications of their conscious and subconscious motives, which Rand did not clearly distinguish from subconscious motives (Campbell 2002). 7. She presumed the truth of a hypothesis—that newborn babies experience pure sensations—which is now generally rejected by cognitive psychologists. Was this all philosophy? According to Binswanger and Peikoff, around the time of her essay on ­psychologizing Rand laid down this demarcation: “So whenever you are in doubt about what is or is not a philosophical subject, ask yourself whether you need a specialized knowledge, beyond the knowledge available to you as a normal adult, unaided by any special knowledge or special instruments. And if the answer is possible to you on that basis alone, you are dealing with a philosophical question. If to answer it you would need training in physics, or psychology, or special equipment, etc., then you are ­dealing with a derivative or scientific field of knowledge, not philosophy” (Binswanger and P ­ eikoff 1990, 289). Any effort to understand infant perception or cognition is highly ­specialized: neither casual observation of babies nor introspection from an adult point of view will establish whether newborns experience pure sensations. Nor do i­ ntrospection and casual observation have any chance of answering most other questions about infant cognition. 8. Psychologists who rely on self-report surveys for their data are certainly aware that people’s responses to the items can be erroneous, distorted, or purposely m ­ isleading. There is a substantial literature on the “faking” of survey answers and even on the ­“fakeability” of whole surveys. A recent book on the subject (Ziegler, MacCann, and Roberts 2012) rounds up a lot, but not all, of this literature—in 19 chapters. 9. We should add that from a eudaemonistic standpoint, being obsessive-compulsive might detract from living a fulfilled life—and that by Rand’s description of rationality as a virtue (1964b, 25–26), compulsive behavior may even qualify as immoral. But we will leave these concerns to the side here.

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 64

15/06/15 7:41 PM

The Prohibition Against ­P sychologizing  |  Campbell 65

10. Nonclinical applications include industrial/organizational psychology, ­educational psychology, and the study of human-computer interaction. 11. “Judging from her remarks [about psychologizing], Miss Rand evidently believes that conscious mental processes can be kept entirely separate from and independent of subconscious mental processes—which is not true” (Branden 1971, 12). Expressing regret for his past praise of Rand’s psychological acumen, Nathaniel Branden went on to say, “I think Miss Rand’s lack of psychological understanding is a great liability to her, not only as a person but also as a philosopher. The point at which her ignorance becomes most apparent is when she attempts to moralize about psychological processes, as she does constantly” (12). References

Binswanger, Harry, ed. 1988. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. New York: Meridian. Binswanger, Harry and Leonard Peikoff, eds. 1990. Appendix: Excerpts from the epistemology workshops. In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 2nd ­ ­edition. By Ayn Rand. New York: Meridian, 122–307. [The appendix is an edited transcription of workshops on epistemology that Rand conducted in 1969–71.] Branden, Barbara. 1986. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Branden, Nathaniel. 1971. Break free! An interview with Nathaniel Branden. Reason (October): 4–19. ———. 1999. My Years with Ayn Rand. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Campbell, Robert L. 1999. Ayn Rand and the cognitive revolution in psychology. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall): 107–34. ———. 2002. Goals, values, and the implicit: Explorations in psychological ontology. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3, no. 2 (Spring): 289–327. ———. 2008. The Peikovian doctrine of the arbitrary assertion. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 10, no. 1 (Fall): 85–170. Gotthelf, Allan. 2000. On Ayn Rand. Belmont, California: Wadsworth. Piaget, Jean. 1918. Recherche. Lausanne, Switzerland: La Concorde. Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. ———. 1964a. How does one lead a rational life in an irrational society? In The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Edited by Ayn Rand, with additional articles by Nathaniel Branden. New York: Signet, 71–74. ———. 1964b. The Objectivist ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. Edited by Ayn Rand, with additional articles by Nathaniel Branden. New York: Signet, 13–35. ———. 1964c. “Extremism,” or the art of smearing. The Objectivist Newsletter 3, no. 9: 35, 37–40. Reprinted in 1967 in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Edited by Ayn Rand. New York: Signet, 173–82. ———. 1968. To whom it may concern. The Objectivist 7, no. 5: 1–8. ———. 1971. The psychology of “psychologizing.” The Objectivist 10, no. 3: 1–8. Reprinted (with minor edits) in 1990 as “The psychology of psychologizing” in The Voice of Reason. Edited by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Meridian, 23–31.

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 65

15/06/15 7:41 PM

66  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

———. 1972. The stimulus . . . and the response. The Ayn Rand Letter 1: 8–11. [The four  installments were dated 17 January, 31 January, 14 February, and 28 ­February 1972.] Valliant, James S. 2005. The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics: The Case against the Brandens. Dallas: Durban House. Ziegler, Matthias, Carolyn MacCann, and Richard D. Roberts, eds. 2012. New ­Perspectives on Faking in Personality Assessment. New York: Oxford University Press.

JARS 15.1_05_Campbell.indd 66

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why” A Critique of the Objectivist Theory of Volition Ro ger E. Bissell

ABSTRACT: The author examines the canonical Objectivist model of free will (aka “volitional consciousness”) and finds it wanting, amounting to a form of Agency—Indeterminism. Employing an Aristotelian Four Cause analysis, he explores the complementary roles of determinism and free will, as well as the conditional nature of necessity and contingency, in understanding how causality operates in the human realm. He proposes an integration of what he calls “value-determinism” and “conditional free will,” arguing that it amounts to a basic axiom of human choice and action, and urges its acceptance in place of the Orthodox Objectivist view of free will.

If a man obeys his own ideals—how can that be called servitude? —Ayn Rand (15 May 1934 in Harriman 1997, 70) [I]t is invalid to ask: why did a man choose to focus? There is no such “why.” —Leonard Peikoff (1991, 60)

The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 67

15/06/15 7:41 PM

68  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Free will or “volitional consciousness” is one of the most ubiquitous tenets of Objectivist philosophy. Rand (1957) publicly enunciated her principle of ­volition in rather brief form: “[M]an is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically. . . . In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort” (1012), but as Branden noted ([1969] 2001), “In her subsequent writing, Miss Rand does not provide a theoretical elaboration of this statement” (37). This she left to her two main protégés, who in the ­process, and with her blessing and endorsement, elevated volition to the status of a “basic principle”1 in Branden 2009 (based upon lectures first ­delivered publicly in the 1960s) and an “axiom”2 in Peikoff 1991 (based upon lectures delivered in 1976). Peikoff ’s formulation of volition (1991), most concisely stated, is this: A course of thought or action is “free,” if it is selected from two or more courses possible under the circumstances. In such a case, the difference is made by the i­ ndividual’s decision, which did not have to be what it is, that is, which could have been otherwise. . . . Man’s basic freedom of choice, according to Objectivism, is: to exercise his distinctively human cognitive machinery or not; that is, to set his conceptual faculty in motion or not. In Ayn Rand’s s­ ummarizing formula, the choice is this: “To think or not to think.” (55) Regarding Objectivism’s very specific placement of the nexus of volition, Branden ([1969] 2001) clarifies: Man’s freedom to focus or not to focus, to think or not to think, is a unique kind of choice that must be distinguished from any other category of choice. [Such decisions as what particular subject to think about or what particular physical action to perform] involve causal antecedents of a kind which the choice to focus does not [such factors as one’s “values, interests, knowledge, and context”]. (43) In the face of this, I and numerous other supporters (and former supporters) of the Objectivist philosophy maintain, on the one hand, that rationality does indeed include volition, in the sense of the self-aware monitoring and directing of one’s mental processes—while also maintaining, on the other hand (1) that, in any given situation, one could not have done otherwise than one did, given that situation, and (2) that, even in situations involving the choice of whether or not to raise one’s level of focus, there are always causal antecedents of the kind Branden mentions. Numerous other supporters of Rand’s philosophy (as she stated it) also hold some variant of this hybrid view, variously referred to

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 68

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 69

as “soft determinism” or “compatibilism” (meaning that free will is compatible with determinism). The question we compatibilists raise, and which I will explore in this essay, is this: Is the standard Objectivist view of free will correct, and are we ­compatibilists entrapped in a contradictory, incoherent muddle—or, instead, is some significant, actual kind of free will or volition compatible with some significant, actual kind of determinism, as we argue that it is? This essay, then, explores how and whether determinism and free will play necessary and complementary roles in human choice and action. In ­particular, it seeks to answer these questions: Are we human beings and our ­mental-volitional organ, the brain/nervous system, truly free, as Objectivism claims, to engage in conscious processes and make choices? If so, in what respect are we and our choices free, and does that respect clash with d ­ eterminism, as Objectivism claims, or does it instead harmonize with it? If the latter is the case, then what is the status, moving forward, of the canonical Objectivist view of volition?3 Free Will, Determinism, and Aristotle’s Four Causes Human action, like any change occurring in the world, consists in something’s potential being actualized. Something goes through a process of change that results in its taking on a new form, characteristics it did not previously possess, but was able to acquire under appropriate conditions. As he did for change and action in general, Aristotle identified four intimately, and necessarily, linked aspects of human action that may be said, in some sense or other, to be a “cause” of our actions, and without which we would not have a complete description and understanding of the phenomenon of human action.4 First and foremost, Aristotelians and Objectivists recognize that, because, as already noted, actions are the actions of entities, causality is the relation between an entity and its actions. Also, because parts of entities often themselves engage in actions, causality can also be the relation between a part of an entity and its actions. Thus, in the primary sense, the cause of an action is the entity (or a part of an entity) that engages in the action. This sense of causality is referred to by Aristotle as the efficient (or “moving”) cause of an action. The acting entity is the thing that, in fact, does make an action happen. In the case of human action, the efficient cause is the person doing the acting, the agent of the action. For this reason, this primary mode of causality, specifically as it occurs in human action, is sometimes referred to as “agent-causation.” Next, note that the other three causes are clearly related aspects of efficient causation (or, more specifically, agent-causation), distinct facets of an entity’s making something happen. For instance, we also speak of the nature of an entity, that is, its attributes, as being, in a secondary sense, the “cause” of its actions. What an entity is

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 69

15/06/15 7:41 PM

70  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

“determines” what it can do. Its attributes are an entity’s potential for action; and its potential for action is that by virtue of which it can be the efficient cause of something that happens. This kind of causality, an entity’s being the ­actualization of a previous process and its being the potentiality to engage in, or be used for, an additional process, is referred to by Aristotle as the formal cause. The acting entity’s nature, the formal cause of its actions is that in virtue of which the entity can make an action happen. In this respect, the formal cause is the enabling or empowering cause of an entity’s actions. In the present case, human action, the relevant aspect of the formal cause of a human being’s actions is his capacity of consciousness, which is a fundamental aspect of his nature, namely, his power to engage in certain kinds of actions, including cognition, evaluation, and regulation of action—and, in particular, thinking. It is only in this sense, that consciousness qua attribute is a “cause.” In other words, consciousness qua attribute is not an efficient cause. It does not have causal efficacy. Instead, it is the causal efficacy of conscious living beings. It is conscious living beings (and their parts, such as the brain and nervous system) that have the causal efficacy to do things consciously and unconsciously, and that engage in efficient causation. Then there is the material cause—that from which an entity causes s­ omething to happen. This is sometimes construed rather narrowly along the lines of the physical material that is used in order to make something. However, since Aristotle is fundamentally attempting to explain the action of an entity, not the constituents of things resulting from that action, we must look more broadly, to what includes, but extends far beyond, those constituent materials—namely, to the surrounding conditions out of which the result arises. This is another way of thinking of the “antecedent conditions,” which ­determine that an entity does one thing rather than another thing. In general, the material cause of an entity’s actions—that is, the antecedent conditions of its actions—is that in virtue of which the entity must make an action happen.5 The material cause is thus the determining cause of an entity’s action. A helpful way of relating material and formal cause is thus as follows. Formal cause relates to possibility and impossibility, while material cause relates to necessity and contingency. The formal cause of a thing’s actions, that is, the nature of that thing, determines what that thing can do, and what it can do determines what it cannot (and thus will not) do. (A thing will not do ­anything which is not possible to it.) The material cause of a thing’s actions, that is, the antecedent conditions of its actions, determines what a thing must do, and what it must do determines what it might not do, if those conditions are not present. The formal cause of an entity’s engaging in a specific action is its power to enact the material cause of that action—and, conversely, the material cause

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 70

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 71

of an entity’s action is the set of conditions that determines its enacting the formal cause, its power to engage in that action. An entity can do that which, and only that which, it must do. In this respect, therefore, Freedom (“can”) and Determinism (“must”) are in holy metaphysical wedlock in human action. In the case of making any kind of choice, the operative material cause or antecedent conditions of that choice will be not factors in one’s e­xternal ­environment, nor even one’s genetic and inborn physiological makeup, but instead a complex of knowledge and one’s various contending interests, ­preferences, wants, and “values.”6 Whether one acts on impulse, or only after some amount of deliberation, it seems to be an inescapable fact that one ends up pursuing that which one most strongly wants or “values” in any given situation. Even in the case, for instance, of choosing to think (or not think)—the quintessential act of free will, ­according to Objectivism—the most relevant antecedent condition is the agent’s interest in thinking, which is sufficient (or not sufficient) to overcome motivations for, or interests in, other acts that would preclude thinking in that instance. Finally, and most appropriately, there is the final cause—one’s actual goal, which is something one desires to the extent that, in a given situation, one actually chooses and seeks it, rather than something else that one would have chosen instead, had one desired it more. Given its nature and the relevant ­associated conditions (i.e., the formal and material causes operative in a given situation), the ends of the entity determine what the entity will do. Its ends are that by virtue of which the entity will make the action happen. We thus also speak more generally of an entity’s tendencies, in some ­circumstance or other, as being the “cause” of its actions. What an entity tends toward determines what it will do. This kind of causality is referred to by Aristotle as the final cause of an action. The acting entity’s end, the final cause of the entity’s action, is that end state for the sake of which the entity will make an action happen. It is actually the concept of an efficient cause that gives rise to the need for the concept of a final cause.7 As Veatch (1952) points out, “[U]nless such an efficient cause acts in a determinate and predictable manner, then change would be utterly unintelligible and nature would be a chaos instead of an order” (290).8 Thus, final causation is end-determination, that is, the end of an entity ­determining that it will, in certain circumstances, act to achieve that end. And for conscious living entities, since their ends are values in the primary, Randian sense (that which they act to gain and/or keep), and since an actual value is precisely that internal “value” (preference, desire) which one most wanted to attain—end-determination is value-determination in the fullest sense. When we acknowledge that a living being’s actual end or value—that is, what a living

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 71

15/06/15 7:41 PM

72  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

being in fact acts to gain in a given context—is that which it most “values” (i.e.,  desires to gain) in that context, we are acknowledging that its action is determined by that end (among the alternatives open to it) which it most strongly “values” (desires). If this sounds tautological, it is because we are in the presence of an axiom of biology. More specifically, for human beings, it’s important to distinguish between final cause and material cause—that is, between value in the primary sense, codified in Rand’s definition of “value,” the actual end of one’s action, that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and “value” in the secondary sense of a desired, possible end of one’s action, that which one desires or wants to gain and/or keep. When a “value” in the latter sense is also the most desired possible end of one’s action, then it is and indeed must also be—that is, inexorably becomes—a value in the primary sense. In any given situation, one will in fact not act to gain and/ or keep something that one does not most strongly desire to gain and/or keep in that situation. That is just a basic fact of motivational psychology that applies to human beings and conscious animals alike. Since evaluations and desires are the products of thoughts, our actions are determined ultimately by the thought that produces our highest o ­ perative ­evaluation and strongest desire. The challenge for us human beings is thus to manage our thought processes so that our strongest desires are for ­life-enhancing ends, rather than ones that subvert and destroy our well-being. To recap, the Four Causes are all specific, distinguishable aspects of how an action is determined, of how something is caused to happen. The efficient cause of an entity’s action is that entity that does make something happen. The formal cause of an entity’s action is that in virtue of which that entity can make ­something happen. The material cause of an entity’s action is that from which an entity must make something happen. The final cause of an entity’s action is that for the sake of which an entity will make something happen. Each of these aspects of causality is compatible with the others, and each of them is indispensable to a full understanding of human action and freedom. Furthermore, none of these aspects of causality leave room for the notion of a choice undetermined by existing conditions—not even the choice to be aware. Yet, as we will see, the Orthodox Objectivist model is just such a view of human choice, and thus must be revised along the lines proposed in this essay. Orthodox Objectivism’s Indeterminist Model of Volition Agent-causation, the acting entity’s role in human action, is the a­ pplication to the human realm of the Aristotelian model of entity-action causality. However, agent-causation does not and cannot, as most Objectivists claim, ­operate by means of “libertarian” or categorical free will, where one “could have

