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with Marxism and dualism with capitalism, Popper agrees with Marx. Marx argued that dualism was both essential and historically specific to the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, capitalism both reflected and generated the dualities in the modem world. His historical project points toward a communist society that would transcend these dualities and the capitalist system on which they depend.

      Rand proposes a resolution transcending the Popperian and Marxian alternatives. She links her defense of capitalism to a strong, dialectical sensibility. Her vision of the free society rejects traditional antinomies, but embraces the morality and practicality of the capitalist system. Given the collapse of Marxism as a theoretical paradigm and political force, Rand’s alternative is particularly compelling. In many ways, it redeems the integrity of dialectics as a radical method by rescuing it from its mystical, collectivist, and statist incarnations.

      DIALECTICS AND DUALISM

      Yet Rand would have been the first to deny her status as a “dialectical” thinker. Rand’s own view of “dialectics” was based on her experiences in the Soviet Union. In Rand’s mind, the very word “dialectics” must have raised a “red flag” of sorts. In 1959, she saw Nikita Khrushchev on American television. As she later recounted, he recited “the credo of dialectic materialism in the exact words and tone in which I had heard it recited at exams, in my college days, by students at the University of Leningrad.”³⁰ This credo was branded into the minds of students as an ideological tool of Soviet repression. Barbara Branden (1986) writes that Rand “understood the theory of dialectical materialism—and had on her body and spirit the scars of its practice” (42). For Rand, “dialectics” was pure Heraclitean nonsense; it was the view “that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A.”³¹ In this sense, Rand, like Popper, interprets dialectics as an endorsement of logical contradiction, embodying a view of the universe based on nonidentity.³²

      Certainly dialectical language at times obscures a strictly logical understanding of contradiction and identity. Some writers are guilty of claiming that dialectical “logic” transcends the so-called formal, static, or one-dimensional logic of Aristotle.³³ The question is, in part, one of semantics. Unless I clarify my own understanding of “dialectics,” I am vulnerable to at least two criticisms: (1) that in reconstructing Objectivism, I utilize categories and distinctions foreign to Rand’s own system (Kelley, 20 August 1989C); and (2) that, in focusing on “dialectics” as a key component of the Objectivist approach, I have linked Rand to her Russian predecessors on the basis of a nonessential characteristic (Kelley in Kelley 1993T).

      I reject both criticisms as follows:

      Throughout the history of philosophy the term “dialectics” has been used in many different senses. Aristotle recognized dialectic and rhetoric as counterparts of each other; for him, rhetoric was the art of public speaking, or the “faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” whereas dialectic was the art of logical discussion and argumentation.³⁴ In dialectic, the interlocutor proceeds from accepted (or specific) propositions and argues toward a more basic (or general) conclusion.³⁵ Although mastery of this dialectic technique was the hallmark of Socratic and Platonic philosophy, Aristotle argued that it was insufficient for establishing scientific truth.³⁶ Nevertheless, he valued the dialectic because it demanded the study of questions from multiple vantage points. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Marx, Engels, and Lenin recognized Aristotle as the father of dialectical inquiry. Engels, in fact, called Aristotle “the Hegel of the ancient world,” who “had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.”³⁷ And Lenin argued that within Aristotle lies “the living germs of dialectics and inquiries about it.”³⁸

      More than two thousand years after Aristotle’s death, Hegel developed a conception of dialectics as an ontological and historical process. Hegel’s dialectical method affirms the impossibility of logical contradiction and focuses instead on relational “contradictions” or paradoxes revealed in the dynamism of history. For Hegel, opposing concepts could be identified as merely partial views whose apparent contradictions could be transcended by exhibiting them as internally related within a larger whole. From pairs of opposing theses, elements of truth could be extracted and integrated into a third position.³⁹ Other philosophers saw this form of dialectics as a triadic movement in which the conflict of “thesis” and “antithesis” is resolved through “synthesis.”⁴⁰ Dialectical materialists placed this process on an economic foundation and used it as the basis for a philosophy of history.

      The best way to understand the dialectical impulse is to view it as a technique to overcome formal dualism and monistic reductionism. Dualism attempts to distinguish two mutually exclusive spheres, though it often leads theorists to emphasize one sphere to the detriment of another. Thus one can differentiate between genuine philosophical dualists, who see two coequal principles at work, and philosophical monists, who accept the dichotomies defined by dualists and reduce one polarity to an epiphenomenon of the other.⁴¹ Wolf Heydebrand (1981) explains that these dualistic forms can be found in nearly every branch of philosophy: in ontology, in the radical separation of body and mind, or matter and consciousness; in epistemology, in the radical separation of the real object and the datum present to the knowing mind; in ethics, in the radical distinction between good and evil (92).

      Dialectical method is neither dualistic nor monistic. A thinker who employs a dialectical method embraces neither a pole nor the middle of a duality of extremes. Rather, the dialectical method anchors the thinker to both camps. The dialectical thinker refuses to recognize these camps as mutually exclusive or exhaustive.⁴² He or she strives to uncover the common roots of apparent opposites. He or she presents an integrated alternative that examines the premises at the base of an opposition as a means to its transcendence. In some cases, the transcendence of opposing points of view provides a justification for rejecting both alternatives as false. In other cases, the dialectical thinker attempts to clarify the genuinely integral relationship between spheres that are ordinarily kept separate and distinct.⁴³

      In Rand’s work, this transcendence of opposites is manifest in every branch of philosophy. Rand’s revolt against formal dualism is illustrated in her rejection of such “false alternatives” as materialism and idealism, intrinsicism and subjectivism, rationalism and empiricism. Rand was fond of using what Thorslev has called a “Both-And” formulation in her critique of dualism.⁴⁴ Typically, Rand argues that Both X And Y share a common premise, Z. Her characteristic expression is: “Just as X depends upon Z, so too does Y depend upon Z.” Moreover, Rand always views the polarities as “mutually” or “reciprocally reinforcing,” “two sides of the same coin.” This is not merely an expository technique. Rand was the first to admit that a writer’s style is a product of his or her “psycho-epistemology” or method of awareness.⁴⁵ By her own suggestion, one can infer that such an expository style reflects a genuinely dialectical methodology.

      It must be emphasized, however, that Rand does not literally construct a synthesis out of the debris of false alternatives. Rather, she aims to transcend the limitations that, she believes, traditional dichotomies embody. In some instances, Rand sees each of the opposing points of view as being half-right and half-wrong. Consequently, at times, her resolution contains elements from each of the two rejected positions.

      Rand’s dialectical approach is also illustrated in her recognition of such integral relationships as that between mind and body, reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice. For Rand, these factors are distinctions within an organic unity. Neither can be fully understood in the absence of the other, since each is an inseparable aspect of a wider totality.

      It is this emphasis on the totality that is essential to the dialectical mode of inquiry. Dialectics is not merely a repudiation of formal dualism. It is a method that preserves the analytical integrity of the whole. Although it recommends study of the whole from the vantage point of any part, it eschews reification, that is, it avoids the abstraction of a part from the whole and its illegitimate conceptualization as a whole unto itself. The dialectical method recognizes that what is separable in thought is

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