Ayn Rand’s re-translation of Aristotle’s logic, ethics, and aesthetics into modern parlance is invaluable. However, she seems to have followed some trails and assumed they are the only possible ones. Atheism is one of those. Scores of Randies think that atheism is the only rational alternative simply because it fits with what they’ve learned from Rand. But, of course, that’s a fallacy. It would only be the only rational alternative in a positivistic world – one in which the only thing we know is what we’ve gleaned from what we already know. And no one lives that way, least of all Randites.
Rand has a lot to say that we should listen to about the use of force (extortion, compulsion, etc) and about, without most readers hearing it, Death.
“I can get along with a Randite” – Bernardo de la Paz.
I consider Rand a mentor, and I’ve read her analysis of religion, which is why I think both that she would make a welcome addition to the faithful, and why I suspect she never really absorbed the significance of Orthodox thought in her Communist and Jewish Russian experience. Her commentary seems absorbed primarily with late-Western forms of Christianity, and perhaps just a smells and bells interaction with Russian Orthodoxy. She didn’t have a Vladimir Lossky to translate our thinking into modern parlance and, by the time she could have, her ideas were already well-formed and she was committed to her path.
But I pray for Ayn. And ask that she receive mercy, because she tried to reach the truth and got there in some respects, but also got sidelined, perhaps by pride and loneliness, as I would have. And if the Lord will have mercy on her, perhaps he will have mercy on me by her prayers.
“Pancho needs your prayers, it’s true. But save a few for Lefty, too. He only did what he had to do, and now he’s growing old.” – Towns Van Zandt
If you should think of her, pray for Ayn Rand.
Amen. We need more evaluation of the modern “critical hermeneutic” which is evident in the West at least for the last two centuries, but which intensified after WWII. Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras has written book after book about how phenomenology, existentialism, and Derridaean deconstruction are potent criticisms of the Western tradition which amaze us with their insight. We Orthodox have a lot to learn from the soul-searchings of Rand, Derrida, and Heidegger, as well as the others who have shared in their search for Truth.
Even Westerners are copping on to the depravity of life as “technological efficiency”. These great Western minds long for what Heidegger called the sense of “enchantment” by which the Ancient Greeks related to the world. This sense of enchantment was not rejected by Christians, but was reinterpreted as being grounded in the Logos as the logoi (words) of created beings. We are already in this Logos-based world of logoi before we can theorize about anything from a naive Descartian perspective.
What Yannaras has hit upon is that Truth is not mere logical expression, an attitude which has led to the Western catastrophy, but rather, Truth is only found in “relations according to the Truth”. Man is not a static thing, but is pointed toward Life, and lives only by participation in Christ. But through this participation, man also communes “according to Truth” with his fellow men. If Rand were here, she would be on my side, not on the side of Westernism.
May we be as fearless and uncompromising as Mrs. Rand in our own journey into “relations according to the Truth”.
Rand was an atheist, not because of Aristotle (who was not) but because there is no evidence that God exists. Also, there is no evidence whatsoever that Rand was ever lonely. She was married to the same man until he died very late in her life and always had a group of friends and associates. Are you saying that lonliness makes us unable to be objective? She certainly was prideful but what does that have to do with basing one’s philosophy on the concept of objective reality? Either it is or it isn’t.
These are excellent points, Rob. I too don’t believe that God exists, in the sense that you and I do or anything else does. As an Orthodox Christian, I can just as easily say that God exists as that he doesn’t, and frankly the last is easier.
As to the loneliness, that’s a subjective judgment on my part, it’s true. I think the image of Rand as entirely self-sufficient, and never needing the acceptance of others to be what she was, is an ideal. It’s a great ideal, and I love it. But from watching her in front of crowds and listening to her speak, it’s my opinion that the ideal isn’t the full reality of it. Of course, I’m biased, I think that all people want acceptance, that it’s hard-wired. I think we all search for meaning, and we search for it together. Sometimes that involves a repudiation of dependence on others – but that’s still a relation. Nothing wrong with that relation – I rely on it consistently – but it is what it is. A is A.