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 72

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 73

done otherwise, period,” and where one’s choice is undetermined by existing conditions.9 This can be seen in any one of countless examples, but it is perhaps most ­expeditious to head straight to the court of last resort, the paradigm case of human choice: the locus of free will, which Peikoff (1991) characterizes as the choice to “raise one’s degree of awareness,” that is, to “focus one’s mind” (58). This ­primary choice, he says, cannot be explained by any more basic factor, not even a motive or a value-judgment. He claims that one must already have decided to perceive reality before forming a value-judgment that it is ­desirable to perceive it, overlooking his own observation that the decision to focus is the ­decision “to raise one’s degree of awareness” (58), which is possible only if one is already aware before deciding to become more aware! He concludes, “In short, it is invalid to ask: why did a man choose to focus? There is no such ‘why.’ There is only the fact that a man chose: he chose the effort of c­ onsciousness, or he chose non-effort and unconsciousness” (60). But, if one does not do ­something as basic and primal in one’s awareness as choosing to focus because it is what one most values doing, then why would one do it? Apparently, for no reason, according to Peikoff. One’s choice to focus is free-floating; no aspect of the i­dentity of oneself or of the world anchors and explains this choice. It has no cause and no explanation, except the brute, miraculous fact that one chose to focus, rather than not to focus. And it is miraculous, anti-identity, because nothing explains it. (There is no “why.”)10 Moreover, one could just as well have chosen not to focus, and have had no reason for this choice either. This is the meaning of libertarian, categorical free will, including the concept of volition advocated in the Orthodox Objectivist model. One is free to have chosen as one did—and otherwise than one did . . . just because. Because of what? Nothing, just because. (There is no “why.”) Or, in Objectivist parlance, “by whim,” which is how Objectivists typically ­characterize indeterminism! Actually, however, whim is less indeterministic than Orthodox Objectivist free will! Whim is understood to be the causal product of a transient, ­unprincipled urge—that is, a desire generated by a subconsciously held value that bears no obvious relation to one’s rational self-interest. An act of Orthodox Objectivist free will, however, is a free-floating, uncaused act. Nothing whatever makes you cause your freely willed acts. (There is no “why.”) As Goodell (2007) succinctly puts it, Rand’s view of volition “amounts to saying that volition is causeless causality” (20). Or, as Dwyer (2001) expresses it, Objectivists have often chafed at the characterization of volition as “indeterminism,” which “holds that not all human action is necessitated, because some actions allegedly have no causes.” (Binswanger 1991, 5)

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 73

15/06/15 7:41 PM

74  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

But it is difficult to see how Objectivism’s view of volition as entailing an arbitrary choice based on nothing is superior to indeterminism as a realistic account of human action. Since both views deny that the choice to think or not to think is governed by a prior reason or purpose, both claim that the choice is fundamentally causeless. (88, emphasis added)11 In another respect, the Objectivist concept of free will, or libertarian free will, bears a startling similarity to the God of Judeo-Christian theology. On this view, the choice to think is the “first cause” of human action (i.e., of every other human choice), just as God is the First Cause of the universe (i.e., of every other thing that existed). On the Judeo-Christian view, nothing “made” God choose to create the rest of the universe. He had no motivation or reason for doing so. It was not good or evil, just something He wanted to do and chose to do. Even if God did have a reason or motivation for creating the world, that reason or motive didn’t cause him to create the world. In other words, God’s reason/motive for creating the world was His act of creating the world. Thus, Creation was God’s whim, just as the choice to think is a whim of human beings—in other words, supernatural and human ­indeterminism, respectively. Naturally, Objectivists are just as loath to characterize their choice to think as indeterministic as theists are the actions of God. Instead, as all Objectivists readily acknowledge and vigorously proclaim, the human choice to focus is not acausal, but actually a form of causation, and thus is an instance of the Law of Causality, which is the Law of Identity applied to action. However, most Orthodox Objectivists apparently are not aware that their view of free will undermines the claim that focusing is a form of causality. If in fact, however, there is nothing, neither in your nature nor in the nature of the world around you, including the special antecedent conditions that are your “values” (preferences resulting from evaluations) by virtue of which you choose to focus or not, then your choice to focus (or not) proceeds from nonidentity. This means that, on the Orthodox Objectivist view, your choice to focus is not only undetermined, but also noncausal—which means it is not your choice.12 You didn’t do it. It just happened. And note: this isn’t just the “you didn’t build that” of Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, who are merely ­reattributing the individual efficient causation of an entrepreneur to the ­collective efficient causation of the taxpayers or the community or society (even as they forcefully redistribute the fruits of his labors to those who need and “deserve” it more). Instead, it is the obliteration of efficient causation in regard to human action.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 74

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 75

Thus, libertarian, or categorical free will, including the Orthodox Objectivist model of volition, is a disguised form of indeterminism—moreover, one that is difficult, in principle, to distinguish from the ancient doctrine of the “Epicurean swerve.” As Konstan (2014) outlines the views of Epicurus, [H]uman beings, like everything else, are composed of atoms that move according to their fixed laws, [but] our actions are not wholly predetermined. . . . What enables us to wrest liberty from a mechanistic universe is the existence of a certain randomness in the motion of atoms, that takes the form of a minute swerve in their forward course. . . . It is not entirely clear how the swerve operates. . . . It did, at all events, introduce an indeterminacy into the universe, and if soul atoms, thanks to their fineness, were more susceptible to the effects of such deviations than coarser matter, the swerve could at least represent a breach in any strict predestination of human behavior. As an attempt to escape the indeterminist implications of libertarian, ­categorical free will, Orthodox Objectivists might object that we do indeed have sufficient reasons for our actions, but that those reasons are part of and, thus, s­ imultaneous with our actions, not antecedent causes of them. Any other reasons we have prior to the action are not sufficient for the action, since we also have contrary reasons at that time. The reason that is strongest and thus sufficient for our action is not itself determined to be strongest and sufficient until the time of the action, not before. But determined by what? On this view, there is apparently nothing that determines a given motive to be the strongest, and thus sufficient for our actions. This attempt to dismiss antecedent conditions thus would merely compound the problem by viewing both the choice and the strongest motive as f­ ree-floating things. This also wipes out the distinction between a sufficient condition and an effect, by viewing the sufficient condition for an effect, the choice, as part of the effect/choice. In the process, it would also render the concept of a “sufficient condition” completely superfluous.13 It is also not widely appreciated that the Orthodox Objectivist view of ­volition is not compatible with more fundamental premises of the philosophy. In particular, there are four important premises of Objectivism, all of which logically and developmentally precede, and one of which logically contradicts, the Orthodox Objectivist claim that man’s volition consists in the ability to have acted otherwise than he did in any given situation. Premise 1: The Primacy of Existence holds that consciousness is not metaphysically active—that is, does not create or control existence—but ­ instead is epistemologically active, being man’s awareness of existence.14 Thus,

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 75

15/06/15 7:41 PM

76  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

it is absurd to speak of mind or consciousness as causing changes in reality. Instead, mind or consciousness is an attribute or power by virtue of which a human being causes changes in reality. Premise 2: Every action is the action of an entity, not of an action, nor of an attribute (such as consciousness).15 Thus, it is absurd to speak of “actions of consciousness.” Instead, these are conscious actions of entities, especially, in this context, conscious human entities. Premise 3: Causality, in the sense of efficient causation and causal efficacy, is the relation between the agent of an action, an entity, and that action, not between an attribute (such as consciousness) and an action. Although it is true that an entity’s attributes are, in Aristotle’s terms, the formal cause of its actions, being that by virtue of which the entity engages in those actions, it is the entity itself, including its physical parts—not its attributes, such as consciousness— that is the (efficient) cause of its actions.16 By the same token, it is invalid to speak of processes or events or actions as causing things. It seems to be a natural tendency to slip into this Humean mode of thinking, but we should remember that regarding actions or processes or events as causes is really a form of abstraction from the entities that are the causes. Actions, processes, and events don’t cause other actions any more than attributes do. Only entities cause actions. A decision, for instance, is not an entity. Thus, our decisions do not cause our actions. A decision is my (referring to the entity now writing this ­sentence) action, a conscious action I (the entity) am taking—not an action of my ­consciousness (my attribute). It is I who decide and I who then take the action that follows that decision. It is not my decision, but my having decided (i.e., I, who have decided) that causes my subsequent action. Thus, it is absurd to speak of the “causal efficacy of consciousness,” ­considered either as a capacity or a process, as though consciousness were an entity with the power to do things, that is, to engage in efficient causation. The same applies more specifically to talk of “the mind” or “the will” as being “free” to do things or make things happen. Instead, what has freedom and causal efficacy (the power to do things) is entities, especially in this context conscious human ­entities. Just as Aristotle enjoined us, as Wedin (1994) points out, to “say not that the mind thinks, but that the person thinks in virtue of his mind” (113), so did John Locke enjoin us to speak not of the will being free, but as a person’s being free to will an action.17 Liberty, Locke said (1690 [2013]), “is not an idea belonging to volition, or preferring; but to the person doing, or forbearing to do . . .” (223). “[L]iberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power” (225). It is “the man that does the action,” Locke says: “[I]t is the agent that has power, or is able to do.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 76

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 77

For powers are relations, not agents: and that which has the power or not the power to operate, is that alone which is or is not free, and not the power itself. For freedom, or not freedom, can belong to nothing but what has or has not a power to act” (227–78). The frequently committed error of considering the will and the intellect as “real beings in the soul,” Locke says, has been the cause of “no small occasion of wrangling, obscurity, and uncertainty” (221–22). “[T]he fault has been, that faculties have been spoken of and represented as so many distinct agents” (228). Thus, insofar as Objectivists hold that mind and will are capacities of human beings (rather than entities residing within human beings), Objectivists should be Lockeans in their view of the nature of the will for the same reason that they should be Aristotelians in their view of the nature of the mind. They should not speak of the mind and will as doing things such as thinking and choosing, but instead as the powers of human beings to do those things. Premise 4: “Cause and effect … is a universal law of reality. Every action has a cause (the cause is the nature of the entity which acts); and the same cause leads to the same effect (the same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action).”18 This means that human beings will also, under the same circumstances, perform the same action. And why will they do so? Because that is the nature of cause and effect as a universal law of reality. Humans are not exempt from cause and effect, despite our prodigious powers of reason, self-awareness, and deliberate control of our reason, self-awareness, and actions. Thus, it is absurd to say, without qualification, that a human being “could have done otherwise” than he did in a given situation. By the nature of cause and effect, a given action and only that action must be performed in a given situation, even in a rational, volitional human situation. It is sometimes objected that while the Law of Causality says that if the ­circumstances could be identical, the actions would be the same, there is never a case where external circumstances actually are identical. The real point of the Law of Causality, however, is not that the “same circumstances” determine the “same action”—this is a schema that we use to good benefit in physics, taking circumstances to be relevantly the same—but that any given circumstance ­determines one and only one action. In assessing human choice and action, we must employ this latter form of the Law of Causality, or else we will run aground on the rocks of the subtleties and complexities of human psychology (values) and physiology. We might make some good guesses, observing another’s choices from “the outside,” but when a person’s “value-conflicts” are not entirely known to us, we cannot really know the circumstances of his choice in their entirety. Thus, we have to fall back on the Law of Causality telling us that a person chose as he did because of the given circumstances, including, of course, his

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 77

15/06/15 7:41 PM

78  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

strongest operative motivation or “strongest occurrent desire” (Irwin 1988, 341) in that situation. His choices and actions—his actually deciding, and i­nitiating actions, to gain and/or keep things—are the strongest evidence we have of his actual values, as against his espoused, purported “values,” which he may or may not actually seek to gain and/or keep, however vociferously or fervently he ­proclaims them.19 These four crucial Objectivist metaphysical premises together logically rule out the kind of “free will” that most Objectivists believe in, the “could have done otherwise, period” brand of volition. Thus, as I argue here, in contrast to the presently accepted, Orthodox Objectivist model of indeterministic, categorical freedom of choice, volition must instead be understood as value-determined, conditional freedom of choice. Neither can the Orthodox Objectivist view of free will be rescued from ­indeterminism by pointing to human agency—that is, the fact that human beings cause their actions. Of course, they do. But by virtue of what and, ­especially, in consequence of what, do they engage in one action rather than another? What determines that they will do X rather than Y? Nothing, according to Peikoff and other Orthodox Objectivists. Assuming that one has the power to do either X or Y, and assuming that nothing would prevent one from doing either X or Y, then one either does X, or one does Y—for no reason. (There is no “why.”) Agent Causation as Conditional Free Will and Value-Determinism Hence, it follows that some form of determinism must be true—but not environmental or genetic determinism.20 Instead, what is implied by basic Objectivist metaphysical premises is “self-determinism,” the view that one’s actions (including the act of focusing one’s awareness) are ­determined by one’s “values,” ­preferences, desires, and ideas. For short, I call this “value-determinism.”21 Value-determinism does not qualify as “free will” in the sense of “could have done otherwise, period,” but that view of free will is not valid, anyway. It does, however, qualify as “free will” in the sense of one’s being the originator of that action, absent environmental duress and physical or medical impairment. One’s capacity to will to do something is free of control by anything other than one’s own values. Conditional free will is thus compatible with determinism of a kind that does not require predeterminism or fatalism, and that does not preclude knowledge and correction of error. Now, some may object to my attributing “could have done otherwise, period” or “could have done otherwise, just because” to the canonical Objectivist view of free will, because the word “period” and the phrase “just because” appear nowhere in the orthodox arguments or characterizations of free will. But this

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 78

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 79

attribution of “could have done otherwise, just because” to Rand and Peikoff is no more an invention than referring to Kant’s moral prescriptions in the form: “ought to do something, period.” It is just a way of stating the ­categorical (rather than conditional) nature of Rand’s and Peikoff ’s view of volition and ­underscoring the essential similarity of the latter to Kant’s view of ethical imperatives. To put it another way: when you assert that you could have done otherwise than you did, and you assert that that ability is not conditioned upon your ­actually “valuing” doing (i.e., preferring to do) otherwise than you did, but simply upon the ability to make an arbitrary (there is no “why”), undetermined choice to do other than you in fact did, then you are advocating the categorical volition model. Peikoff (1976), with Rand’s approval, openly stated this view of volition, when he said that the choice to focus “is a first cause within a consciousness which cannot be reduced to or explained by anything earlier or more f­undamental,” and that “you cannot try to explain the choice to focus in terms of a person’s values or ideas” (lecture 3). In other words, Peikoff says, nothing determines whether you are going to focus or not—which, logically, has to exclude even your “valuing” (or preferring) to focus more than to not focus. (There is no “why.”) This is nonsense. Focusing is not an arbitrary act. Focusing is motivated and determined by one’s “valuing” it more than (i.e., desiring it more than, or ­preferring it to) not focusing. If, in a given situation, one “values” (prefers) ­focusing more than not focusing—and one is not incapacitated by disease, injury, or c­ oercion—then one will (and must) focus. Peikoff himself acknowledges this point when, in the same lecture, he answers his own question, “Why would a person evade?,” by saying, “Obviously, because he chooses to place some consideration above grasping truth, above his p ­ erception of reality . . . a feeling of some kind . . . [some fact which] seems threatening to him [and which he doesn’t want] to be true, so he decides to blank it out, to follow the feeling as against the facts.” But what that is this, if not “explain[ing] the choice to focus in terms of a person’s values or ideas”? And if one’s choice, including the choice to focus or not, is made in terms of one’s “values”, then one’s “values” become the reasons for one’s choice. But note: it is not one’s value qua pursued object in the world that is the reason for one’s choosing to pursue it, but one’s “value” qua the strongest one of one’s desires and preferences. Peikoff attempts to sidestep this simple truth of value-determinism by saying that “the inviolable essence of your choice is: what kind of reason moves you? The reality-orientation or the out-of-focus, anti-effort drift? . . . Man’s choices . . . do have reasons [and] his choices are free, because he chose

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 79

15/06/15 7:41 PM

80  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

the reasons.” Granted, he chose some reason or other, even if only by default. But why did he choose one reason rather than the other? Peikoff offers no ­explanation. (There is no “why.”) He just chose it—and he could have chosen something else, for no a­ pparent reason. Again, such a model of human choice, while it seems to p ­ reserve human agency—the individual human being as the “decider”—actually portrays the human agent as an acausal being, ­miraculously and unaccountably doing one thing rather than another. Contra Peikoff, to ask “what motivates a given choice?” is not to betray belief in a reductive materialist framework, in which something apart from a person had to have motivated that person’s choice and that the individual person cannot be a cause of it. We pursue and thus actually value one goal rather than another, because we “value” (prefer or desire) it more highly than the other. The internal mechanism by which that choice is made is not (fully) understood, but there must be one, and it must be part of our nature as living, conscious, ­choosing beings, or that choice is arbitrary and causeless. It may seem like a proof by definition to equate one’s highest or strongest preference or desire (“value,” in the secondary sense) with what one ends up choosing (“value,” in the primary sense). However, this is because, whatever the physiological mechanism that drives one’s choices, we are in the presence of an axiom of human action. In a critique of psychological egoism, Nathaniel Branden (1962) tellingly said that it is a “truism—a tautology—that all purposeful behavior is m ­ otivated” (70), and we always in some sense “want” to do what we do: “Obviously, in order to act, one has to be moved by some personal motive; one has to ‘want,’ in some sense, to perform the action” (68).22 Well, if this is true—and I’m sure that it is—then how can we escape the conclusion that what you did in any given s­ ituation is what you most wanted to do? Not what you “would like to have done, if things had been different,” but what you did want to do, given the way things were. Accounting for the value-preference that translates into an actual choice and action is thus really quite simple. If, for instance, the reason that we “value” (prefer) one goal more highly than another is because we first engaged in a process of seeking truth about which goal was better to pursue then it is also true that we engaged in that truth-seeking process because we already “valued” ­(preferred) seeking the truth in regard to that matter more highly than not doing so! Or, in the focusing example, what else is there, beyond my “values” ­(preferences) of the consequences of focusing or not focusing, to determine my choice of whether or not to focus? In the absence of coercion, I can and must choose to obtain that which I most strongly “value” (prefer), whether focusing or not. How in the world could anyone escape this necessity? It is an ­inescapable axiom of human action.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 80

