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that also leads Lossky to reject the “causal theory of perception,” which states that “the action of external objects upon the sense organs and through them on the cortex is the cause that produces in the subject’s mind the contents of sense perception.” Although the causal theory assumes that there are external objects, it inevitably regards everything in human consciousness as “mental and subjective.”¹⁵ Rejecting the causal theory as subjectivist, and Aristotle’s theory as insufficiently intuitivist, Lossky (1955) argued that genuinely “direct intuition” preserves the objectivity of the existents it perceives; the mind processes information through an “immediate contemplation of reality” (139). We perceive existents as they exist, not as distorted copies.

      Rand would have applauded her teacher’s rejection of the subjectivist theory, but she would have viewed Lossky’s approach as nonobjective and “intrinsicist.”¹⁶ Rand argued that although the subjectivists view concepts as products of consciousness apart from existence, the intrinsicists view concepts as intuitively grasped products of reality apart from any “distortions” of consciousness. For Rand, the subjectivists attempt to circumvent reality, and the intrinsicists try to circumvent the identity of consciousness. Rand would have argued that Lossky had merely embraced intrinsicism as a means of fighting subjectivism, and that neither approach is genuinely objective.

      But for Lossky, objectivity is preserved through direct intuition in which the metaphysical existence of the object is “given to” the mind, thus collapsing the distinction between form and matter, essence and existence. Epistemologically, people achieve a coordination between subject and object that provides for a direct insight into both the essential and existential reality of the thing. And yet, because we are not omniscient, we are never able to know completely and exhaustively the infinite complexity of an object in its organic wholeness. Each act of discrimination and comparison is an attempt to resolve the fragmentation and incompleteness of human knowledge (Lossky 1957, 43). As a neo-Leibnizian personalist, Lossky argues that every substantival agent in the universe grasps a fragment of the whole. From the smallest electron to the Absolute World Spirit, all substantival agents are “consubstantial” and “welded into a single whole” (41). Hence it is in the Whole that the Truth is to be found.

      This variation on Hegel’s dictum is more a metaphysical proposition than it is an epistemological one. For Lossky assumed the existence of substantival agents on levels lower and higher than the human. These are metaphysical assertions which Rand would have rejected categorically. And yet it must be remembered that Lossky presented an intuitivist perspective that he believed owed much to the concrete ideal-realism of Aristotle. Though he rejected aspects of the Aristotelian epistemology, Lossky saw Aristotle as a philosophical intuitivist. In later years, Rand would present an interpretation of Aristotle that linked the Greek philosopher to a similar metaphysical-intuitivist tradition. Rand explained that Aristotle affirmed the existence of essences in concretes.¹⁷ Aristotle “held that definitions refer to metaphysical essences, which exist in concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly” (Introduction, 52).

      She argued that Objectivism departs from Aristotle’s theory by regarding “essence” as epistemological and contextual, rather than as “metaphysical.” One can speculate that Lossky’s lectures on Aristotle provided Rand with an intuitivist interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy.¹⁸ This might explain her insistence that Aristotle’s theory was a form of intuitivism with an emphasis on metaphysical “essence.”¹⁹

      It is clear, however, that Lossky saw Aristotle as a spiritual ally in his struggles against dualism and atomism. After all, Aristotle had opposed both the Eleatic monists and the Heracliteans. As Tibor Machan (1992) explains: “Eleatic monism is the affirmation of identity to the exclusion of difference and the affirmation of stasis to the exclusion of change. The Heraclitean flux is the affirmation of difference to the exclusion of identity and the affirmation of change to the exclusion of stasis” (48).

      Embodying both change and identity, being and becoming, Aristotle’s notion of identity is profoundly ontological. Becoming presupposes Being, change presupposes identity. Like Rand after him, Lossky praised Aristotle’s ability to integrate these facts of identity and change, the basic axioms of existence and mind. Lossky endorsed an ontological interpretation of the laws of logic.²⁰ For Lossky ([1917] 1928), “Logical and metaphysical principles fundamentally coincide: they are the expression of the same general structure of the world, considered in its different aspects (viz. in its significance for knowledge and for being)” (173). Like Aristotle, Lossky viewed the laws of logic as “therefore, no less a real than … a logical necessity.”²¹ A is A, but this logical identity is not a static tautology; it too is an expression of a metaphysical fact.

      Lossky appreciated Aristotle’s attempt to transcend the one-sided traditions of his predecessors. Aristotle’s emphasis on the concrete led him to condemn both the Platonic idealists and the Democritean atomists. For Aristotle, Plato had committed the fallacy of reification; he had inferred the existence of (specific) things from a (general) Ideal abstraction. Aristotle aimed to comprehend the universal through the part, grasping the abstraction through an apprehension of the particular.²² It is Aristotle’s dedication to the real concrete that enabled him to bridge the gap between universals and particulars. Thus Aristotle sought to transcend the polarity between ideas and sensory objects, mind and body. Unlike the Platonists, he saw a closer affinity between mind and body, arguing that it is only through the corporeal functions of the body, that the mind can exercise its distinctive faculties.²³ But in contrast to the atomists, Aristotle maintained the integrity of the whole as a whole.

      Like Aristotle before him, Lossky did not isolate an abstracted particular from its context, a part from the whole. In Aristotle’s teleology, the actualization of an organism’s potential cannot be reduced to the potentiality of each of its elements taken separately. Allan Gotthelf explains that for Aristotle,

      The development, structure, and functioning of living organisms cannot be wholly explained by—because it is not wholly due to—the simple natures and potentials of the elements which constitute these organisms. No sum of actualizations … ‘element-potentials’ is sufficient by itself for the production of those complex living structures and functionings for which Aristotle offers teleological explanations.²⁴

      Thus, for Aristotle, everything is part of a system of related things:

      When any one of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the discussion, but the relation of such part to the total form. Similarly, the true object of architecture is not bricks, mortar, or timber, but the house; and so the principal object of natural philosophy is not the material elements, but their composition, and the totality of the form, independently of which they have no existence.… [A] house does not exist for the sake of bricks and stones, but these materials for the sake of the house, and the same is the case with the materials of other bodies.²⁵

      Like Aristotle, Lossky rejected mechanistic conceptions in favor of teleological explanations. Mechanism sees events in simple temporal sequence and views causality as an external relation between disconnected elements. It implicitly accepts a vision of the whole that is inorganic and atomistic. By contrast, Lossky (1934a) argued that “the whole conditions its elements and is not the sum of them” (149). His teleological conception suggests that “a new event is conditioned not only by the preceding events but also by the future, namely, by the purpose for the sake of which the change is produced. Thus, e.g., the structure of the eye is partly conditioned by the purpose of having an organ of vision” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 154–55).

      It is this Aristotelian emphasis on the integrity of the whole that was furthered by thinkers such as Leibniz and Hegel, modern philosophers who made a huge impact on Lossky.²⁶ Lossky regarded Hegel as a great philosophical intuitivist, another in the grand tradition of concrete ideal-realism. Hegel “makes logic subordinate to the

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