Objectivist Philosophy is Skin Deep

Ayn Rand's Skin was Very Thin

New York Magazine carries an extended review of Anne Heller’s new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Sam Anderson, who when he was a callow tyro was himself for a few years a disciple of Ayn Rand.

It seems that Rand was a very thin skinned person and like the Genevan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau allowed her reasoning and construction of her philosophical system to be profoundly informed by her personal experiences and family background. In Rand's case this turns out to be ironic, since her Objectivist philosophy is supposed to leave all that behind. But this, of course, is impossible to do. As Anderson reminds us:

Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned … What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”

No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand.

Rand is still widely read in the United States today--particularly in the Libertarian set. Her philosophy, which is rehash of a narrow Aristotelianism, resonates with those who believe (the word is deliberate) that the material universe is the only reality, and paradoxically, within that reality, the thinking, rationalist individual man is ultimate. The concept of the automonous rationalist is attractive to those who see all law and corporate governance as an infringement upon personal and individual autonomy.

A fundamental flaw of objectivism is that it relies upon a narrow set of premises. Accept the premises, and Rand's logic will drive you relentlessly in the direction Rand wanted you to go, with stock whip cracking. Reject the premises, and Rand's cattle drive passes you in the night. But sadly, self-deception is no virtue, and Anderson argues that Rand was most definitely self-deceived and blind when it came to her own lack of objectivity regarding her starting premises.

Rand insisted, over and over, that the details of her life had nothing to do with the tenets of her philosophy. She would cite, on this subject, the fictional architect Howard Roark, hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” But the things she thought, it turns out, were very much dependent on her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings—or at least on her relative lack of all that.

Now, everyone is influenced by their personal cluster of human experience. Moreover, it is not necessarily bad to be unaware of the conditioning effect of our personal histories--although rigorous self-criticism always makes one's beliefs more robust, one way or another. But for Rand, her militant insistence that her objectivism had nothing to do with her person and her experiences has always seemed to be a case of protesting too much.

Anne Heller’s new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-American’s overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rand’s early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at all—it looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood. This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of Rand: She built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.

Heller, via Anderson, catalogues the self-deception that riddled Rand's life, making her a tragic-comedic figure:

No one, according to Heller’s portrait, struggled with the unreality of Objectivism more than Rand herself. She wept, throughout her life, at the world’s refusal to conform to her ideal vision of it. Although she claimed that “one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” she repeatedly withheld or distorted facts to feed her own mythology. (When she died, in 1982, none of her followers even knew her real name.) She carried on an increasingly toxic sexual affair with a married disciple 25 years her junior; when he had his own affair with a younger woman, Rand slapped him, excommunicated him, and falsely accused him of embezzlement. Her special brand of reasoning led her to some unreasonably ugly positions—e.g., that homosexuality is “disgusting” (which caused gay Objectivists to pretend to be straight); that Native Americans, having failed for millennia to create a heroically productive capitalist society, deserved to be stripped of their land; that women are ideally “hero worshippers” who should submit themselves, body and soul, to great men. “I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being,” Rand wrote while composing her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. After the book’s publication, however, she fell into a deep depression and chided herself for not being more like her ideal man. “John Galt wouldn’t feel this,” she wrote. “He would know how to handle this. I don’t know.”

One personal insight which shows just how reductionist, superficial, and crass Objectivism turns out to be is as follows:

In middle school she found herself uncharacteristically intrigued by another student, a seemingly intelligent girl who was also popular—a contradiction in the Rand cosmology. Hoping to solve the mystery, and possibly even make a friend, Rand approached her. “Would you tell me what is the most important thing in life to you?” she asked, showing once again her flair for smooth opening lines. “My mother,” the girl answered. Rand turned away, disgusted. As an adult, she called this exchange “the first most important event in my life socially” and analyzed it as follows: “I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, and she didn’t mean anything as a person.”

Here is the point. The "other girl" was indeed serious and no doubt in every way profound, but to materialist, reductionist Rand, the other girl did not mean anything as a person. She fell outside Rand's premises, and therefore showed herself a lower order being on the evolutionary ladder.

Rand tends to appeal to the younger set, or those who prefer to cling to youthful certainties. Most people influenced by Objectivism tend to outgrow it. Its narrow reductionist glib superficiality is appealing for a time; but the profundities, complexities, and puzzles of life soon show it up to be trite and irrelevant for most. Human wisdom, richness, and complexity in the end leads one to side with the "other girl" as a more fulsome representation of what it means to be a human being, created in the image of God.