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 81

Even in the extreme case where you capriciously decide to choose something other than what you most want (in order, perhaps, to prove a point of some kind)—whether focusing, pursuing a career or romantic partner, or buying a vanilla ice cream cone—you are doing so on the basis that, at least in this instance, you want to choose capriciously and contrary to your p ­ references more than you want to choose in keeping with your preferences. In such a case, the desire to make a capricious choice is the “value” (preference) that d ­ etermines your higher-level choice of how to choose; it is how you prefer choosing in that particular time and situation. However, not all actual values are chosen by either caprice or a process of rational deliberation. Some of them are instead things that we are biologically wired to pursue, and our nervous systems readily facilitate our choosing to pursue them, if upbringing and circumstance have not beaten them out of us. Seeking to understand (rather than to evade) is one of those wired-in values. So, some of the things that we choose are the result of natural human drives, rather than a deliberative process. The “initial cause in play,” the “first cause” in human choice and value are those kind of choices and values, which stem from earliest childhood—not the arbitrary choice to focus “just because” (for no reason, motivation, preference, value, etc.). Nor does any of this present a difficulty for the status of morality on the ­perspective of value-determinism. It is still the human being choosing and acting, and he is doing so by the simultaneous constraint and empowerment of his highest “values” (preferences), which are parts of his body.23 Moral responsibility would certainly be more plausible and palatable, and freedom and autonomy more intensely experienced, for choices that are constrained and empowered by one’s strongest (operative) preference, than for actions ­determined by an unmotivated, arbitrary “choice.” Now, in arguing against the idea that “nothing made me focus, I just did it,” nowhere have I denied agent causation. In fact, what I am saying is that ­value-determinism is how agent causation works! It’s how agency (human ­efficient causation) gets off the ground, without one’s having to engage in an unexplainable, arbitrary leap, divorced from one’s identity and the identity of the existing conditions under which one chooses and acts.24 Value-determinism, while primarily the internal aspect of the material causation of a entity’s actions, is also a form of efficient causation, in which our “values” (­ preferences) are actually lower-level entities stored in our brains and ­nervous ­systems. The interaction between these “value” entities and ­various other regions in our brains results in the “value” of greatest intensity emerging as the “chosen value.” This “value” i­nteraction ­determines not only the choice our brains-minds make, but also the s­ ubsequent action we take in pursuit of the object of that “chosen value.” We are so constructed ­biologically that we must act

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 81

15/06/15 7:41 PM

82  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

according to the stored or held “value” that emerges as the strongest preference in a given situation. That ­preference is the internal cause of that particular choice and action, and the object of that preference becomes the end of that action. One’s strongest preference (desire, “value”) is that preference stored as, or active as, a physical subentity within the brain, and it is the d ­ etermining ­antecedent condition that determines a person to pursue the object of that ­preference, rather than some other. The decisive influence of that strongest preference ­(subentity) is how we are moved to enact efficient causation and to choose to pursue the object of that preference—and our choosing to pursue that object of preference is how we enact efficient causation and make ourselves act to pursue the object of that preference. It is precisely when self-determinism or agent-causation is divorced from value-determinism, however—that is, when it is conceived in some manner other than choice necessitated by our strongest occurrent ­operative or ­preference—that models of agent-causation start to take on a “mystical” and “spooky” odor. How else are we to interpret someone’s saying: “Nothing made me focus, no dominant value or motive or desire, I just decided to, just  because”?  This sounds a whole lot more like God’s arbitrary cosmic whims,  rather than something determined by one’s strongest operative preference. On this quasi-mystical perspective, you focus not because you want to be moral or to be happy, or because you desire it more than being unfocused, or for any reason—but simply: just because you choose to, just as a blind, arbitrary choice. This can’t be anything worthy of the name Objectivism. Yet, this is what we have been told by Rand and Peikoff since the 1970s. If we are to demystify volition, we must not view it, with the Orthodox Objectivists, as just “I could have done otherwise than I did, period,” but instead as “I could have done otherwise than I did, if I had wanted to.” In other words, we must reject Rand’s (and Peikoff ’s) categorical model of volition, and instead adopt a conditional model of volition. This is so for much the same reasons that we follow Rand in rejecting Kant’s categorical model of ethics (you should do such and such, just because), and affirm instead her conditional model of ethics (you should do such and such, if you want such and such a result). As Rand (1970) expressed her view of moral necessity: “Reality confronts man with a great many ‘musts,’ but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: ‘You must, if—’ and the ‘if ’ stands for man’s choice: ‘—if you want to achieve a certain goal’” (118–19). In fact, Rand’s conditional model of ethics gives us an insight into what ought to have been her model of free will. She took the ethical stance that we ought to attend to the world with our minds, and clearly she believed this to be a matter of choice, since “ought” implies “can.”

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 82

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 83

The fuller statement of Rand’s position, however, was not the categorical, Kantian, intrinsicist view that “we ought to attend to the world with our minds, period.” Instead, it was the quintessentially Aristotelian-Randian, conditional, objective view that “we ought to attend to the world with our minds, if we want to live successfully (be happy, etc.).” If we more strongly desire to live successfully, and so on, than to do s­ omething else, and we understand that doing so requires that we attend to the world with our minds, and that we can freely do so, then—barring disease, coercion, and so on—we will do so. That is the respect in which our free choice to focus is ­determined by our values (and our understanding). We should, to put it simply, try to consistently eschew the quasi-religious “just because, period” approach to both the nature of ethics and the nature of ­volition. “Should” and “could” are both rooted conditionally in a basic fact, whether you label it “value,” “desire,” “want,” “preference,” “interest,” ­“motivation,” and so on. “Should do—if you want . . .” “Could have done—if you had wanted . . .” Those are the respective fundamental facts of human nature with which the debates over value and choice should begin. Volition as Conditionally, Not Radically, Contingent The foregoing explains why I regard volition as being compatible with ­determinism, and more particularly why I am a compatibilist (or what some would call a “soft determinist”). In saying this, I am emphatically not trying to claim that the Orthodox Objectivist, categorical type of volition—being a form of indeterminism—is somehow compatible with compatibilism (let alone with hard determinism). My approach is precisely not to try to fit the round peg of Objectivist or ­“libertarian” categorical volition into the square hole of determinism of any form. Instead, I very specifically equate conditional volition with v­ alue-determinism, which fit together hand in glove as the way in which people operate as selfdetermining beings. I understand that many people do not see how ethics is possible without categorical free will, and believe that “freedom to choose, just because” is a necessary condition of ethics. But if there is not some personal “value” actually determining one’s choice in a given context, then one’s choice is arbitrary and thus devoid of moral worth. I hasten to say that I, too, see ethics, as does Rand, as a “code of values to guide man’s choices and actions” (1961, 13). But it’s important to clarify that she is not using the term “value” here in the same sense in which she does two pages later in her essay, “The Objectivist Ethics”: “that which one acts to gain

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 83

15/06/15 7:41 PM

84  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

and/or keep” (15)—that is, not as a set of things one actually pursues. In order to actually pursue the items so codified, one would necessarily be attracted to them, to be sure, but not guided in any relevant ethical sense. Thus, it’s clear that, by “code of values,” Rand means not the constellation of things that one actually pursues in life, but instead a group of preferences, a set of espoused values, things one desires and resolves or commits to pursuing, because they meet some criterion of what one considers to be good for oneself. These “values,” as retained in memory and activated in one’s consideration of alternative actions, are things that are ranked on a more or less stable order of importance and priority, and that one has decided one should act to gain and/ or keep, but that, in some or even most cases, one has not actually acted to gain and/or keep. For Rand, holding an ethics of survival as a rational being, one’s set of affirmed preferences is tied fundamentally to the necessary conditions for one’s living and being happy—that is, what one must do if one wants to live ­successfully and be happy. The “if ” has primacy here. If you didn’t want those things, where would be the motivating power behind the “ought” or “should”? In particular, given that focusing your mind rather than evading is necessary to your well-being and happiness, if you didn’t want to be well and happy, what would motivate you to focus your mind, rather than to evade? That is why I reject both Kantian categorical ethics and Randian ­categorical volition. It is also why I further believe that Randian ­categorical volition implies Kantian categorical ethics, and that Rand’s and Peikoff ’s flawed view of ­volition as categorical undercuts their correct view of ethics as conditional. “Could have done otherwise, period,” is mystical as construed by Rand and Peikoff. It is categorical volition, which is tantamount to unexplained whim. The parallel to Kant’s mystical, intrinsicist categorical view of ethics is i­ nescapable— and the antidote is the same as Rand’s this-worldly, objective, conditional view of ethics. In other words, I am arguing that Objectivism should properly embrace ­conditional volition, “could have done otherwise, if I had desired and chosen differently than I did.” The same applies to any claim for free will that seeks to escape the pitfall of indeterminism and the arbitrary by substituting an agent’s bare “act of initiative,”25 in place of “period” or “just because.” Such free-floating acts are simply miraculous—that is, impossible. The impossibility of free-floating, uncaused acts of volition is just a ­special case of the impossibility of free-floating, uncaused acts in general. All action, while necessarily determined by the nature of the entity that acts, is also ­contingent, in the respect of being dependent upon and determined by the existing conditions within which that entity acts.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 84

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 85

For instance, suppose that I have a pan of water at sea level. Given that ­condition, I know that the water will boil if I heat it to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. However, I also know that if I take it into a higher elevation, say, Pikes Peak, Colorado, it will boil at a lower temperature, due to the lower air pressure there having a different effect on water’s response to being heated than does the higher air pressure at sea level. Prior to being heated, the water has those two and many other potential boiling points, depending on the air pressure prevailing at the time and location of heating the water. Water’s boiling point is thus a contingent, conditional fact. Although it must be a certain temperature under certain specific conditions, it may be a different temperature under other specific conditions. Thus, water’s boiling point, while necessarily specific under any given ­conditions, is contingent or open-ended when conditions are not specified— and it is contingent precisely in the sense that it could-have-been otherwise, if ­conditions had been different than they were. Water must have some boiling point, but may have any boiling point within the range of possible physical conditions including atmospheric pressure that may prevail at a specific time. It must be 212 degrees Fahrenheit under some conditions, but may have other boiling points under other conditions. It was 212 degrees under some condition, but could have been otherwise, had certain other causal conditions been fulfilled instead of the ones that were. The same is true for more general physical laws such as Newton’s First Law of Motion, which states that an object not subjected to an outside force will continue in its current state of rest or uniform motion. In other words, its state of motion is necessarily specific and constant under any condition in which no outside force is applied to it, but the velocity, duration, and constancy of that motion are contingent or open-ended in relation to any outside forces that have been applied—and it is contingent precisely in the sense that it couldhave-been otherwise, if some outside force had been applied other than the one that was. These are examples of the causal nature of “contingency,” which is consistent with the identity of the existing entities actions involved. It is also, to be more exact, conditional contingency. Something could have been otherwise than it was, had certain other causal conditions been fulfilled, instead of the ones which were. In contrast, the concept of “contingency,” used both in theology and (strangely) in Objectivism, refers to that which could have been otherwise for no reason, other than someone’s wish or arbitrary, uncaused, unmotivated ­decision. This is not conditional, but “radical” or categorical contingency. In theology, the claim is made that, for no reason at all, God could have decided not to create the physical universe. The existence of the presently ­existing physical universe is thus not the result of certain causal factors having generated it from something previously existing, nor even the result of God’s

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 85

15/06/15 7:41 PM

86  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

desire to be creative or to indulge His curiosity in finding out what would happen in a physical realm that He initiated, but simply because God willed it and continues to will it. It literally did not, and does not, have to exist, period. Similarly, Orthodox Objectivism characterizes free will as an uncaused choice to think or not think. This is not a motivated choice, but instead a choice that is not made for any reason. A person chooses to think simply because he decides to, because he wills it, period. Whether in the supernatural form pertaining to the creation of the cosmos for no reason, or the secular form pertaining to the choice of thinking for no reason, this is radical, categorical contingency, in the same sense of “categorical” as Kant’s categorical imperatives in ethics. Nothing made God create or sustain the world, and nothing makes man choose to or continue to think. Peikoff (1967, 110) rightly rejects the radical contingency of existence (the world could not have existed, for no reason), as well as the radical contingency of identity (things could have been other than they are, for no reason). He fails, however, to realize that the same objections apply to the radical contingency of human choice (a person could have chosen other than he did, for no reason). The root reason for this failure, I believe, is his failure to realize that c­ ontingency is causal and conditional. As a result, Orthodox Objectivists paradoxically treat contingency too ­stringently when it comes to cosmic events, but too loosely in regard to human choice. In fact, they hold that contingency applies only to human choice. Cosmic events could not have been otherwise, they say, suggesting that this rules out radical contingency in the physical world. But as I have illustrated, while cosmic events could not have been otherwise, given the existing c­ onditions, they could have been otherwise, had conditions been different. This is the heart of causality and of our understanding of it, including the fact underlying the validity of the scientific method and Mill’s Laws of Induction. But causal necessity and causal contingency are both conditional, as illustrated in Figure 1 (on page 87). The corollary of causal necessity based on identity is conditional causal contingency, also based on identity. Contingency, being a corollary of causal necessity, is thus not radical and causeless, but conditional upon causal factors, in the absence of which a given action would not have taken place. Human events could have been otherwise, Orthodox Objectivists claim, because nothing made you choose to think instead of making you choose not to think. You just decided to think, for no reason. In fact, however, you could only have chosen to think (rather than not think), if you had valued thinking more than not thinking, at that point in time. That is, one’s choice to think is not free-floating, arbitrary, and radically contingent, but conditional—and thus its contingency, one’s ability to have chosen otherwise, is also conditional.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 86

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 87

Positive

Negative

Given the conditions

Necessity—X must be the case; it is necessarily the case

Impossibility—X cannot (must not) be the case; it is necessarily not the case

Not given the conditions (i.e., if the conditions were different)

Possibility—X can (might) be the case; it is not necessarily not the case

Non-necessity (contingency)—X might not be the case; it is not necessarily the case

Figure 1.  A metaphysical tetrachotomy relating to necessity and possibility.

Agent Causation and Value-Determinism Instead of being mired in futile puzzlement over how free-floating choices might be possible and real, or being sidetracked by straw man warnings about falling prey to materialistic premises, let’s simply ask: what motivates an “agent’s act of initiative”? Isn’t it the fact that, when he exercised a specific act of initiative, despite whatever official, professed “values” (preferences) he might have espoused, he actually “valued” doing (i.e., desired to do) what he did more than what he didn’t do? How could initiative not be compatible with value-determinism? Our evaluations and the preferences and desires that flow from them— which often shift in relative weighting to one another—are the only ­possible cause of, and explanation for, our choices of action and our e­xercise of ­initiative. ­Agent-causation operates by means of compatibilist, or ­conditional, free will, where one “does what one does because one wanted to, but could have done ­ otherwise if one had wanted to.” This is value-determinism. As a  ­value-determined agent, one does do what one most wants to do (i.e., “values”)—and as a value-determined agent, one will do what one most wants to do. Similarly, as a conditionally free agent, one does do otherwise than one would have in a given situation, if one prefers to do otherwise—and as a conditionally free agent, one can do otherwise than one would have done in a given situation, if one prefers to do otherwise. Similarly, as an antecedently conditioned agent, one does do what is ­determined by one’s preexisting knowledge and values—and as an ­antecedently conditioned agent, one must do what is determined by one’s preexisting ­knowledge and values.26 Thus, agent-causation, value-determinism, conditional free will, and ­antecedent conditioning all work together, seamlessly and inseparably.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 87

15/06/15 7:41 PM

88  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

This compatibility between a form of free will and a form of d ­ eterminism ­suggests that the intractability of the age-old controversy between ­determinism and “libertarian free will” is due, at least in part, to a false alternative. Actually, though, the situation is even more complicated, because there has been another false alternative prevalent in discussions of the nature of mind and will: ­determinism and indeterminism—the former holding that ­antecedent ­conditions determine our actions, the latter that they do not. These two  options are not mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive of the ­possibilities, because they both hold that we do not cause our actions. Thus, as shown by the ­tetrachotomy in Figure 2,27 they leave out two other p ­ ossibilities: ­libertarian free will (the ­official, canonical Objectivist position) and ­compatibilism (the view ­consistent with the thesis of this essay).28 From an Objectivist-Aristotelian standpoint, which steadfastly affirms  that human beings, like all entities, are the causes of their actions, Hard  Determinism and Hard Indeterminism (the two views shown on the right side of Figure 2) are false on the face of it. The only ­question remaining is: do a­ntecedent ­ ­ conditions determine our actions, or not? That is, do a­ ntecedent ­conditions  ­necessitate  the  actions  that we cause, or not? And more s­pecifically, does our most strongly “valuing” (­desiring to take)  an  action,  in  a  given  ­context,  necessitate that we will take that action, or not? We cause our actions (agent causation)

We do not cause our actions

Antecedent conditions determine our actions (material causation)

We cause our actions, but antecedent conditions (including values) determine them → Soft Determinism aka Compatibilism aka conditional free will

Antecedent conditions determine our actions, but we do not cause our actions → Hard Determinism

Antecedent conditions do not determine our actions

We cause our actions, and antecedent conditions do not determine our actions → Libertarian free will or Soft Indeterminism (official Objectivist position)

We do not cause our actions, and antecedent conditions do not determine our actions → Hard Indeterminism

Figure 2.  What role do agent causation and determination by antecedent conditions play in human action?

