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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
It is for this reason that Rand saw “Faith as the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” But at this point in her intellectual development, Rand was not certain about why people have abdicated the use of logical reasoning in the governance of their lives. She asked if reason is impossible to individuals, or if individuals have merely been taught that it is futile. If people have been taught such, then “the teacher is the church.” Rand hoped “to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”27
Just as religion was a source of social dualism, so too was statism. The theme of We the Living, according to Rand, was the “individual against the State” (New Intellectual, 60). Rand did not believe that there was a necessary incompatibility between the individual and all forms of government. She was not an anarchist; she rejected neither government per se, nor truly human social relationships. What she opposed was statism in all its incarnations.
Communism both constituted and perpetuated a social dichotomy between the individual and the masses. Under communism, the masses are collectively organized by the coercive state. In such a system, the individual has no alternative but conflict with the society at large. Hence, it is quite possible that in the early edition of the novel, Kira’s call to sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few is the only alternative she can advocate within the context of communism, which sacrifices the few for the sake of the many. Just as religion pits thinking against living, communism pits the individual against the community. Within this context, Kira is forced to choose between two poles of a deadly duality. When she is able to remove herself briefly from this context, she exclaims that indeed, she does not wish to fight for or against the people. She wants only “to be left alone.”
Like Rand, Kira lived in a society which had no developed concept of the individual. The Russian language does not even have a word for “privacy.”28 This peculiarity of Russian might have motivated Rand to write, several years later, in The Fountainhead: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy” (684). Russian religious and political culture did not recognize the sphere of the private. Kira knew that it was “an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt.” But under communism, “they make it felt with particular ugliness” (We the Living, 49). She protests to Andrei, that it is “a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven, and then not to dream of it, but to demand it” (107).
Hence, Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses, as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective. It is a system that compels Kira to see the world dualistically, in terms of herself versus everyone else. Soviet communism had appropriated the essence of Russian sobornost’, the fusion of the individual and the collective whole. But instead of preserving the uniqueness and privacy of its members, it sought to annihilate their individual identities. For Rand, communism is a system that defeats “the living” by robbing them of the very qualities that make them human. It institutionalizes a war of the masses against the solitary person.
After she wrote We the Living, Rand knew that she had more work to do. By 1934, she began to view her writing as part of a broader project. In her own words, “These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master philosophy—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has been said.”29
She intended that her journals would be only for her own use and did not worry if her thoughts appeared “disjointed.” Despite her humility in characterizing herself as “an amateur philosopher,” Rand’s musings are much more articulate and self-conscious than she intimates.
Rand hoped that once her ideas were fully developed, she would be able to present them as a “Mathematics of Philosophy.” She aimed to “arrange the whole in a logical system, proceeding from a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems” (7). But it was clear to her that such a project would take time and effort.
In her journals, Rand dealt critically with the writings of other thinkers, such as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Peter Kropotkin, and José Ortega y Gasset. Having rejected both religion and communism, both the worship of God and the idolatry of the collective, Rand wanted to grasp why people allowed themselves to obey standards set by others. Reading Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, she was perplexed by the actions of “the mass man.” Mass men are not those who obeyed their own standards. Rather, they submit to the dictates of others. They are not genuine individuals, in Rand’s view. Since they lack internally generated ideals, they cannot be free. Rand believed that no human quality such as freedom could be “disconnected from its content.” She asked: “Isn’t there a terrible mistake of abstraction here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said, ‘not freedom from what, but freedom for what’?”30
For Rand, the “mistake of abstraction” is the social division of ideals and action, theory and practice, morality and practicality. No human value can be separated from the conditions that make its achievement possible. Rand was developing a view of the individual that included not merely negative notions of freedom, but positive notions of autonomy and self-responsibility. Autonomy demands that individuals achieve values by their own effort, not by a mystical alliance with God or a selfless union with the collective. The person who attains values and power by pandering to the masses is to be rejected as “a slave to those masses.” A genuine selfishness, an “exalted egoism,” demands that the individual achieve his or her “own theoretical values and then apply them to practical reality,” for it is one’s “actual living” that must take priority “over all other considerations.”31
Seeing “history as a deadly battle of the mass and the individual” (8), Rand was poised to begin working on a mammoth literary project whose “first purpose … is a defense of egoism in its real meaning.”32 Her working title for the book was Second-Hand Lives. Ultimately, it would be called The Fountainhead.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD
In 1935, Rand began to outline the plot and characters of the book that would be her first, genuine commercial success. In these early outlines, Rand continues in her quest for a nondualistic, integrated view of human being.
The Fountainhead follows the exploits of Howard Roark, Rand’s first, fully formed “ideal man.”33 Roark is a brilliant architect, a man of integrity expelled from school for his unwillingness to conform to traditional architectural styles. One of Roark’s classmates is Peter Keating, a man who always relied on Roark’s assistance to complete school projects. While Roark is destitute and looking for work, Keating becomes a professional success by manipulating those around him, and by imitating old and tired architectural standards. He lives a “second-hand” life, in which “the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person” (Fountainhead, 607).
Throughout the novel, we meet other characters, such as Dominique Francon, Gail Wynand, and Ellsworth Toohey. Dominique is Roark’s beloved, and one of the more bizarre characters in the novel. She separates herself from the things that she grows to love, including Roark. She is convinced that no man of integrity can succeed in a world ruled by the mob. Wynand, the most tragic figure in Rand’s fiction, is a newspaper magnate who boasts that he has the power to mold the tastes of the masses. His belief that everyone can be corrupted is challenged by his encounters with Roark. Toohey, a critic writing for