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traditions in Western thought seeks to uncover the fundamental errors they share. In most cases, Rand shows that each of the opposing schools of philosophy is half right and half wrong.

      Since Rand discovered value in many of the philosophies she analyzed, some critics have attempted to tie Objectivism to such traditions as rationalism, materialism, or existentialism.⁶ What her critics failed to grasp was that she was working toward a new synthesis, which required that she use established categories in the process of transcending them. She both accepted and rejected significant principles within each of the polar traditions which she analyzed. Consequently, by abstracting particular aspects from the totality of her thought, one can see elements of rationalism and empiricism, idealism and materialism, liberalism and conservatism. Rand explains: “Most men hold mixed premises; most schools of thought are full of contradictions. One may find some elements of value, of truth and of rationality in many people and schools. This does not make them Objectivist.”⁷

      Part 2 examines the distinctiveness of Objectivism, even as it traces significant parallels between Rand’s thought and others in the history of philosophy. But in dissecting the content of Objectivism, much of the following discussion may sometimes obscure the broad fundamentals of Rand’s worldview. Rand herself was once asked to identify the central tenets of her system. Her identification, in each of the major branches of philosophy, is worth recalling:

      1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality. 2. Epistemology: Reason. 3. Ethics: Self-interest. 4. Politics: Capitalism. If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”⁸

      THE REJECTION OF COSMOLOGY

      Rand’s revolt against formal dualism first manifested itself in the realm of metaphysics or ontology.⁹ Metaphysics, for Rand, refers to that branch of philosophy which “deals with the fundamental nature of reality.”¹⁰ Metaphysics involves the widest abstractions pertaining to existence as such.¹¹ Whereas the special sciences separate a part of existence and investigate it thoroughly, metaphysics is concerned with the ultimate context of reality and knowledge, that is, “being qua being.”

      Rand’s approach to the ontological foundations of philosophy was minimalist. In fact, beyond the general axiomatic proposition of existence, Rand refused—on principle—to commit herself to any a priori judgments about the ultimate constituents of reality. She believed that epistemology was the crux of philosophy because it related to the means of knowledge and was the base of all special sciences. Rand herself considered ontology and epistemology inseparable, and argued that each therefore implied the other (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 4). Thus her axioms serve as the foundation for her theories both of being and of knowing.

      Having been schooled in ancient philosophy by Lossky, Rand was well acquainted with the classical Greek thinkers. In the area of ontology, she generally celebrated the accomplishments of antiquity, most particularly the works of Aristotle. But she viewed the inclusion of cosmology in ancient metaphysics as an error that had had disastrous effects throughout intellectual history. Cosmology sought to define the specific nature of the universe. For Rand, the specific nature of the universe was a scientific question. The legitimacy of philosophy depended on its ability to provide the ontological and logical foundations for all forms of inquiry. Philosophy was metascientific.

      Rand identified Thales, the father of Western thought, as the first philosopher to define the nature of the universe in cosmological terms. Even though Thales was groping toward a unified view of existence and knowledge, he argued that the universe consisted of water, air, and fire. By concluding “that water was the primary metaphysical (or cosmological) element,” Thales pretended to an omniscience that was impossible to the human mind. Such an approach was profoundly rationalistic because it dogmatized science by reifying the available knowledge into a self-sufficient whole. It made metaphysics dependent upon “every new discovery of physics.”

      Rand believed that such rationalism had been duplicated many times throughout the history of philosophy. Later empiricists were correct to repudiate this approach. However, Rand argued that Thales, Plato, and the ancient cosmologists were, in fact, “arrested empiricists” because they had formed conclusions about “the ultimate constituents of the universe” by “taking partial knowledge as omniscience.”¹² The cosmologists had projected epistemological conclusions into their metaphysical foundations. But if the rationalists were “arrested empiricists” for reifying their current state of knowledge, then empiricists displayed a “Hegelian or Rationalistic” tendency to dogmatize their empirical conclusions. Both alternatives depend on the same fundamental error. They

      advance conditions for what that primary has to be.… You cannot say philosophically what conditions you will ascribe to that which is not known. We cannot know by what means we will grasp something not known today.… And yet in making any kind of conclusions about the ultimate stuff of the universe, you are necessarily committing that error. You are prescribing conditions of what something not known to you now has to be. (“Appendix,” 292–93)

      In Rand’s rejection of cosmology, then, there is an important grasp of the origins of dualism in the history of Western thought. Rand argues that the inclusion of cosmology in the body of philosophy necessarily generated antinomic tensions. Cosmology contributed to the belief that the universe could be defined in terms of two separate spheres of reality. This led to the development of reductionistic, monistic alternatives in which one sphere is emphasized to the detriment of the other. In her journal, Rand wrote: “‘Cosmology’ has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ will be wiped out—or rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.”¹³

      Rationalists and idealists, empiricists and materialists have traditionally embraced one polar principle over another. Each has sought to identify the primary “stuff” of the world. Rationalists identify the basic substance as spiritual or ideal; empiricists, as atomistic and material. The former view matter as a manifestation of the spirit, whereas the latter see consciousness as a pure epiphenomenon of material elements. The former affirm the identity of consciousness, but reject the material basis of reality, and the latter accept the reality of the body, of the physical world in general, but doubt the ontological integrity of the mind. Such traditions cut “man” in two,

      “Setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other.… They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature.” (Atlas Shrugged, 1026)

      Both Rand and Peikoff argue that in the history of philosophy, it was the Pythagoreans who first conceptualized this dualism in their distinction between this world and the world of numbers. Their orphic cults taught that the body was the tomb of the soul. Plato absorbed this Pythagorean legacy and distinguished between the world of particulars and the world of universals or Forms.¹⁴ Augustine christianized this dualism and argued that there was an incommensurability between this world and the next (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 7). It was not until Aquinas resurrected Aristotelianism that philosophers began seeing existence as singular, albeit one in which there was a natural, hierarchic totality ascending to God (lecture 8).

      Rand contended, however, that at the birth of modern philosophy, dualism reared its ugly head in a more sophisticated form with Descartes, who saw the physical world and human consciousness as two distinct, unrelated spheres. By beginning with the metaphysical assumption that the spiritual and the physical are independent of each other Cartesian philosophy creates the problem of mind-body interaction.¹⁵

      By banishing cosmology from the realm of metaphysics, Rand sought to

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