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 88

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 89

As noted above, the official Orthodox Objectivist position is that ­nothing necessitates our taking a given action. More specifically, since the ­fundamental act of free will is choosing to focus our awareness or not, ­nothing necessitates our choosing to focus, rather than not to focus. (There is no “why.”) Entertaining the view that our motives are not distinct from and temporally prior to our actions, but instead are part of our choosing that action, does not allow us to escape this dilemma. If your motivation for a choice, or your most strongly desiring something at the time you choose to pursue it, actually is the choice, then what motivates the choice? Nothing! This is illogical. However close in proximity a cause may be to its effect, it cannot be its effect. They cannot be simply the same thing (or two aspects of the same thing), if there is to be an ontological distinction between cause and effect. Furthermore, a motive, or moving factor, is more than simply one’s ­capacity to move oneself to act. It is that which moves one to act. As such, it must be an actual physical and physically interacting part of oneself, not merely an ­attribute (capacity). A motive is a part of oneself that one may be directly aware of ­introspectively, but which is also a material part of the brain, not a ­metaphysically distinct, immaterial, spiritual entity. Conclusion The implication of the Orthodox Objectivist view, as we have seen, is that our choices are not based on identity, either our own identity or the identity of ­antecedent conditions in the world, and thus that our choices are uncaused. They just happen. This implies that the official Objectivist position (libertarian, categorical free will) actually amounts to an odd form of Agency-Indeterminism and is thus false. This further implies that the view advocated by this essay, compatibilist, conditional free will and value-determinism, must be true. Value-determinism means that an agent must do what he most wants to do in a given situation and at a given time. Given the existing array of wants at the time of his decision and action, he could not have done otherwise than he did. However, absent duress or physical incapacitation, value-determinism is ­necessarily linked with conditional freedom. An agent could have done ­differently than he did, if he had wanted to do so more than he wanted to do what he actually did. This fundamental, necessary linkage of value-determinism and ­conditional volition is a basic axiom of human choice and action. It is consistent with the core metaphysical premises of Objectivism, whereas the Orthodox Objectivist

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 89

15/06/15 7:41 PM

90  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

model of volition is not. It is past time to recognize the latter for the ­illogical, quasi-religious dogma that it is and to purge it from the philosophy of Objectivism. Notes

1. One searches in vain, however, for any indication in Rand’s own ­summaries of Object­ ivism that she regarded volition as part of the essence of her philosophy—either in her end notes to Atlas Shrugged, or in her impromptu remarks to the press preceding its publication, or in her 1962 column in the Los Angeles Times. Yet, the Objectivist view of volition has been vigorously promoted for decades as a litmus test for one’s q ­ ualification to be an Objectivist. 2. Or a “corollary,” which Peikoff defines as “a self-evident implication of already established knowledge” (1991, 15). Although he sharply distinguishes corollaries ­ from axioms, one page after unequivocally stating that “[t]he principle of volition is a ­philosophic axiom,” Peikoff then makes the curious statement that “[v]olition, ­accordingly, is not an independent philosophic principle, but a corollary of the axiom of consciousness” (71). He also unaccountably waffles in consistently applying this ­distinction to the issue of the validity of the senses; in the space of three paragraphs on the same page, he states first that “[t]he validity of the senses is an axiom,” and then ­that “[t]he validity of the senses is not an independent axiom; it is a corollary of the fact of consciousness” (1991, 39). Perhaps we are to conclude that corollaries are dependent axioms—an awkward locution, to be sure, but the only apparent way to salvage what otherwise seems to be little more than careless double-talk. 3. Numerous other important issues implied by the logical harmony of determinism and volition are beyond the scope of this essay. For instance, if determinism plays a role in human action, how does this affect our understanding of the making of “sacrifices,” in the Randian sense of giving up a “higher value” for a “lower value”? Similarly, how are we to properly understand the idea of having “betrayed” one’s values, if we (in some sense) have to make the choices we do, and (in some sense) cannot avoid choosing that which we most value at that point in time? These questions will be taken up in a sequel to this essay. Second, there are a number of other serious issues, such as autonomy, morality, and knowing itself, not to be passed over lightly or dismissed by any model of human choice and action that purports to adequately describe human mind and will. For instance, if determinism is an essential aspect of human choice and action, doesn’t this rule out moral responsibility, as well as any moral justification for credit and blame, reward and punishment? Doesn’t this negate the rationale and even the need for ­individual rights and liberty? More fundamentally, if determinism is an essential part of human choice and action, doesn’t this fatally affect the possibility of human knowledge, as Branden ([1969] 2001, 49–52) has argued? Although I have a bit to say about the issue of responsibility in the sequel to this essay, I believe that these three vital issues have all been dealt with adequately in Dwyer 2001 and Dwyer 2002. For extended discussions that present an opposing, Orthodox Objectivist perspective, see Peikoff 1991, Branden 2009, and Machan 2000. 4. From Aristotle’s point of view, Graham (1987) says, “all previous philosophies embody partial or one-sided views of reality because they have comprehended only a

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 90

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 91

subset of the kinds of causes” (78). In contrast, an Aristotelian Four Cause analysis is very dialectical and comprehensive, for it focuses on both the structural and the temporal aspects of a totality. In dialectics, those aspects, Sciabarra notes (2000), “are understood systemically—that is, according to their spatial, or synchronic, i­nterconnections—and dynamically—that is, according to their temporal, or diachronic, i­ nterconnections” (173). Specifically with regard to the Four Causes, a “synchronic” analysis focuses on the formal and material causes, which are the systemic factors in all change; and a “­diachronic” analysis deals with the dynamic factors: the efficient and final causes (173). The power of this method, Graham further notes, is that “[i]t does not leave out any relevant ­questions concerning the matter at hand (169). . . . Since a cause is by definition an answer to the question Why, [Four Cause Theory] provides a systematic closure to any inquiry. Once the relevant questions have been posed and answered properly, there is no more to inquire about” (170). 5. Limitations of space prevent me from making extensive comments on the view of free will presented in Binswanger 2014, but I do want to call the reader’s ­attention to the fact that he apparently finds determination by antecedent conditions, or ­necessity, ­objectionable, stating that he “might be in disagreement with Rand’s view of ­causality, since [he sees] it as involving what an entity can do, and some of her statements are phrased in terms of what an entity will do” (348). He does not provide any citations that directly support this claim, and a perusal of his entries under “causality” (in Binswanger 1986, 64–65) fails to reveal any such statements by Rand herself either. The only statement by Rand that Binswanger cites or quotes (Rand 1957, 1037) makes no mention or indication of either “can” or “will.” There are examples that indirectly support Binswanger’s claim—for instance, in Peikoff 1991: “In any given set of c­ ircumstances, therefore, there is only one action possible to an entity, the action expressive of its ­identity. This is the action it will take, the action that is caused and necessitated by its nature” (14; first emphasis added, second in original); and: “[T]he same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action” (15; emphasis added). Though these statements connecting agency (efficient causation) to necessity (determination by ­antecedent conditions) occur nearly a decade after Rand passed away and was no longer able to give her official approval as representing her philosophical views, the second statement is verbatim, and the first nearly so, from Peikoff 1976 (lecture 2): “In any given set of circumstances, there is only one action the entity can take, the action ­expressive of its identity. This is the action it will and must take, the only possibility open to it. This is the action it is caused and necessitated to take.” It could thus be argued that ­disagreement with these statements by Peikoff amounts to being “in disagreement with Rand’s view of causality.” More problematic is Branden’s statement (1966) that “[j]ust as what a thing can do, depends on what it is—so, in any specific situations, what a thing will do, depends on what it is” (57; emphasis in original). His statement passed the editorial and philosophical scrutiny of his then-mentor and publishing partner, and (despite his being persona non grata moving forward from 1968) was firmly entrenched among “the only authentic sources of information on Objectivism” (Rand 1968, 7). This source includes both Binswanger’s preferred “can do” aspect of causality, as well as the “will do” aspect that he rejects; that is, both possibility and necessity (in A ­ ristotelian terms, formal and material causation) as necessarily related to efficient causation. Binswanger, in ­failing to acknowledge it, thus misrepresents Rand as asserting only the

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 91

15/06/15 7:41 PM

92  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

latter ­connection. ­Animosity toward Rand and/or ignorance of her actual views could hardly be the likely cause of this distortion. 6. I use quote marks around “value” and phrases including that word in order to signal that I am using it not in the fundamental Randian sense of “that which one acts to gain and/or keep,” but in the frequently encountered secondary sense of a thing one prefers and desires, apart from whether one actually acts to gain and/or keep it. “Value” in the basic sense is the object of one’s action, and because it is that “for the sake of which” one acts, or that which one acts so as to gain and/or keep, this object is only a “cause” in the sense of final cause, which is not how I am using the term in the phrase “­ value-determined.” Instead, I am using “value” in another sense, also used by ­Objectivists and others, to refer to the “internal” phenomenon of desires and preferences, aka one’s “values,” which in fact are the precursors to one’s actual values, which are the things toward which one is actually and actively striving. They are the presently generated or stored past products of acts of evaluation, and “values” are experienced i­ntrospectively as an impulse or drive to engage in such action (to gain and/or keep the evaluated object) at some point in time, if and when the conditions are right, and if and when no other competing desire or ­preference is stronger. It is one of these ­objects-of-positive-evaluation which, when chosen over other such objects, then becomes an action-object and thus the final cause of one’s action. These ­objects-of-positive-evaluation might best be distinguished from values in the primary, action-object sense by c­onsidering them to be “aspirational” values, “espoused” values, “potential” values, etc.—as, variously, that which one wants to, or intends to, or hopes to, or thinks one should, or might possibly someday, etc. act to gain and/or keep, and not necessarily as that toward which one is presently so acting. Thus, in this section, I will frequently be putting quote marks around the terms “value” and “value-determinism,” and/or parenthetically clarifying with the additional term “preference” or “prefer.” Here and in the third section, I will also flag such secondary senses of “value” as “value-hierarchy” or “conflicting values,” as part of my attempt to further clarify the fundamental Randian meaning of the term “value” and to ­differentiate it from the various ambiguous, confusing ways in which the term is used in canonical Objectivist texts. 7. For this reason, Agency (“doing”) and Purpose (“will”) are also in holy m ­ etaphysical wedlock in human action. They are the diachronic couple that, together with the ­synchronic couple of Freedom and Determinism, provide a complete analysis of human choice and action. 8. It is often argued that final causation applies only to living beings, that only living organisms have natural end states, either biologically built-in or chosen, toward which their actions aim; but this is a narrower view of final causation than is helpful for ­explanatory purposes. It is a fact about hydrogen and oxygen that, in certain conditions—primarily temperature and atmospheric pressure, but also the absence of other substances that might preemptively unite with one or both of them—they have the natural tendency to unite and form water, which is thus their natural end state, in those circumstances. (In this respect, just as Rand has argued that essence is ­epistemically contextual, I am arguing here that final cause, or natural end state is physically or ­existentially contextual.) It is toward the formation of water that the interaction of hydrogen and oxygen molecules will tend in certain ­conditions, does result by their action, can occur by their nature, and, in fact, must ­culminate, by the nature of the situation in which

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 92

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 93

they coexist and, most i­mportantly, by their own specific natures as physical e­ ntities. Oderberg (2007) provides further e­ laboration: “There can be a goal (or purpose, or final cause) of a thing without that goal being one whose satisfaction does anything for the object that acts to satisfy it,” and that “conceptual space is thus left open for other kinds of teleology, of a more attenuated nature, that are not self-directed and arguably true even of non-living things” (199). This analysis of final cause thus applies not only to the values or goals that are sought by living entities, but also to the natural causal end states of inanimate physical objects and chemical elements and compounds in any given set of dynamic physical conditions. 9. I use the term “libertarian” here, not to allege any general philosophical ­connection between Objectivism and the modern political libertarian movement, which Rand and those loyal to her abhor, but to recognize the fact that, since the late eighteenth ­century, the term has been used to denote someone who believes in the doctrine of free will, which holds that human beings are free from control by fate or necessity. 10. Peikoff (1991) further elaborates this miraculous, acausal view of human choice: “The most conscientious man, though he may have every inclination to use his mind, retains the power to decide not to think further. The most anti-effort mentality, despite all his fears and inclinations, retains the power to renounce drift in favor of focus” (60;  emphasis added). “Every” and “all” leave no room for countervailing reasons to support a different choice! 11. See also Lyons 1995, 77–115. 12. As Dwyer (2002) notes, it is “only if my conclusions [which includes my choices] were determined by my character and judgment,” only if they bear a “­necessary ­connection to my identity,” would they be my conclusions. “Far from [categorical] free will’s being required for the authorship of one’s conclusions, it is in fact [soft] ­determinism [i.e., compatibilism] that is required for it” (224). 13. My thanks to an anonymous reader for raising this issue. 14. See Peikoff 1991, 19. 15. See Peikoff 1991, 15. 16. See Peikoff 1991, 16. 17. See also Aristotle 1984, I.4.408b11–14; Robinson 1989, 65. 18. See Peikoff 1991, 15; emphasis added. 19. I will have a great deal more to say about this in the sequel to this essay. 20. See Branden (1969) 2001, 47–52; and Peikoff 1991, 69–70. 21. The reader should bear in mind that when I use the term “value-determined” in quotes, I am continuing my policy of indicating that I am not using the term “value” in the fundamental sense of Rand’s definition. See also note 6. 22. Compare this to Branden’s much less pejorative expression ([1969] 2001) of the same point: “[W]hether his values are life-serving or life-negating, it is a man’s values that direct his actions. Values constitute man’s basic motivational tie to reality” (64; emphasis added). Note that Branden is using the term “values” not in the basic Randian sense of the goal of an action, but in the sense of an occurrent or stored desire or preference, something one has decided to pursue, if and when the conditions are right, and no other competing preference is stronger: “[A value] is that which one regards as conducive to one’s welfare” (63), and: “If a man regards a thing (a person, an object, an event, a mental state, etc.) as good for him, as beneficial in some way, he values it—and when possible

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 93

15/06/15 7:41 PM

94  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

and appropriate, seeks to acquire, retain, and use or enjoy it” (64; emphasis in original). See also note 6. 23. As Binswanger (2014) notes, “All mental content including concepts is stored in the nervous system in physical form” (174; emphasis in original). Such mental content specifically includes “values” or “desires,” preferences, and interests, various things that one wants to attain in a given context. It’s also important to add that ideas, thoughts, etc., also occur in the nervous system in physical form—that “in physical form” means: as or by entities. A thought qua occurrent “phenomenon” is the action of a group or ­network of neurons—in other words, a unified set of entities comprising part of the brain or ­nervous system; and qua stored phenomenon, a thought is a set of neurons with a retained action potential. In each case, though—occurrent or stored—a thought is the form in which we are aware, introspectively or through inference, of our brain as an entity carrying out or able to carry out conscious, intellectual, and evaluative processes. What is engaging in causal activity, however, is not the activity or process itself, the thinking. Instead, it is the thinking brain, via certain physical parts or subparts, which carries out a process of thinking or preferring or choosing. So, our motives or “values” really are contending within us for dominance, and one of them wins when we make a choice (see Ainslie 2001, esp. 39–44 and 61–64). “Value-conflicts” and “weighing of values” actually do involve a physical struggle between parts of ourselves, a struggle that we are aware of introspectively (at least, sometimes) as a clash of desires, motives, or “values.” In this respect, our thoughts and motives actually do have causal efficacy—not, however, as immaterial entities cohabiting with our brains, nor as attributes per se, but as real, material entities—just as do memories, which are also stored as neural structures in the brain. The working out of the causal relationships between the various items of knowledge and preference—things I knew and cared about five minutes or five days ago—eventually results in some desired end emerging as the one that I care most about now, at the point of choice and action. It is in that respect that my present (physically occurrent) and preexisting (physically stored) knowledge and preferences determine my actions now, because they determine what I know and prefer now, what I most strongly care about now, which in turn is the efficient cause that determines my actions now. So, since the complete working out of the relative strength of one’s desires can involve ­present thinking and evaluating as well as accumulated knowledge and ­preferences from the past, and that working out is sufficient to determine what one in fact most wants in a given situation, it should be clear that these antecedent conditions, as material cause, determine what one must do in all cases, including cases of rational (i.e., rationally ­considered and justified) desire. 24. An agent or self, in Branden’s words (1983) is “the totality of those mental ­characteristics, abilities, processes, beliefs, values, and attitudes that I may or may not consciously recognize as mine” (29). People can and do have mixed premises, mixed values, and thus less-than-integrated selves, making it frequently difficult to a­ scertain exactly what are their “basic motivating values.” So, it’s probably most accurate to say that one’s (conscious) self is one’s conscious mind-brain and its constellation of active and stored “values” (preferences, desires). Since a human being’s actions are ­determined by his strongest “values”—and not necessarily his espoused “values”—it is only the latter than he can act in conflict with or betray. So, this should make it clear that ­value-determinism does not mean “espoused value-determinism.” If it were, then people committed to rationality would never commit a breach of morality!

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 94

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Where There’s a Will, There’s a “Why”  |  Bissell 95

25. See, for instance, Machan 2000. 26. Now, to say that preexisting knowledge and values jointly determine one’s actions means neither that knowledge and values are free-floating spiritual entities somehow connected to the brain, nor that they are simply attributes (powers) of the brain. Instead, knowledge and values are products of our exercise of the mental and volitional attributes or powers of our brains and, as products, they exist as parts of our brains, i.e., as material entities or parts of entities within our brains or nervous system, actual physical things in our brains that we are aware of introspectively in the form of thoughts and motives. We are aware of them as what can or does move us to act in the way that we do. See also note 21. 27. See Harding 2013 for a similar figure that was originally posted to Wikimedia Commons by an anonymous person identified only as “Tesseract2.” 28. A similar fourfold distinction is made in Register 2001, which contrasts “hard determinism,” “simple indeterminism,” and “libertarian free will,” with “compatibilism, or soft determinism,” the latter being characterized as “the claim that we are free, and also determined. . . . Just as having a mind is consistent with being a body, being free is consistent with being governed by causal law” (72). Register states that “[t]here are at least four positions to take on the freedom of the will” (72), though there are more than these four only if an additional premise is added to the two dichotomies that produce that fourfold ­distinction in Register’s and my discussions.

