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Ayn Rand. Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Читать онлайн.Название Ayn Rand
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isbn 9780271063744
Автор произведения Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
Although Marx accepted the spirit of Hegel’s dictum, he departed from strict organicity in several significant ways. Marx argued that no whole could be studied from a synoptic vantage point. The totality is studied through the abstracted parts. Marx varied the scope of his abstractions by altering the relational units, the perspective, and the level of generality. By focusing on the mutual determination of structure and function, Marx concretized knowledge of the whole. As Ollman (1979) argues, Marx refused to separate “events from their conditions, people from their real alternatives and human potential, social problems from one another, and the present from the past and the future” (126). Marx viewed each part of the totality as a cluster of relations. Each part is in organic conjunction with every other part such that each expresses the sum of its interrelations. The conditions of each thing’s existence are taken to be part of what it is (Ollman 1976, 15–16). Ollman (1993) explains further that the Marxian dialectic replaces “the common sense notion of ‘thing,’ as something which has a history and has external connections to other things, with notions of ‘process,’ which contains its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations” (11).
This emphasis on internal relations was equally important to the Russian Marxists. But Marxist scholarship in Russia underwent several transformations. From the earliest moments of the Bolshevik Revolution, Marxism was hardening into a state ideology that legitimated repression and dictatorship. During the Silver Age, however, Marxist thought was being supplemented in a variety of ways. Such thinkers as Berdyaev, Bulgakov, and Struve integrated Marxism with Kantian ethics.32 The Nietzsche-an Marxists explored the provocative synthesis of quasi-individualist and socialist ideas. And Lenin utilized a naive realist epistemology to answer Machian neo-Kantians, as well as more popular revisionist and positivist interpreters of Marx. By the following decade, professional scholars had probed the limited editions of Marx’s Grundrisse, which appeared in the Soviet Union as early as 1939 and 1941 in two successive volumes published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.33 Throughout this period, however, the entrenchment of Stalinist dogmatism ultimately quelled all theoretical debate and dissent.
Though Lenin’s writings suffered at times from simplistic diatribe, his influence on Russian Marxism made a significant impact during the Silver Age. Despite Lenin’s failure to develop his realist perspective adequately, his polemics were extremely effective in shaping the character of Marxist ideology.34
Lenin began with a realist ontology. He saw objective conditions as prior to consciousness. He asserted the primacy of the material world and the objectivity of space and time. He wrote in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism that “things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us.” Epistemologically, he adopted a reflection theory of knowledge. He disputed the Kantian distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenal thing-in-itself. “The only difference,” in Lenin’s view, “is between what is known and what is not known.”35
Like Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, Lenin rejected dualism, since it failed to grasp the internal relatedness of mind and matter. Lenin recognized the supreme importance of the Hegelian dialectic to Marx’s method. His writings feature scathing attacks on subjectivists and empiricists who divorced cognition from the object. He believed that the reduction of the world to pure sense perception led inexorably to a subjectivist, solipsistic idealism. Like Nietzsche, he condemned such empiricism as a philosophy of immaculate perception.36 But Lenin rejected rationalism as equally one-sided, and proposed a resolution of the age-old dichotomies. His attempt at an organic synthesis was entirely within the tradition of Russian philosophy.37
The appeal of Russian Marxism, however, had little to do with Lenin’s critique of dualism. The Russian Marxists had strategically merged Western dialectical categories of explanation with the indigenous concept of sobornost’. They secularized the concept, and aimed not for Oneness in the mystic body of Christ, but for a collective unity that was One with the Proletariat. Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin warned that this would lead to the establishment of the One State. Ultimately, the voluntarist sobornost’ had been replaced by the Bolsheviks’ administrative machinery for massive statist repression.
By 1919–20, anti-Bolshevik writings enjoyed limited circulation throughout Russia. One of these works, We, written by Zamiatin,38 depicted a totalitarian society in which peoples’ names were replaced by numbers, and the distinction between public and private life was all but obliterated, except for two hours a day when the “mighty uni-personal organism” was allowed to disintegrate “into separate cells.”39
Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same minute and the very same second we, in our millions, arise as one. At the very same hour we monomillionedly begin work—and, when we finish it, we do so monomillionedly. And, merging into but one body with multimillioned hands, at the very second designated by The Tables of Hourly Commandments we bring our spoons up to our mouths; at the very same second, likewise, we set out for a walk, or go to an auditorium, or the Hall of Taylor Exercise, or retire to sleep. (177)
The One State forbade romantic love and the free conduct of sexual life, for
isn’t it an absurdity that the State … could allow sexual life without any control whatsoever? Anybody, any time, and as much as one wanted to.… Completely unscientifically, like brutes. And, like brutes, they bred offspring gropingly. Isn’t it laughable—to know horticulture, poultry culture, pisciculture … and yet be unable to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child culture. (178)
Like Zamiatin, Rand rejected the One State. In the 1930s, having escaped to America, she would author a number of anticollectivist writings of her own, including the “semi-autobiographical” novel, We the Living, and a futuristic novelette called Anthem. These works would portray Rand’s rejection of the intellectual trends during America’s so-called Red Decade, when many writers and artists embraced the promise of collectivism (B. Branden 1986, 95). But Rand’s early works can also be read as a passionate reaction against the dominant philosophic and cultural trends of the Silver Age. Rand would reject the Slavophile and Symbolist denigration of reason and their cultic commitment to the dissolution of self in a collective whole. She would reject the neo-Idealist defense of religion. She would reject Russian Marxism as a legitimating ideology for the newly emerging totalitarian state.
In her rejection of Russian mysticism, altruism, collectivism, and statism, Rand began to identify a philosophic conjunction that was not as apparent to others of her generation. Perhaps this unity was clearer to Rand because she had lived in a laboratory that had enabled her to make such grand inductive generalizations.
But in repudiating these traditions, Rand had absorbed the tendency toward synthesis so prevalent in Russian philosophy. Wherever the young Alissa Rosenbaum had turned, she would have encountered a nondualistic, formal commitment to the dialectic. This mode of inquiry was apparent in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which had influenced the philosophic and cultural movements of the Silver Age. It was also prevalent in the works of the Slavophiles, Solovyov and his successors, the Symbolists, the Russian Marxists, and the neo-Idealists of the religious renaissance. And the most important philosopher of this neo-Idealist tradition was Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, Rand’s teacher.
No study of Rand’s Objectivism would be complete without a consideration of the life and thought of N. O. Lossky, her philosophy professor at Petrograd University. The relationship between these two is of paramount historical importance because it was probably Lossky who introduced Rand to dialectical methods of analysis.