I haven’t said that loneliness makes us unable to be objective, but I do think there are degrees of objectivity, something you might not acknowledge. I think this because to be truly objective would require comprehensive knowledge, or the assumption that, because of the law of noncontradiction, all new knowledge is merely added to and refines previous knowledge. The problem with that is that it doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of subjectivity in the previous thing called ‘knowledge’. And that assertion while immune from disproof to the individual, asserts itself through that very glaring immunity: that which is immune to disproof isn’t logical. And by Rand’s thinking, it isn’t objective therefore. Catch-22.
Rand draws a circle and says this is objective reality. I draw a circle around it and say this is reality, and then I begin erasing some of the line, because it’s unknown, and so reduces us to a kind of subjectivity. You cannot stand and declare all reality objective unless you can observe all reality. That’s positivism, and it might as well be solipsism for its myopoeia. The assumption that because one is comfortable with the larger ‘circle’ or unknown shape or possible abyss of shape – the open system – that one is necessarily a “subjectivist” is illogical and easily disproven. But Rand never had access, I suspect, to any contrary examples. Logic dictates that if you say all x are y, the only burden disproof has is to find one x that isn’t y, but if you declare it y merely by reference to the rule, then that’s argument by definition – begging the questions. It’s a sophomore fallacy.
And incidentally, even your assertion that “it is or it isn’t” while *seemingly* based on one of Aristotle’s laws: ( A or not A ) – the law of the excluded middle, it is actually not in the least, nor is it scientific nor logical nor an application of suitable mathematics. The reason is simple: you cannot make a statement about a thing you can’t survey. And frankly, the trick of calling it “objective reality” instead of making the more obvious claim “reality is objective”, doesn’t conceal from us the fact that you have to first survey reality (all of it), before you can make such a claim.
You can call that turning everything on its head and taking an inherently subjectivist view, but I repudiate that – just because I don’t know and you don’t know doesn’t mean it’s unknown or can’t be known. If I ask you what’s outside the circle of your knowledge, you cannot really make statements about the kind of thing that’s out there. You cannot confine it to, “Well, whatever it is that I don’t know, it’s knowable, defineable, and subscribes to the rules I do already know.” However much the Randite tries, he cannot help but convert objectivism into superstition.
I’ve never read any Rand, but I’ve always wanted to. Where should I start? And should I be aware of anything before I dive in?
Well, the two main volumes will be philosophical fiction: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. If you have to only read one of them – read the magnum opus – Atlas Shrugged, but it’s nice to read them both in the order they were written. They’re long books. If your tendency is to get bored easily in long books that don’t immediately satisfy, go straight for the magnum opus.
In either case, Rand’s introductory chapters are slow, because she’s setting up an entire millieu. She’s recasting the world in such a way that it takes the blinders off and she can give it back to you later. This is, frankly, necessary.
She also has excellent non-fiction – most of it is written for a popular audience and consists of columns she wrote for the NY Times, presented as chapters. She gets flack for being pop philosophy – but a) that’s what the nonfiction is supposed to be and b) she’s just successful at it, where most can’t be, because of the philosophy they’re selling. In her nonfiction vein are The Romantic Manifesto, The New Left, the Virtue of Selfishness, Philosophy Who Needs It, etc.
A lot of people have done Rand ultra-lite – they’ve read Anthem. Anthem is a good dystopian novella, but it doesn’t even give a clue to the magnitude of what she accomplishes in her philosophical fiction.
Frankly, I think the Fountainhead gives one of the best portrayals of evil in literature. Right up there with L’Engle’s Wind in the Door. Atlas Shrugged – what can I say – it’s one of my bibles.
The only warning would be against a tendency to blend, hybridize, or overlay Objectivism with Orthodoxy. One is a philosophy, and one is not. The moment an overlay is attempted, we’re not talking about Orthodoxy anymore. This is where the West went wrong, in making one the handmaiden of the other – twin sciences. In the East, we always treated philosophy and theology separately, and did not regard them as comparable, or touching the same things.
Nicely sensitive treatment. I thought that I was the only one praying for her. Thanks.