References

Ainslie, George. 2001. Breakdown of Will. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle. 1984. De Anima. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Revised Oxford ­translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Binswanger, Harry. 1986. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. New York: New American Library. ———. 1991. Volition as Cognitive Self-Regulation. Oceanside, California: Second ­Renaissance Books. ———. 2014. How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation. New York: TOF Publications. Bissell, Roger E. 2008. Mind, introspection, and “the objective.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 10, no. 1 (Fall): 3–84. Branden, Nathaniel. 1962. Isn’t everyone selfish? In Rand 1964, 66–70. ———. 1966. Volition and the law of causality. In Rand and Branden 1966–68, 8–14. ———. [1969] 2001. The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A Revolutionary Approach to Self-Understanding That Launched a New Era in Modern Psychology. 32nd ­ ­anniversary edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. ———. 1983. Honoring the Self: Personal Integrity and the Heroic Potentials of Human Nature. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher. ———. 2009. The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Gilbert, ­Arizona: Cobden Press. Dwyer, William. 2001. Do knowledge, ethics, and liberty require free will? Review of Tibor Machan’s Initiative: Human Agency and Society. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 3, no. 1 (Fall): 83–108.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 95

15/06/15 7:41 PM

96  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

———. 2002. Free will and determinism: A rejoinder to George Lyons and Tibor R. Machan. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4, no. 1 (Fall): 221–30. Gill, Mary Louise and James G. Lennox, eds. 1994. Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodell, Neil K. 2007. To think or not: A structural resolution to the mind-body and free  will-determinism problem. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall): ­1–51. Graham, Daniel J. 1987. Aristotle’s Two Systems. Oxford: Clarendon. Harding, Tim. 2013. Determinism, free will and compatibilism. Logical Place 25 ­October. Online at: https://yandoo.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/determinismfree-will-and-compatibilism/. Harriman, David, ed. 1997. Journals of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. Irwin, Terence H. 1988. Aristotle’s First Principles. New York: Oxford University Press. Konstan, David. 2014. Epicurus. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus. Locke, John. [1690] 2013. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II. Of Ideas. Chapter VI: Simple ideas of reflection and Chapter XXI: Of power. Edited by Jim Manis. Hazelton, Pennsylvania: The Electronic Classics Series. Lyons, George. 1995. Compatibility of determinism and free will. Objectivity 2, no. 3: 77–116. Machan, Tibor R. 2000. Initiative: Human Agency and Society. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press. Oderberg, David S. 2007. Real Essentialism. New York: Routledge. Peikoff, Leonard. 1976. The Philosophy of Objectivism. Audio lecture series. Irvine, ­California: The Ayn Rand Bookstore. ———. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Dutton. Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. ———. 1961. The Objectivist ethics. In Rand 1964, 13–39. ———. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet. ———. 1968. A statement of policy, part 1. In Rand and Branden 1966–68 (June): 7–9. ———. 1970. Causality versus duty. In Rand 1982, 114–22. ———. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Rand, Ayn and Nathaniel Branden, eds. 1966–68. The Objectivist. New York: The ­Objectivist. Register, Brian. 2001. Review of Tibor Machan’s Initiative: Human Agency and Society. Objectivity 3, no. 1: 71–96. Robinson, Daniel L. 1989. Aristotle’s Psychology. New York: Columbia University Press. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Tesseract2. 2010. DeterminismXFreeWill. Wikimedia Commons (2 September). Online at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DeterminismXFreeWill.jpg. Veatch, Henry B. 1952. Intentional Logic: A Logic Based on Philosophical Realism. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. Wedin, Michael V. 1994. Aristotle on the mind’s self-motion. In Gill and Lennox 1994, 81–116.

JARS 15.1_06_Bissell.indd 96

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews

Liberating Capitalism? Gary Chartier

Why Not Capitalism? by Jason Brennan New York: Routledge, 2014. 114 pp., index ABSTRACT: Jason Brennan’s book Why Not Capitalism? offers a distinctive and engaging defense of the positive moral value of markets and property rights. Directly confronting influential socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen’s argument for the moral superiority of socialism, Brennan shows that a market society embodies distinctive moral excellences that we have good reason to embrace.

Ayn Rand famously characterized “capitalism” as “the unknown ideal.”1 Rand emphasized the importance of articulating a moral defense of markets and robust property rights. Hers has arguably been one of the two most influential strategies for doing so. Rand’s approach emphasizes individual dignity and creativity and stresses the ways in which market order uniquely respects individual rights. Her critics tend to see her defense of capitalism as celebrating industrial titans as creative geniuses whom the mediocre collective seeks all too often to hobble, and as valorizing the heroic individual’s pursuit of her or his own well-being without regard for others’ good (provided she or he respects their rights). This reading of Rand is not always wide of the mark; but it does seem frequently to ­represent a distortion that is reflective of Rand’s deliberately provocative The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 97

15/06/15 7:41 PM

98  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

r­ hetorical choices that is rooted in insufficient attention to her texts, and that ­demonstrates ­inadequate awareness of the Aristotelian tradition in which she writes. Even if we allow for these difficulties, though, it’s clear that her framing of the question of market morality will not fire the imagination of every reader. Where Rand focuses squarely on the morality of the individual market actor, the other prominent moral defense of market order tends to treat the widespread prosperity and social coordination yielded by markets as central to the task of justifying them morally. Here, the analysis is broadly consequentialist. (F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and David Friedman are particularly capable defenders of this sort of approach, though none is simply a consequentialist.) Almost everyone can be expected to experience greater material prosperity in a market order than in any realistically conceivable alternative. This needn’t mean that everyone is, or should be, interested primarily in material well-being; but even those who aren’t can use the opportunities provided by greater prosperity to pursue goals that are quite nonmaterial. Whereas Rand begins with an objective account of individual flourishing, the consequentialist approach to offering a moral justification for markets assumes that there’s nothing more to be said about individual well-being (at least by political theorists) than that people happen to have various preferences, and that markets can effectively facilitate the realization of these preferences. This is a more modest morality than Rand’s, to be sure, but it is a moral, and not merely a pragmatic, approach: it treats personal well-being as crucially significant, and points to markets as essential to fostering well-being. While Rand’s approach gives careful attention to individual virtue, the ­consequentialist moral justification for markets generally treats individual character traits as given (frequently, by biology) and asks how, given that people are as they are, their welfare can be enhanced. Both approaches—Rand’s because her account of virtue is controversial and strikes many readers as ­counterintuitive, the consequentialists’ because they tend to bracket the question of virtue entirely—tend to encounter resistance on moral grounds. This resistance is encapsulated nicely in G. A. Cohen’s influential essay Why Not Socialism? Cohen (2009) argues that people in a socialist society embody virtue in a way that people in a capitalist society do not. We may, with the consequentialists, appreciate the material gains from living under capitalism. But even if we do, we should, he thinks, instinctively acknowledge that the way in which people feel and choose and behave under capitalism is unappealing. Socialism, he maintains, is an inspiring, attractive view of human community; capitalism is ugly, marked by rapacity and exploitation and arm’s-length relationships that ­undermine respect and compassion and human solidarity. Cohen makes his point using a homely example. Imagine we’re all going on a camping trip. Would we want our fellow campers to behave like socialists

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 98

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  Chartier 99

or like capitalists? Would those who insisted on property rights, charged for services, or otherwise seemed unconcerned with empathic mutual support be welcome participants in our trip? If we agree that they wouldn’t, why should we want to live in a society full of such people, a society whose institutions encourage everyone to behave like them? Fully virtuous agents would be socialists, Cohen believes. There may be practical constraints on realizing the socialist ideal; but let’s treat them as practical constraints, to be overcome if possible— let’s acknowledge that socialism truly is the ideal. Cohen’s attempt to draw moral lessons from his camping trip narrative can be criticized on multiple fronts. For instance, one might wonder how analogous to the circumstances of an ongoing society those of a one-off trip might be. And one might similarly question whether the expectations one has of friends accompanying one on a camping trip were especially relevant to relationships with acquaintances and strangers in a setting of extended social cooperation. In Why Not Capitalism? Jason Brennan (2014) confronts Cohen’s fundamental claims for the moral superiority of socialism as modeled by the camping trip community. He seeks to show why markets and property rights are morally desirable, why a market order is inherently attractive. He does so, however, in a manner interestingly different from both Rand’s and the consequentialists’. Unlike the consequentialists, he doesn’t focus exclusively or primarily on the instrumental value of markets in yielding widespread prosperity. And while, like Rand (and Cohen), he is concerned with individual virtue, his account of virtue is much more likely than Rand’s to resonate with ordinary readers’ moral sensibilities. Brennan asks us to consider a social microworld just as Cohen does. But he chooses, importantly, to focus on a stable, ongoing community rather than the ad hoc kind at the center of Cohen’s thought experiment. Brennan’s puckish proposal is that we imagine a version of the world depicted in Disney’s animated series, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, as a market society. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Brennan says, portrays “a voluntaryist, anarchist, non-violent, respectful, loving, cooperative society” (75). Such a social environment, appropriately envisioned, will, he argues, prove more attractive morally than that of Cohen’s camping trip. Cohen fallaciously compares camping-trip socialism with real-world capitalism and triumphantly proclaims the former superior. In the actual world—a world of fallible, often less-than-virtuous people—markets beat alternatives, as even Cohen grudgingly concedes on at least a limited basis. But, Brennan suggests, the same is true in a world of fully virtuous agents (as he imagines the denizens of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to be): Cohen’s socialism still doesn’t look as appealing as the free-market alternative Brennan depicts. Brennan recognizes that his Mickey Mouse Clubhouse story, framed as a parody of Cohen’s camping trip, is inadequate by itself as a moral defense of

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 99

15/06/15 7:41 PM

100  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

markets and property rights. But he suggests, plausibly, that the insights it offers can be developed into a compelling moral argument. It’s important to recognize, he emphasizes, that socialists have no monopoly on virtue. There is no inherent link between supporting markets, or being a market actor, and being avaricious, exploitative, or unconcerned about others’ interests, just as there is no inherent link between supporting socialism, or being a decision maker in a socialist society, and being compassionate, generous, or respectful (Brennan rightly instances Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Soviet Union, and contemporary Cuba here [64]). Indeed, as Brennan notes, markets tend actively to promote a number of key virtues, including fairness, reciprocity, trust, and regard for strangers. We don’t just need property rights to promote prosperity, Brennan observes. We need them, even in a utopia of perfectly virtuous agents, so that different people can explore different life plans and different conceptions of a good life. Property rights ensure that we do not need to ask permission of others to live our lives—something most people would prefer not to do even if everyone else were fully virtuous—and they give us spaces in which, literally and figuratively, we can be “at home.” They also foster social coordination, particularly by managing people’s expectations effectively. And of course it matters that agents—again, perfectly virtuous agents—can, in virtue of a property system, receive confirmation from others of the value the goods the agents produce when those others choose in the course of market exchanges to acquire these goods or accept them as gifts. It matters, too, that agents have the opportunity to signal affection and gratitude and cement relationships by giving what is theirs to others. Property rights give agents access to specific objects that have particular historical significance for them as well, objects that figure in their lives in meaningful ways over time. In addition, knowledge problems could be expected to persist even in a moral utopia—and markets could enable them to be addressed effectively. Property rights enable people to explore different solutions to social problems. They enable agents to specialize and develop expertise with the potential to benefit everyone. Market orders made possible by property rights would yield greater prosperity than alternatives (Brennan isn’t oblivious to this sort of consequentialist justification, much less opposed to it—he just gives it a subordinate place in his argument) and would give people the chance to be genuine authors of their own lives, making choices about developing and expressing themselves in the economic sphere. Agents in a utopian capitalist world wouldn’t object to property rights as potentially leading to prejudice-based exclusion or the maintenance of social hierarchies, because such agents wouldn’t use their property rights to give vent to prejudice or to undermine others’ dignity or agency. They could, indeed,

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 100

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  Chartier 101

be counted on to deal with accidents and upsets of various kinds by offering compassionate, solidaristic support to those in need, something they could obviously do without compromising their commitments to a robust property regime and market exchange. Furthermore, a capitalist utopia would offer space in which people could create and put on display a variety of styles of communal life, including nonmarket ones, while Cohen’s socialist utopia wouldn’t offer the chance for people to create market societies. A capitalist utopia would offer the opportunities for community and solidarity made available on Cohen’s ­camping trip but also a range of benefits that would be unavailable in Cohen’s world.2 In short, says Brennan, if we compare utopia with utopia, markets win. And if we compare a market society that could obtain in a real world of not just epistemically but also morally imperfect agents with a socialist society that could obtain in the same real world, markets win again, since they offer more protection against abuses of power and mobilize people’s self-interest on behalf of the common good—both morally important achievements. So, either way, markets win on moral grounds. Cohen might seek to respond to Brennan on more than one front. He could claim, perhaps, that participants in the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse world wouldn’t choose in the ways in which Brennan suggests they would or care about the things Brennan thinks they would care about. But it seems unlikely that this rejoinder would be persuasive. Brennan isn’t deploying a controversial account of fully virtuous agents’ motivations or choices. Assuming such agents have projects of their own that they value and on which they wish to focus—if they didn’t, one might wonder why they would have reason to be concerned about each other and what, if they were concerned, they would have to be concerned about apart from bare survival—they would have reason to value the framework of rights Brennan proposes. As Brennan emphasizes, epistemic difficulties persist even when agents are fully virtuous. Fully virtuous agents don’t, just because they are fully virtuous, cease to have the human needs for confirmation and attachment that Brennan notes, and would have no reason (Cohen doesn’t stipulate that abstemious asceticism is part of virtue) to be uninterested in the options generated by increasing prosperity. Similarly, Cohen might argue that the world as Brennan envisions it simply wouldn’t be as morally appealing as a world modeled on his camping trip. Tastes will differ, no doubt. But Brennan’s imagined world, utopian though it is, is believable and attractive as a model for a society in a way Cohen’s is not. No one is friends with every other member of a society, and many people, I suspect, would find being expected to be friends in the relevant sense with large numbers of other people both oppressive and artificial. This seems even more likely to be the case if expectations that might make sense, even (­ perhaps) as regards strangers, on a short-term basis in an environment like that created

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 101

15/06/15 7:41 PM

102  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

by the camping trip were treated as norms for ongoing social interaction. Universal friendship is not a realistically appealing moral ideal, nor is anything approaching it. Cohen views the acceptance of strong egalitarian and fraternal norms as a key element of virtue. Thus, a society in which only some people accept these norms won’t prove more attractive than one in which everyone or nearly everyone does.3 Brennan maintains, by contrast, that compassion and mutual support are quite compatible with robust property rights and don’t require Cohen-style egalitarianism and Cohen-style solidarity. There is doubtless more work to be done explicating and testing the intuitions to which Cohen’s and Brennan’s examples give rise. In any case, Brennan has effectively highlighted the moral appeal of an authentic market order. He has not chosen to bracket the question of personal virtue, like the typical consequentialist defender of markets. Nor has he chosen to abandon common conceptions of virtue as marked centrally by benevolence and solidarity. Instead, he has shown that affirming a market utopia is quite consistent with embracing these conceptions. He has made a valuable contribution to clarifying just why market society is not a second-best alternative to socialism but rather a genuinely attractive moral ideal. Notes

Thanks to David Gordon, Sheldon Richman, Gene Berkman, Kevin Carson, and Jason Brennan for comments on an earlier version of this review and A. Ligia Radoias for welcome opportunities for dialogue and exchange. 1. Brennan says that “[a] social system is capitalist to the extent that it has private property in the means of production, decisions about the use of property are made by owners rather than by governments or society at large, people can make contracts as they please, legal monopolies and subsidies are absent, and so on” (2014, 63–64). By “socialism” he clearly seems to mean collective ownership of the means of production, in tandem with collective regulation of personal property. I am skeptical about the use of “capitalism” to describe a social order marked by free(d) markets and strong legal protections for j­ ustified possessory claims, and about the use of “socialism” to refer to collectivism. I spell out some reasons for my skepticism in Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a S­ tateless ­Society (Chartier 2013, 386–405). But there is no p ­ articular value in the present context in conducting a debate over this terminological issue. I  will ­therefore sometimes use “capitalism” and “socialism” without critical comment in the way in which ­Brennan (like Rand) uses these terms. I suspect that some of G. A. Cohen’s ­criticisms, to which Brennan responds, are best seen, though Cohen might not agree, as concerned with ­“capitalism” in the negative sense in which I’d use the term, rather than with markets per se. 2. As Kevin Carson observes, neither the cash nexus nor Cohen’s camping trip is desirable as a meta-organization for an entire society (there is no reason to think ­Brennan would disagree). Almost no one would want to see every interaction organized on a commercial basis. A moral commitment to solidarity and mutual respect provides

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 102

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  Camplin 103

crucial support for the institutions of commercial society, and everyone benefits when alternative options are explored and put on display. Respect for property rights is crucial, but such rights could themselves be expected to take diverse forms. Nozick’s utopia of utopias allows for considerable diversity—a point that Brennan makes very clear (Nozick 1974, 297–334). 3. Thanks to David Gordon for discussion on this point.

References

Brennan, Jason. 2014. Why Not Capitalism? New York: Routledge. Chartier, Gary. 2013. Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a Stateless Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, G. A. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic.

Freedom and Fiction Troy Camplin

Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism by Allen P. Mendenhall Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014 ix + 161 pp.

Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film by Edward W. Younkins Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014 x + 331 pp. ABSTRACT: This review discusses recent work that considers literature and film from a free-market perspective. It focuses on two books: Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism by Allen P. Mendenhall and Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film by Edward W. Younkins. Each provides a different, but useful, approach to the topic.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 103

15/06/15 7:41 PM

104  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

We are more often coming across works that discuss literature from a free market perspective, although they are still rare. To books like Frederick Turner’s Shakespeare’s 21st Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (1999), Russell Berman’s Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western Culture (2007), and Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s collection Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (2009), we can now add Edward W. Younkins’s Exploring Capitalist Fiction and Allen P. Mendenhall’s Literature and Liberty. Younkins’s book emerges out of the Business through Literature course he has taught since 1992 in the MBA program at Wheeling Jesuit University. For those who think that literature and film are mostly antibusiness and antimarket, Younkins does a good job of countering, by providing a list of recommended readings and viewings. Indeed, the book is mostly a series of summaries of the books, plays, and films (sometimes including film versions of books or plays). Most are quite promarket, but certainly not all, and the works he recommends are hardly uncritical of business practices—how can one have a story without some sort of conflict, after all? But in his summaries, Younkins explains the value added by the books to understanding business practices. His discussion of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a great example of his ability to summarize a work. He notes what she is doing, the level of conscious construction in her novel, and readers’ responses to this epic novel before proceeding to give a summary of the work itself. While works like Atlas Shrugged are clearly probusiness and promarket, sometimes the books or films “accidentally” show us the positive aspects of business. There is little question, for example, that Oliver Stone is not procapitalism, yet he manages, in Wall Street, to present a character in Gordon Gekko who is able to explain how corporate raiders benefit the market and stockholders. We see this in particular in the (in)famous “greed is good” speech, where Gekko explains how what he does benefits the market by reorganizing or getting rid of wasteful companies. Indeed, corporate raiders are often a subject of literature dealing with business and free markets. However, they are not always negatively portrayed, like Gordon Gekko is. Jerry Steiner’s play Other People’s Money, and the film based on it, present “in dramatized form, both the arguments for and against corporate takeovers” (Younkins 2014, 249). They have even been presented positively, as in Cameron Hawley’s Cash McCall. Younkins does a good job of explaining what it is that “corporate raiders” do, from an economic standpoint, putting the discussions of these works in the proper context. When Younkins allows himself to provide insights from economics—­ including the rarer critiques of a work’s ideas—the book is particularly valuable. Yes, we do need to know what works out there are worth reading or viewing, but some insight and analysis are also welcome. For example, in his chapter

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 104

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  Camplin 105

“Taking a Look at Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward,” Younkins identifies many of the problems inherent in Bellamy’s socialist utopian vision, which leads to a short discussion of Rawls and Mises. The average reader would have benefitted greatly by having more of these brief but excellent analyses and discussions of the economic principles that are dramatized in the works. Where Younkins’s book seems intended for the average reader or viewer looking for literature and films portraying business and markets (including the average professor looking to create a reading/viewing list for a class like Younkins’s), Allen Mendenhall’s Literature and Liberty is clearly aimed at a more scholarly audience. Mendenhall primarily addresses the subfield of law and literature, which makes it an unusual book in what is, with free market literary theory, already an unusual field. Indeed, the fact that Mendenhall is writing about law and literature from a libertarian perspective is one of the strengths of the work. Most libertarian literary scholars are likely to think of doing literary analysis from a free market perspective as a corrective to the pervasive Marxism within the academy, but we certainly shouldn’t forget that libertarianism is a theory of governance, meaning that we libertarians have to understand something about the law. Mendenhall corrects this tendency with his book. After a chapter on Emerson celebrating genius and individualism, in which he makes a positive comparison between Emerson’s and Rand’s individualistic philosophies, Mendenhall presents us with a history of law and literature involving the historical concentration of this field on Shakespeare. What is amazing to this writer, who has a master’s in English and a doctorate in the humanities, is that I had never learned of this area of study. So many are the silos in the academy. The literary scholarship done by many of our law professors could have perhaps helped correct some of literary scholars’ progressivist and Marxist biases. Of course, the addition of good economics would contribute even more to this correction, as Mendenhall observes at the end of this chapter. For those looking for an example of how to do libertarian law and literature analysis, Mendenhall provides us with an excellent analysis of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. This is perhaps the kind of chapter one would most expect in a book subtitled Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism. Indeed, if the book has a fault, it would be that there are not more chapters like this. Sometimes the best argument for doing something new is to show rather than to tell the audience (it is perhaps unsurprising that this is also the advice creative writing students get to improve their writing). From this chapter we come to understand not only Forster’s novel better, but also a criticism of the “rule of law,” which might not have otherwise occurred to us. Mendenhall’s essay explicates both the novel as well as the criticism of the rule of law within it, bringing us to think about and question something with which most people

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 105

15/06/15 7:41 PM

106  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

would tacitly agree: that the rule of law is good. We rarely think “good for whom” or “good for what,” but these are precisely what we ought to be thinking about. Moreover, we ought to be thinking about “what law, whose law.” When it comes to other cultures, we cannot simply come in and impose our own laws. Law ought to emerge naturally, dynamically from the interactions of the people within a given culture; it cannot be imposed on others without creating severe problems and stresses for the people and within the culture. This is what we see in Forster’s novel, and everywhere any country has engaged in “nation building.” This brings us to the next chapter, on the rise of English law. Here Mendenhall brings the techniques of literary analysis to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain to help us better understand the underlying message of the book, that it is the law that is the true sovereign. The story of the English law is the story of the simultaneous emergence of the common law and Roman-style legislation. This combination gives rise to a unique tradition in English law: The key message of . . . the history [of English law] is that law persists across the centuries, no matter who fulfills the role of sovereign, as the sovereign is subject to legal precedent even if he is capable of issuing law. The message is reassuring: regardless of who becomes the sovereign, law will protect Britain by providing order and peace among the polis and by ensuring the continuity of the nation-state. (Mendenhall 2014, 100) The way law emerged and works in England is similar to how transnational law works, according to Mendenhall in his final chapter. Very often in England, the common law tradition gave rise to a degree of pluralism: local conditions resulted in local laws. Of course, there were hierarchies that placed those local variations within broader laws, including the laws handed down by the king himself, whereas in transnational law, there is and can be no central authority to bring everything together. This means that transnational law must necessarily emerge out of the interactions of local territories’ laws. It is and will always be pluralist insofar as it is transnational (rather than international, which implies some sort of unity). Mendenhall again makes use of literary theory to help us understand the nature of transnational law, showing us the degree to which such theory can be of great practical use. Mendenhall also has chapters on Henry Hazlitt as a literary theorist and on a recent revision of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to remove an infamously offensive word. Most of us know Hazlitt for his Economics in One Lesson, so it is good that Mendenhall points out Hazlitt was a broader writer and thinker. And most of us are familiar with the ongoing controversies surrounding Huckleberry Finn, to which Mendenhall’s contribution is welcome, even if he will probably be only preaching to the choir.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 106

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  McElroy 107

Indeed, if there is one criticism I have of Mendenhall’s book, it is the title. While I certainly welcome a book titled Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism, I fear that such a name will immediately make the very people who most need to read it overlook it. This is a rhetorical point all of us with classical liberal/libertarian worldviews should consider in getting people to read our works—especially when the vast majority of the audience is hostile to classical liberal ideals. Overall, each of these books is highly recommended for very different reasons. Younkins’s book is recommended precisely because it is a very neutral, balanced summary of each of the works he treats. This is rare, whatever one’s ideological leanings. And Mendenhall’s book is recommended precisely because he engages in libertarian literary criticism, showing the value added in doing so. Moreover, he primarily analyzes texts through the lens of law (not surprising given he is a lawyer), making his contribution to literary studies unique. Law and literature is perhaps more common than is libertarian literary criticism, but Mendenhall’s combination of the two is precisely what makes his book worth reading. References

Mendenhall, Allen P. 2014. Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary ­Criticism. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. Younkins, Edward W. 2014. Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

Russian Radical: Twenty Years Later Wendy McElroy

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical by Chris Matthew Sciabarra University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, second edition, 2013 xv + 526 pp., notes, bibliography, index. ABSTRACT: The second expanded edition of Ayn Rand: The Russan Radical, like the trilogy of which it is a part, aims to radically redefine the methodology of established traditions by wedding the dialectical method to libertarianism.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 107

15/06/15 7:41 PM

108  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

On this overall trilogy, many important questions remain with regard to Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s ambitious project. But this does not take away from the fact that the book remains a brilliant and pathbreaking work. Sciabarra inspires us to rethink issues on a fundamental level.

Ayn Rand scholar nonpareil Chris Matthew Sciabarra once stated ­ironically, “One of my cardinal sins is that I’ve dared to speak to the larger world” (Sciabarra 2003). It is a cardinal virtue, of course, because Rand and Objectivism ­desperately needed to be freed from both adulation by fans and demonization by detractors. The door to Rand needed to be thrown open with a r­ esounding bang that invited in fresh air. Sciabarra’s intellectual history Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Sciabarra 1995b) achieved this goal in a m ­ asterful and nuanced manner. Sciabarra’s ironic observation sprang from the extreme controversy that ­surrounded the book’s initial publication two decades ago. Few works of exacting scholarship have elicited such a passionate backlash of denunciation and praise. But what else could be expected from a work that redefines a figure toward whom many people feel proprietary? Russian Radical is also an amazingly ambitious and original work that rattles the cage doors of several traditions, including Objectivism and libertarianism. It aims at nothing less than radically redefining the methodology of established traditions by analyzing the thought of key figures in terms of the dialectical method. In fact, Russian Radical cannot be thoroughly appreciated except in the context of Sciabarra’s broader Dialectics and Liberty trilogy. The first work in the trilogy, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (1995a), compares the works of the communist Karl Marx and the classical liberal F. A. Hayek through a probing analysis of their convergent critiques of utopianism and their emphasis upon context holding; the book challenges the traditional views on both men. The final work, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (Sciabarra 2000), charts the prevalence of the dialectical method from Aristotle to the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard. It argues for a redefinition of dialectics “as indispensable to any defense of human liberty and as a tool to critique those aspects of modern libertarianism that are decidedly undialectical and, hence, dangerously utopian in their implications” (Sciabarra [1995] 2013, xi). Sciabarra’s system-building style introduces new questions into the philosophical and historical narrative about Rand and libertarianism. Simply by breaking through conventional assumptions, the book is a success. Whether it convinces people of its main contentions, however, depends on ­several ­factors, including Sciabarra’s definition of “the dialectical method.” The dialectical approach is most frequently associated with Marx and most often expressed as “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Rephrased: society contains intellectual or situational tensions that interact to produce a third and different

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 108

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  McElroy 109

situation. In turn, the new social conditions produce more conflict and more social change. Dialectics is core to the theoretical foundation of Marxism with communism being its political or social expression. Sciabarra defines the dialectical method as “‘the art of context-keeping.’ More specifically, it emphasizes the need to understand any object of study or any social problem by grasping the larger context within which it is embedded, so as to trace its myriad—and often reciprocal—causes and effects. The larger context must be viewed in terms that are both systemic and historical” (x; more on this in the section on dialectics). Now a second edition of Russian Radical offers the opportunity to reengage with Sciabarra both in appreciation and with some lively disagreements.

The First versus the Second Edition The intellectual thrust of the two editions is identical, but the second offers considerably more insight into Rand’s education as well as almost 90 pages of invaluable notes and references that are stunningly thorough. The references to books and articles on Rand make Russian Radical an indispensable research resource. Each edition follows the same structure in the main narrative of the book. Both focus tightly on three aspects of Rand’s life and work: the intellectual history that roots her within Russian culture, a careful and complex exposition of her thought, and a reinterpretation of Rand’s methodology to place her in the dialectical tradition. Sciabarra explained the specific differences between the editions: [W]hereas the first edition closed with the Epilogue, the second edition adds three new appendices, expanded notes and references, and an expanded index as well. Readers will recall that I did not have access to Rand’s college transcript when I published Russian Radical and that I had to piece together a portrait of a very turbulent time in the history of what was then Petrograd State University (and later became Leningrad University, and then, returned to its original name: the University of St. Petersburg). Nevertheless, I stated explicitly that the evidence I had collected and the conclusions I reached included a dose of reasonable speculation and a nod to “best explanation.” (Sciabarra 2013b) The first appendix consists of an article titled “The Rand Transcript,” which was published in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Sciabarra 1999). The second appendix, “The Rand Transcript, Revisited,” appeared in JARS (Sciabarra

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 109

15/06/15 7:41 PM

110  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

2005b) and considerably expanded insights into Rand’s formative education, including her years at then Petrograd State University (1921–24). The third appendix is Sciabarra’s response to a 2012 critique of his “historical detective work” by Rand scholar Shoshana Milgram, whom the Ayn Rand Institute has provocatively called Rand’s “authorized” biographer (Sciabarra 2013b; see also Sciabarra 2014). Only two sections in the main book are significantly revised. A new preface provides a necessary and updated overview. Chapter 12, titled “The Predatory State,” has been dramatically expanded in order to deal with, as Sciabarra explains, “Rand’s radical critique of the welfare-warfare state, so relevant to a post-9/11 generation” (Sciabarra 2013a). The first edition of Russian Radical pioneered an explosion of biographies on Rand, essays on her thought, academic discussion, popular films, and the introduction of her name in mainstream politics. In the second edition, Sciabarra not only stands his ground but also stakes it out more solidly. He writes, “[I]n this book I address two questions: 1. In what sense can Rand’s philosophy be understood as a response to her Russian past? 2. In what sense can Rand’s philosophy be understood as a contribution to twentieth-century radical thought?” (Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 2). Section 1: Rand’s Russian Soul? The first of three broad sections in Russian Radical is titled “The Process of Becoming” and concludes with the chapter “The Maturation of Ayn Rand.” Sciabarra begins by defining an approach that he maintains is fundamental to the Russian soul. “No theme has been more central to the history of Russian thought than . . . [the] struggle against dualism” (22). Dualism is the conceptual division of a thing or issue into two opposing aspects. Examples are the struggle between “spirit versus flesh, reason versus emotion, the moral versus the practical” (22). Rand, Sciabarra persuasively argues, inherited the Russian drive to achieve synthesis and refused to accept the validity of formal dualism. Instead, she rejected “false dichotomies” such as “mind and body, reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice. For Rand, these factors were distinctions within an organic unity” and needed to be understood in relationship to each other, not in fragmentation (16). Equally, Rand rejected the powerful streak of cultural mysticism that many Russian philosophers accepted as a way to achieve unity. But if mysticism was the Russian version of the “right-wing,” then Rand also reviled the “left-wing” as expressed through the competing intellectual tradition of collectivism and Marxism. If the foregoing formed Rand’s general intellectual framework, what were her specific influences?

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 110

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  McElroy 111

In his quest to discover Rand’s intellectual genesis, Sciabarra received little assistance from Rand herself, who gave the strong impression of being ­self-created. As the book notes, “she concedes only a limited literary and ­philosophical debt to Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Aristotle” (78). Rand especially credited the last. In a postscript to Atlas Shrugged (1957, 1085), Rand wrote, “The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle. I most emphatically disagree with a great many parts of his philosophy (his acceptance of slavery, for example)—but his definition of the laws of logic and of the means of human knowledge is so great an achievement that his errors are irrelevant by comparison.” Sciabarra inspires much the same reaction in the careful reader. The only flesh-and-blood teacher whom Rand is said to have mentioned by name was the philosophy professor Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky. Thus, in order to tease out her specific influences, Sciabarra turns to Lossky and to other individual thinkers who constituted the cultural traditions in which Rand (then Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) blossomed into intellectual adulthood. Much is riding on his presentation of a relationship between Rand and Lossky as the latter was a major proponent of dialectical method and Rand’s most established connection to it. But Sciabarra quickly admits, “An investigation of the links between Lossky and Rand is fraught with problems. It is almost impossible to establish with certainty the exact circumstances of their relationship” (78). Even with the additional appendices, few public records exist or, if they do, few are open to examination. Some of the details of the relationship, as conveyed about 40 years later by Rand via Objectivist insiders Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, seem inconsistent with known facts. This could be chalked up to minor lapses of memory if it were not for the insistence by Rand and the Brandens that the former always remembered things accurately. Sciabarra is required to fall back on more speculation and less documentation than readers may be comfortable with. At the end of the plausible process of Sciabarra making the best explanation possible of the facts, the reader is left with reasonable doubts about whether Rand and Lossky had a significant relationship or how deep his influence went. Sciabarra builds more successfully on the milieu of Russia’s “Silver Age . . . of cultural history” (23) in which Rand received her formal education; the term refers to the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decades of the ­twentieth century when Russian culture experienced unusual c­ reativity. Sciabarra’s command of the Silver Age traditions is breathtaking and well worth the price of admission to the book. Section 1’s discussion also acknowledges the influence of non-Russian thinkers, including Nietzsche’s probable impact on Rand. The substantial 1959 revision of her novel We the Living (1933) to remove Nietzschean passages is a high point of the section and jumps off the page. Problems also exist, however, in assessing the legacy of the general Russian culture upon Rand. Again, much of it reduces to reasonable speculation

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 111

15/06/15 7:41 PM

112  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

and does not have enough external validation to establish the legacy as fact. Sciabarra relies upon historical probability and echoes of early voices that seem to be present in Rand’s later work. Another prominent obstacle to Sciabarra’s analysis is that Rand consistently voiced her contempt for Russian culture, mysticism, collectivism, and authoritarianism. Sciabarra is well aware of Rand’s repudiation of all things Russian; he knows her philosophical conclusions did not resemble those that surrounded her in youth but were often the antithesis. Nevertheless, it is common for people to be as much defined by what they strongly reject as by what they embrace. Moreover, Rand rejects the conclusions of Russian thinkers and traditions, not necessarily the methodology they used to reach them. That is Sciabarra’s specific claim; namely, Rand was methodologically Russian, not Russian in her conclusions. Section 1 concludes with a whirlwind tour of Rand’s later life and works. The brevity is understandable given how much more has been written about the older Rand than Rand the younger. For example, Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand by Nathaniel Branden (1989) and The Passion of Ayn Rand by Barbara Branden (1986) cover Rand’s later years in detail. Moreover, the entire purpose of the section is to sketch an argument regarding her intellectual roots, and it appropriately does not overly dwell on more personal matters. The Revolt Against Dualism The six chapters of Section 2 are collectively titled “The Revolt Against Dualism.” They offer a dialectically inclined overview of the philosophical structure of Objectivism, from “Being” (metaphysics) to “Libertarian Politics.” Interestingly, it opens with a quote from Lossky. “Philosophy is a science and therefore, like every other science, it seeks to establish truths that have been strictly proved and are therefore binding for every thinking being” (Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 116). It continues to repeatedly describe him as “her teacher,” when the reality of the relationship has not been established. Nevertheless, despite quibbles, Section 2 provides a superb overview of Rand’s work. It provides a fair and measured context for interpretational disputes from major “orthodox” figures, such as Leonard Peikoff, as well as from neo-Objectivist ones, such as David Kelley. And, yet, Sciabarra’s reconstruction of Objectivism sometimes seems to be more at the service of dialectics than of Rand. Given that he views dialectics as an integral aspect of Rand’s work, there does not need to be a conflict, but the repetition of the dialectical theme sometimes gets in the way. Section 2 is the most straightforward of Russian Radical, perhaps because Sciabarra was working with well-documented views and comparatively plentiful material.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 112

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  McElroy 113

The Dialectical Method In Section 3, “The Radical Rand,” Sciabarra claims that Rand, like Marx and Hegel, used the dialectical method and should be reexamined in the context of that tradition. His goals are worthy; namely, to further an understanding of Rand and to correct what he views as a “problematic” methodology employed by most Objectivists and other radical individualists. The latter goal drives this section. In several places within Russian Radical and elsewhere, Sciabarra explains the motives behind writing the Dialectics and Liberty trilogy. In his commentary “A Trilogy Conceived,” Sciabarra (2005a, 10) states, For too long, I had listened to both conservatives and Marxists who condemned libertarianism as an “atomistic” ideology, which had abstracted the individual from all social and historical context, and which had built a notion of freedom like nonsense upon stilts. But my study of thinkers in the classical liberal and libertarian pantheon showed that, at their best, the defenders of the free society were profoundly dialectical, profoundly radical, in their understanding of the necessary preconditions and consequences of freedom. In Total Freedom, Sciabarra states the ultimate goal for developing a d ­ ialectical reading of Rand, Hayek, and other giants of individualism; he considers the incorporation of that methodology to be “indispensable to any defense of human liberty” and a countermeasure against the aspects of “modern libertarianism that are decidedly undialectical” and dangerously utopian (Sciabarra [1995] 2013, xi). Section 3 is the most original and controversial segment of the book. I stumble over it for a variety of reasons. In his book review of the 1995 edition of Russian Radical, which is titled “Dialectical Objectivism? A Review of Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical” (Bissell 1996), Roger E. Bissell expresses one of them. The definition of dialectics employed is confusing, largely because “Sciabarra doesn’t provide a one-sentence, genus-differentia definition of ‘dialectic.’” The definition does not need to be one sentence in length, of course, but it should have clarity since the book’s main thesis hangs upon it. As it stands, however, the word’s meaning seems to shift ground through the book. Some shifting may be inevitable as Sciabarra traces dialectics through centuries, across continents, through diverse traditions, and within diverging philosophers. Nevertheless, the specific dialectical method that he espouses could be and should be better delineated. At several points and most consistently, Sciabarra refers to dialectics as “the art of context-keeping.” This description is unsatisfying since many intellectuals

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 113

15/06/15 7:41 PM

114  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

who excelled at the art of context-keeping would not fit into his conception of the dialectical tradition. Rothbard, for example, constructed an intricate and extensive system of “context-keeping” through analyzing the relationship between diverse individuals, traditions, and fields of study such as economics and politics. Yet, as Sciabarra himself explains in Total Freedom, Rothbard was fundamentally a dualist who depicted human history as a struggle between power and liberty, the state and the individual. According to Sciabarra, it was Rothbard’s dualism that led him to mistakenly champion a utopian elimination of the state. As the historian Joseph Stromberg (2002) provocatively asked in his book review of Total Freedom, [A]s regards the dialectical approach generally, how does one determine that a dialectical approach will prove useful for any particular field of study? Might there not be disciplines—praxeology, for example— which can, in fact, proceed deductively from a priori axioms to valid conclusions without any assistance from dialectics, empiricism, or other such handmaidens? (94) Russian Radical offers expanded descriptions of dialectics as well, but these are also unsatisfying. Bissell (1996) identifies the most detailed description in Russian Radical, which consists of six fundamental and interlocking ­characteristics. They are holism or a preservation of “the analytical integrity of the whole” (82); contextualism or a commitment to both abstraction and ­integration; synchronic or systemic internalism; diachronic or historical internalism; anti-dualism; and a radicalism in theory and practice that seeks ­systemic revolution. Bissell suggests that Sciabarra “zero in on a more elegant, concise statement of what dialectics is” (83). It would also be valuable to sort out the specific characteristics that distinguish “dialectics” from other methodologies; for example, the characteristic of “radicalism in theory and practice” is shared by other approaches. At the risk of appearing to dismiss a book that I view as brilliant and ­pathbreaking, I also have some skepticism about whether Rand rejected dualism or dichotomies in favor of dialectics. Dichotomies are a conceptual tool by which ideas, principles, or things are divided into two mutually exclusive groups. The groups are exhaustive; in other words, if a thing belongs in one group, it cannot belong in the other. Certainly, Rand excoriated “false dichotomies” and dwelt upon them much more than upon true dichotomies—that is, ones she accepted as valid. Examples of Randian false dichotomies are mind/ body, is/ought. Examples of Randian true dichotomies are moral/practical, individualism/collectivism. But the very fact that she did accept dualities casts doubt on whether she belongs in the dialectical tradition.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 114

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Book Reviews  |  McElroy 115

Conclusion Much more could be written in praise and in critique of Russian Radical because it is one of those rare books from which a reader raises her head every few pages and wonders, “Do I agree?” These are the books in life that make a wonderful intellectual difference because they inspire thought on a fundamental level. Sciabarra (2003) has stated, “I’ve dared to bring Objectivism and academia, kicking and screaming when necessary, into engagement with one another.” He has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. I hope to be forgiven, however, if I decline to kick and scream in preference to discussing the profound implications of his work over a good New York pizza. References

Bissell, Roger E. 1996. Dialectical Objectivism? A review of Chris Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Reason Papers 21 (Fall): 82–87. Online at: http://­ reasonpapers.com/pdf/21/rp_21_9.pdf. Branden, Barbara. 1986. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Branden, Nathaniel. 1989. Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Subsequently republished in a new edition under the title My Years with Ayn Rand. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999. Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1995a. Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1995b. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. [1995] 2013. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. 2nd edition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 1999. The Rand transcript. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall): 1–26. Subsequently republished as Appendix I in Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 363–80. ———. 2000. Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2003. A response from Chris Sciabarra. Archived comments at IlanaMercer.com (August). Online at: http://www.ilanamercer.com/Archivedcomments.htm. ———. 2005a. Ten years after. Free Radical. (July–August): 10–11. Online at: http:// rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Sciabarra/Ten_Years_After.shtml. ———. 2005b. The Rand transcript, revisited. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall): 1–17. Subsequently republished as Appendix II in Sciabarra [1995] 2013, 381–91. ———. 2013a. Russian Radical 2.0: The cover story. Notablog 13 August. Online at: http:// www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/notablog/archives/001852.html. ———. 2013b. Russian Radical 2.0: 1995 vs. 2013: What’s different? Notablog 14 August. Online at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/notablog/archives/001 853.html.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 115

15/06/15 7:41 PM

116  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

———. 2014. Russian Radical 2.0: A Kindle edition and revised revisions. ­Notablog 8 January. Online at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/notablog/ archives/001881.html. Stromberg, Joseph. 2002. Book reviews: Chris Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. Journal of Libertarian Studies 16, no. 3 (Summer): 93–97.

JARS 15.1_07_Book Reviews.indd 116

15/06/15 7:41 PM

symposium

Marsha Familaro Enright’s essay, “The Problem with Selfishness” Arnold Baise, Merlin Jet ton, and Marsha Famil aro Enright

Introduction The following essays constitute a Symposium in response to Marsha Familaro Enright’s essay “The Problem with Selfishness,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 38–54. We are proud to present replies from Arnold Baise and Merlin Jetton. This is followed by a rejoinder from Marsha Familaro Enright. Enright’s original essay has stirred so much discussion that we will be featuring a sequel to this symposium in a forthcoming issue.

Reply to Marsha Familaro Enright: Selfishness and the OED Arnold Baise ABSTRACT: In her article “The Problem with Selfishness,” Marsha Familaro Enright compares the definition of “selfish” used by Ayn Rand with the ­definition given in several dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED, however, justifies the definition of any word by referring to its actual use in written English, in the past and the ­present, making it the ­definitive English dictionary. In particular, the OED shows that ­“selfish” has been used with a decidedly negative connotation since the seventeenth ­century, ­contrary to Rand’s argument for a morally virtuous meaning. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 117

15/06/15 7:40 PM

118  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

I agree with Marsha Enright’s criticism of the use of the word “selfishness” to denote a virtue in Ayn Rand’s ethical philosophy (Enright 2014), but I’d like to add a comment on the nature of the Oxford English Dictionary, and its ­ importance regarding the definition of words in general and of ­“selfish” and “selfishness” in particular. First, I give three quotations in which Rand discusses her use of these words; note that the last two quotes are from edited volumes, so they may not be exact transcripts of what Rand wrote or said: The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal.” . . . In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil. . . . Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests. (Rand 1964, vii; emphasis in original) You write that correct English demands a certain use of the words “selfish” and “unselfish.” I do not believe that profoundly controversial philosophical issues can or should be permitted to slant the meanings of words. And, in fact, dictionary definitions do not support your assertion. I believe that correct English demands a precise use of words. “Selfish” means: “concerned with one’s own interests.” The question of what constitutes a man’s interests and which actions are to be classified as “selfish” is to be answered by philosophers, not by grammarians or lexicographers. (Rand 1995, 604; emphasis in original) It is important to know when to continue using a word despite its being corrupted, and when to drop such a word. The real test is: what does the corruption of the word accomplish? For example, I fight for the word “selfishness,” even though the word, as used colloquially, designates both criminals and Peter Keatings, on the one hand, and also productive industrialists and Howard Roarks, on the other. Here, there is an attempt to obliterate a legitimate concept—selfishness—and thus we should not give up the word. (Rand 2001, 119–20) The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the definitive dictionary of the English language. The OED has two distinctive features: First, it is a h ­ istorical ­dictionary; that is, in addition to defining present-day words, it also records their use over time by means of illustrative quotations, b ­ eginning with one showing the word’s earliest known use. Second, it is ­descriptive rather

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 118

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Symposium  |  Baise 119

than ­prescriptive; that is, it does not try to be an authority on “­correct” English, it  simply records nonjudgmentally the way words have been used. In short, the meaning of a word is determined by how it is used in ­written  English.  For  details  of the history of the OED and how its words are defined, see Winchester 2003. As the above quotes show, Rand argued that she was using the “exact ­meaning and dictionary definition” of the word “selfishness,” but the definition she gave differs from that in the OED and other dictionaries (Enright 2014, 51). Over the years, some people have reportedly looked for a dictionary that Rand might have used to support her claim, but none has been found, as far as I know. I question the value of finding such a dictionary. After all, we wouldn’t know how the editor came up with that particular definition, and why should the meaning it expresses be any more “exact” than that given in other dictionaries, such as the OED? Furthermore, Rand regarded the meaning implied by “popular usage” of “selfishness” as “wrong,” but in reality popular usage is an important source for the definition of any word in a descriptive dictionary such as the OED. There is no “right” or “wrong” meaning of a word, only the meaning that is inferred by examining its use, popular or otherwise, in English ­publications such as books, magazines, and newspapers. This makes sense because the meaning of a word can change over time, without the deliberate i­ntention of anyone. The meaning of “selfish,” as reported by the OED through its ­quotations, does not appear to have changed over the centuries (the first OED quote is from 1640), but some meanings do change significantly. A good example of this, which should be of interest to readers of this ­publication, is the ­objective/subjective pair. Scholars of the Middle Ages used “­objective” and ­“subjective” (in the metaphysical sense) with meanings that are the exact reverse of those that are used today. Thus scholastic ­philosophers used ­“objective” to refer to s­ omething that exists only in the mind, as an image or mental picture, whereas “subjective” referred to something having a real ­existence outside the mind, as being independent of consciousness. The change from the old to the modern view is generally ­attributed to the ­writings of Kant and his ­followers; see the entries for these words in the OED for more information. It is true that the OED entry for “selfish” has not been updated since the first edition was published in 1928 (the entry was actually added in 1911). So it’s possible that a different definition might have been given if the entry was revised at the time Rand was writing her nonfiction. This is very unlikely— my evidence for this comes from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED). The SOED is an abridged version of the OED, with considerably fewer quotations, but it has been revised at irregular intervals since the first

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 119

15/06/15 7:40 PM

120  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

edition of 1933. I checked the third edition, published in 1944, and the definition of “selfish” was unchanged from that of the original OED: “devoted to or concerned with one’s own advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others.” The editors of the OED are currently engaged in the massive task of u ­ pdating the definition of every word in the dictionary. Their ongoing results have been published online at quarterly intervals since 2000, but ­unfortunately the word “selfish” has not yet been revised. It will certainly be interesting to see what changes, if any, will be made more than 100 years after it was first defined. References

Enright, Marsha Familaro. 2014. The problem with selfishness. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 38–54. Rand, Ayn. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: Signet. ———. 1995. Letters of Ayn Rand. Edited by Michael S. Berliner. New York: Dutton. ———. 2001. The Art of Nonfiction. Edited by Robert Mayhew. New York: Plume. Winchester, Simon. 2003. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reply to Marsha F ­ amilaro Enright: Conceptual ­Classifications Merlin Jet ton ABSTRACT: This is a reply to Marsha Enright’s essay, “The Problem with Selfishness.”

My

comments

pertain

mainly

to

Enright’s

conceptual

­classification, comparing it with mine in “Egoism and/or Altruism.”

I read with great interest Marsha Enright’s article, “The Problem with  Selfishness,” published in the July 2014 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. I commend her effort; indeed, there is a problem with ­selfishness (and ­altruism) as Ayn Rand used those terms. My comments pertain mainly to Enright’s section “Conceptual Classifications.” She posits three classes—objectively altruistic, objectively s­ elf-interested, and subjectively self-interested. She then says she is not sure she has i­dentified all the possibilities. In my article (Jetton 2013), I  show a Venn  ­diagram of e­goistic action  and altruistic  action  in  which  they  are  not  mutually ­exclusive, ­reproduced here (see page 121 below).

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 120

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Symposium  |  Jetton 121

The diagram has not three but five areas that can be regarded as classes, so in my view there are indeed more possibilities. What I meant by each of the five should be clear by the diagram and text of my article. I did not invent labels for each, so for convenience I will refer to them here as areas 1 to 5, in left to right order. Mine is a different sort of classification from Enright’s, but what each tries to categorize provides enough common ground to compare them. Enright’s objectively altruistic class clearly corresponds to my area 5. I think her category of objectively self-interested corresponds best to my area 2. She says that her subjectively self-interested category has at least two ­subcategories. Her first subcategory best fits area 1; her second subcategory seems to best fit area 5. Prior to her section on “Conceptual Classifications,” she describes Peter Keating, quoting Rand. She describes Keating as paradoxically a ­“selfless ­egotist” and “selfish,” then says, “Yet, Keating is not an altruist in the ­philosophical sense, giving up fame and fortune to help others. His is a p ­ sychological s­acrifice, a ­sacrifice of character and achievements. He sacrifices his own ­personal desires and goals” (Enright 2014, 45). Where would Keating’s actions fit in my Venn ­diagram? I can’t say confidently, because the diagram pertains to ­sacrificing other people or sacrificing self for the sake of other people, rather than ­sacrificing one’s own character, personal desires, or goals. However, I am ­confident about where the actions of James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, whom Enright does not address, will fit. Some of his actions fit in area 1 and others in area 5. With the help of his

egoisc acon

altruisc acon benefit to other only

benefit to self only

sacrifice others

benefit to both self and other trade, treang, etc.

sacrifice self

Figure 1. 

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 121

15/06/15 7:41 PM

122  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

government pals, he is a predator on other p ­ roductive businessmen. He is also an altruist in the philosophical sense, giving up fame and fortune to help others. Enright’s conceptual classifications do not seem to say anything about my areas 3 and 4.1 Yet earlier in her article she writes, “Rand’s characters often openly comment on their self-interested concern for others’ interests, as in this exchange between Dagny and Rearden in Atlas Shrugged” (41). After quoting said exchange, Enright writes, Generally, as illustrated here and elsewhere, her heroes are highly aware of each other’s needs and desires—and often try to fulfill them. It is only rational to take other’s interests into account when pursuing our own, since much of human life and striving for human value revolve around our relationships with other people. (42) I agree. Dagny and Rearden are acting as traders. Their actions clearly fit in area 3 of my diagram. Dagny is pursuing her own interests, and she knows that she is simultaneously also serving Rearden’s interests. Rearden is p ­ ursuing his own interests, and he knows he is simultaneously also serving Dagny’s interests. Let us consider (a) Dagny pursuing solely her own interest, such as when she was working around and in her cabin in the woods, versus (b) the above case. If both actions are called egoism (or rational self-interest), with the difference between them completely ignored, then something is amiss. The second case involves a second interest; the first one does not. The second case is a trade; the first is not. The first would belong in area 2, the second in area 3. On page 42 of her essay, Enright asks, “Does this imply that, according to Objectivism, one has only two choices of beneficiary: acting for the sake of another, or acting for the sake of oneself as a rational being? Some people don’t act either way.” She proceeds to describe people who don’t act either way. I could not find a mention that one might act both ways, at least some of the time. I believe that according to Ayn Rand’s nonfiction (and according to nearly all Objectivists), the “or” in the prior paragraph is an exclusive one—not an inclusive one, an “and/or.” On the other hand, in Rand’s fiction there is the exchange between Dagny and Rearden cited above. Each of them at that time is acting in both ways; that is, the “or” is an inclusive “and/or.” Enright says, “Clearly this description doesn’t fit many kinds of actions and people; using only the selfish/altruist dichotomy does not make full sense of all possible human actions” (46). Typically a dichotomy means a partition of a whole into two parts that are: 1. Jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and 2. Mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts.

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 122

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Symposium  |  Enright 123

Enright’s subsequent text suggests she meant “selfish/altruistic” is not a ­dichotomy only by the first criterion. I did not see anything Enright said to ­suggest they are not always mutually exclusive. Note

1. Label area 4 “non-sacrificial altruism” if you so wish. Some examples are most c­ haritable contributions, most gift giving, and a person—not on lifeguard duty—saving the life of a stranger from drowning at little or no risk to himself or ­herself. A more specific, commonplace example is a mother buying clothes for her own preteen children. The material benefit is entirely for her children. In material terms it is a cost, not a benefit, to her. References

Enright, Marsha. 2014. The problem with selfishness. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 38–54. Jetton, Merlin. 2013. Egoism and/or altruism. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 13, no. 2 (December): 107–22.

Rejoinder to Arnold Baise ­and Merlin Jetton: Differing Conceptual Classifications for Selfishness Marsha Famil aro Enright ABSTRACT: This article acknowledges Arnold Baise’s detailed examination of the origin and use of the word “selfish,” which adds interesting details to the topic. It then turns to the issues raised by Merlin Jetton. While Jetton makes important contributions to the discussion, I think that, ultimately, we are using different classification systems.

First, I would like to thank Arnold Baise (2015) for his detailed examination of the origin and use of the word “selfish” as it pertains to the issue of whether Objectivists should fight for a different meaning of it. He has added interesting detail to the topic. The central focus of this essay, however, is on the issues raised by Merlin Jetton (2015) in his reply to my 2014 essay, “The Problem with Selfishness.” Indeed, I read Jetton’s response to my article with interest. It helped to clarify some conceptual classifications of action. Objectivism seems to give us only selfish-altruistic and rational-irrational dimensions to classify behavior. In my

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 123

15/06/15 7:41 PM

124  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

article, I tried to point out the problems with using only these dimensions and urged an expansion and rethinking of ethical categories. I want to thank Jetton for his thoughtful response and his work in presenting a diagram as an alternative way to approach the relations between different kinds of action and the self. Many human actions seem to fit into his categories. But I found it difficult to compare my analysis with Jetton’s categories because, ultimately, I think we are using different classification systems. He equates all actions that benefit others with altruistic actions; I don’t. In the framework I use, the egoistic (selfish) and the altruistic categories are not jointly ­exhaustive, but they are mutually exclusive. I use “altruistic” in its original meaning, defined by Auguste Comte. In Comtean altruism, an action is altruistic if it benefits others only, and not the self. As far as I can see, such action is a sacrifice of one’s self, actions, and values to others. By taking your time, effort, goods, or whatever value you have and using them for the benefit of the other only, you are using up valuable aspects of your life without furthering it. Consequently, referring to Jetton’s categories, I don’t see a distinction between “benefit to other only” and “sacrifice of self.” Also, I don’t see “benefit to self and other” and “trade, treating, etc.” as altruistic. It’s true that many people use “altruistic” to mean benevolent, s­upportive actions—not necessarily self-sacrificing. However, they don’t usually c­ onsider trades altruistic. So that militates against Jetton’s use of the term in his ­classification scheme, even given the conventional meaning of “altruistic.” To be clear, there are many actions you could take for your long-term interest that might be thought sacrificial in a conventional sense. But in my view, even the mother who dies trying to save her child is not sacrificing, if she loves the child. In those circumstances, she would live in intolerable pain and guilt if she didn’t try to save him and he died; by risking her own life, she’s acting in her own, long-term best interest. Furthermore, I don’t see “sacrificing others” as an egoistic action in Rand’s Aristotelian sense. That’s because Rand argues that one’s ethical judgments must always take into account short-term needs and values in the context of the long term of one’s entire life. I think this is what Rand means by life as “Man qua Man.” It is the effort to live an excellent life, and this is what I identify as ­objectively self-interested. In this framework, acting in a way that is unjustly against the life of another person to gain a benefit to yourself is detrimental to yourself in the context of your whole life. A great-souled person does not want the unearned, or that which violates the rights of others; these things do not satisfy his critical psychological needs no matter any material gain. Jetton argues that we need some way to distinguish egoistic action that is aimed solely at the satisfaction of your own needs, and egoistic action that

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 124

15/06/15 7:41 PM

Symposium  |  Enright 125

includes the interests of others. Certainly these aren’t the same, but they both fulfill your needs within the framework of living an excellent life as I have described above. In other words, if you act in a way that benefits yourself and others at the same time, you are still acting egoistically, in an objectively self-interested manner. Perhaps we would want to make a subcategory for this kind of action. Likely, there are a number of subcategories for the class of objectively self-interested actions, but I haven’t thought about that in much detail. As for Peter Keating in The Fountainhead, according to Rand, he sacrifices himself to please others (e.g., his mother, Toohey) in the hope of gaining their approval; thus he makes a psychological sacrifice. James Taggart, in Atlas Shrugged, sacrifices others for short-term, unearned material gain; he also, like Keating, sacrifices himself psychologically by doing what he thinks others apparently deem good, in order to gain their approval. I don’t see how he gives up fame and fortune to help others. References

Baise, Arnold. 2015. Reply to Marsha Familaro Enright: Selfishness and the OED. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 15, no. 1 (July): 117–20. Enright, Marsha Familaro. 2014. The problem with selfishness. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 14, no. 1 (July): 38–54. Jetton, Merlin. 2015. Reply to Marsha Familaro Enright: Conceptual classifications. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 15, no. 1 (July): 120–23.

JARS 15.1_08_Symposium.indd 125

15/06/15 7:41 PM

CONTRIBUTORS

ARNOLD BAISE,

email: [email protected], has worked as a research chemist and as a computer programmer. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the ­University of Wales in the United Kingdom and an M.S. in computer science from Marist College.

ROGER E. BISSELL,

email: [email protected], website: http://www.rogerbis sell.com, is a professional musician and a writer on philosophy and psychology, specializing in aesthetics, logic and epistemology, and personality type theory. His work has appeared in a number of other publications, including Reason Papers, Objectivity, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Bulletin of the ­Association for Psychological Type, Vera Lex, and ART Ideas. His mock transcription of a lecture by the fictional composer Richard Halley was published in Edward W. Younkins’s 2007 compilation, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: A ­Philosophical and Literary Companion, and he supervised the transcription of Nathaniel Branden’s lectures for the 2009 publication of The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism. Most recently, he published his first book, How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics, available from Amazon Kindle. He also frequently performs on recording sessions and jazz engagements, and information about CDs featuring his trombone playing, singing, musical arrangements, and original ­compositions can be accessed at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rbissell and http:// www.cdbaby.com/cd/rogerbissell. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 126

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Contributors 127

SUSAN LOVE BROWN, email: [email protected], is professor of anthropology at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Boca Raton, and received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. She is a p ­ olitical and psychological anthropologist, specializing in the Caribbean and the United States in the areas of cultural theory, social evolution, gender, e­ thnicity, ­individualist anarchism, and the study of intentional communities. She is the former ­director of the Public Intellectuals Program, the Ph.D. in ­Comparative Studies, and she is a faculty associate of the Women, Gender, and ­Sexuality Studies program at FAU and has taught Gender and Culture for the last 20 years. She has ­written a number of articles and book chapters about gender and ­sexuality in Ayn Rand’s novels, and she is the editor of Intentional ­Community: An Anthropological ­Perspective (SUNY, 2002). She is currently working on a full-length study of Ayn Rand and gender. ROBERT L. CAMPBELL,

email: [email protected], a professor of ­psychology at Clemson University, is the author of “The Rewriting of Ayn Rand’s Spoken Answers,” which appeared in this journal in 2011. TROY CAMPLIN,

email: [email protected], has a Ph.D. in the humanities and is the lead consultant at Camplin Creative Consulting. He has published several papers in Studies in Emergent Order and book chapters on ­spontaneous order theory, short stories, and poetry. He is also the author of the book ­Diaphysics (2009).

MARC CHAMPAGNE, email: [email protected], is a postdoctoral researcher

in the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art S­tudies of the ­ niversity of Helsinki. His main research interests are in philosophy of mind, U philosophy of signs (semiotics), epistemology, phenomenology/­existentialism, and American philosophy (especially classical pragmatism, Rand, and the ­Pittsburgh School). He has two doctorates, one in philosophy from York ­University in Toronto and another in semiotics from the ­University of Quebec in Montreal. Formerly a researcher with the Peirce-Wittgenstein Research Group and the Canada Research Chair in the Theory of ­Knowledge, he is ­currently part of a project called Diagrammatic Mind (led by A.-V. ­Pietarinen), which ­investigates how cognitive processes employ similarity-based signs. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals like Philosophical Papers, ­Metaphilosophy, Sign Systems Studies, Philosophy and Technology, Reason Papers, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Dialogue: Canadian P ­ hilosophical Review, The American Journal of Semiotics, Versus, Analysis and ­Metaphysics, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, P ­hilosophical ­Psychology, Semiotica, Semiotic Inquiry, and ­Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 127

15/06/15 7:40 PM

128  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

He was recently asked to compose an a­ nnotated bibliography on “Semiotics” for Oxford University Press’s online Bibliographies in Philosophy series (edited by Duncan Pritchard). At the 2015 Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, there will be a symposium on his forthcoming book, Consciousness and the ­Philosophy of Signs. email: [email protected], website: http://www .garychartier.net, is professor of law and business ethics and a­ ssociate dean of the Zapara School of Business at La Sierra University. He is the author of five books, including Anarchy and Legal Order: Law and Politics for a S­ tateless ­Society (Cambridge, 2013), Radicalizing Rawls (Palgrave, 2014) and Public ­Institution, Public Law: An Essay on Marriage Ethics and the State ­(Cambridge, forthcoming), the coeditor (with Charles W. Johnson) of M ­ ­ arkets Not ­Capitalism (Minor ­Compositions-Autonomedia, 2011). His byline has appeared nearly forty times in journals including the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Legal Theory, and Law and Philosophy. He holds a J.D. from UCLA (2001, Order of the Coif) and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1991). GARY

CHARTIER,

MARSHA FAMILARO ENRIGHT,

email: [email protected], B.A. biology, Northwestern University, M.A. psychology, the New School for Social ­ Research, is an education entrepreneur, writer, and psychotherapist. Her major ­project is the implementation of a new and innovative higher e­ ducation ­program through the Reason, Individualism, Freedom Institute, of which she is ­president, ­curriculum developer, and chief implementer via the Great Connections ­ ­ Seminar in Chicago and Buenos Aires. She has written for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, The New Individualist, Montessori Leadership, Free Voices, The Savvy Street. Her articles are available at www.fountainheadinstitute.com. She is the editor of Ayn Rand Explained: From Tyranny to Tea Party (Open Court, 2013). Among her many other educational and social ­projects and ­organizations: the New ­Intellectual Forum (founded by her in 1987), ­Council Oak ­Montessori School, ages 3 to 15 (founded by her in 1990), and Camp I­ ndecon (Curriculum D ­ eveloper and Lead Instructor from 1999–2007). Her interests are ­wide-ranging but always take a biopsychological bent. MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN, email: [email protected], is professor of English and

theatre arts, University of Texas at El Paso, where she has chaired the E ­ nglish and Philosophy Departments twice, was the first director of Women’s Studies, associate dean of Liberal Arts, and chair of Theatre, Dance, and Film. She has written three books on Ayn Rand and coedited one, Feminist ­Interpretations of Ayn Rand. A coedited volume on the Chicano artist and writer José ­Antonio Burciaga won an American Book Award, a Southwest Book Award, and a

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 128

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Contributors 129

Latino Book Award. Her work in Steinbeck studies has been recognized with the Burkhart Award for Research and the Pruis Award for teaching. In 2011, she was inducted into the El Paso Commission for Women Hall of Fame and the El Paso County Historical Society Hall of Honor. MERLIN JETTON, email: [email protected], is an independent scholar. He graduated from the University of Illinois as a math major. He escaped a­ cademia in order to apply and expand his math skills in the real world of business. He  is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a chartered financial analyst. He retired after a 28-year career as an actuary and financial engineer, having ­specialized in asset-liability management the last 15 years or so. He has been interested in Objectivism for decades. He was a member of the Chicago School of ­Objectivism, also known as the New Intellectual Forum. He was a presenter there several times and is the author of several articles in the journal Objectivity and two earlier ones in this periodical. He now lives in Ohio. ANNA KOSTENKO,

Ph.D., Zaporozhye Ukraine, is an associate professor in the Theory and Practice of Translation Department of Zaporozhye, National ­Technical University. Her research interests lie in the areas of contemporary foreign literature, namely in postcolonial literature and postcolonial t­ ranslation, problems of bilingualism, biculturalism, and multiculturalism.

email: [email protected], is the author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), Sexual ­Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women (McFarland, 1996), and The Art of Being Free (Laissez Faire Books, 2012) and the editor of such anthologies as Freedom, Feminism, and the State (Cato Institute, 1982) and Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). Her articles have appeared in publications as diverse as National Review and Marie Claire. A ­frequent lecturer, she identifies with the individualist anarchist and ­individualist feminist traditions. WENDY McELROY,

CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA,

email: [email protected], website: http:// www.chrismatthewsciabarra.com, blog: http://notablog.net, received his Ph.D., with distinction, in political theory, philosophy, and methodology from New York University. He is the author of the “Dialectics and L ­ iberty ­Trilogy,” which includes Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (State University of New York Press, 1995), Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Pennsylvania State U ­ niversity Press, 1995; expanded second edition, 2013), and Total Freedom: Toward a ­Dialectical ­Libertarianism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). He is also coeditor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of Feminist Interpretations of Ayn

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 129

15/06/15 7:40 PM

130  T H E J O U R N A L O F AY N R A N D S T U D I E s

Rand ­(Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and a founding c­ oeditor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999–present). He has written over a dozen encyclopedia entries dealing with Objectivism and l­ibertarianism, given ­ over 50  interviews published in such periodicals as the Chronicle of Higher ­Education, the Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, the Village Voice, and the Economist, and has published over 150 essays, which have appeared in ­publications as diverse as Critical Review, Reason Papers, Liberty, Reason, the New York Daily News, Film Score Monthly, Jazz Times, Just Jazz Guitar, and Billboard.

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 130

15/06/15 7:40 PM

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 131

15/06/15 7:40 PM

Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand Edited by Mimi Riesel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra “Rand is not just an intellectual forebear of the modern libertarian political movement; sympathizers point to Rand’s increasingly visible impact on pop culture, public sensibilities, public policy, and even on the academy. As part of a growing body of critical literature on the eponymous novelist/philosopher, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand highlights how feminists cannot help but have a conflicted relationship with Rand’s ideas. . . . This anthology is no posthumous feminist Festschrift for Rand. So long as the essays steer clear of intellectually uninteresting muckraking literary analysis, we see engaging (and sometimes ruthlessly) critical essays showing that the views of Ayn Rand bear much fruitful

“Too often, Rand is either revered as a prophet or dismissed as a crank. Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand approaches her as a writer and thinker of profound insights and equally

feminist scrutiny.”

—Andrew I. Cohen, Hypatia

This landmark anthology is the first to engage critically the writings of Ayn Rand from feminist perspectives. The interdisciplinary feminist strategies of re-reading Rand range from the lightness of camp to the darkness of de Sade, from

profound contradictions, who offered

postandrogyny to poststructuralism. A highly

an important and inspiring but flawed

charged dialogue on Rand’s legacy provides the

and limited vision of life. . . . Such a

forum for a reexamination of feminism and its

serious approach can ultimately end

relationship to egoism, individualism, and capi-

Rand’s intellectual marginalization. This volume takes a major step in that direction. In the process, it addresses issues of sexual equality and difference that are more relevant than ever today.” —Cathy Young, Reason Magazine

talism. Rand’s place in contemporary feminism is assessed through comparisons with other twentieth-century feminists, such as de Beauvoir, Wolf, Paglia, Eisler, and Gilligan. What results is as provocative in its implications for Rand’s system as it is for feminism. 480 pages | $34.95 paper Re-Reading the Canon Series

penn state press 820 N. University Drive, USB 1, Suite C | University Park, PA 16802 | [email protected] www.psupress.org | 1-800-326-9180

JARS 15.1_09_Contributors.indd 132

15/06/15 7:40 PM