With Charity Toward None

An Analysis of Ayn Rand's Philosophy

William F. O'Neill

• Éditeur: Philosophical Library
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504022828
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Philosophical Criticism

This book is a study of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism. It addresses three basic questions: What is objectivism? What is the full meaning of the objectivist point of view? And what are the basic social implications of objectivism? The book is divided into two major sections. The first part summarizes Ayn Rand's philosophy with respect to three basic areas of inquiry: (1) knowing and the known, (2) personal value and the nature of man, and (3) the ethics of objectivism. The second part consists primarily of a critical analysis of the ideas presented in the earlier pages. The purpose of the study is to deal with Ayn Rand's basic premises; only secondary consideration is given to the way in which these premises apply to specific problems in such areas as politics, economics and esthetics. Throughout, O'Neill is less concerned with criticizing what Rand says than with determining whether what she says makes sense in terms of established procedures for rational and semantic analysis and with respect to generally accepted principles for the scientific verification of evidence.

PART ONE

THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVISM

Chapter I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND: A FEW INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS

The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

Alice in Wonderland

Writing about Ayn Rand is a treacherous undertaking. In most intellectual circles, she is either totally ignored or simply dismissed out of hand, and those who take her seriously enough to examine her point of view frequently place themselves in grave danger of guilt by association.

This is unfortunate, because—for better or worse—Miss Rand has refused to shut up and go away, and many of her ideas seem to possess a peculiar fascination for those who are more or less oblivious to the esthetic limits of legitimate intellectual debate. On the freeways of Southern California, for example (and while they have scarcely replaced Triple A decals as yet) the hero of Miss Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, has recently become the subject of automobile bumper stickers which occasionally loom up through the contaminated air to pose the insistent question, “Who is John Galt?” In a similar respect, in many of our colleges and universities, undergraduates are beginning to show a disconcerting enthusiasm for the bold, iconoclastic and uncompromising “individualism” which Miss Rand so stridently propounds.

In a sense, then, and regardless of whether certified academics formally choose to acknowledge her presence, Ayn Rand has made a rather significant impact on contemporary American culture. Whether or not she is to be deemed intellectually respectable, she is an important cultural phenomenon who, if anything, seems to flourish from the concerted neglect of the “intellectual establishment.”

Unfortunately, Miss Rand’s philosophy, which she terms “objectivism,” is difficult to grapple with. This difficulty arises for a variety of reasons. For one thing, her philosophy is perhaps best and most eloquently expressed in her works of fiction and, particularly, in her two major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In addition to this, most of her nonfiction consists of brief articles and essays of a highly polemical nature which were originally written either for her syndicated newspaper column or for The Objectivist, a monthly publication which Miss Rand publishes (until recently in collaboration with her erstwhile disciple, Nathaniel Branden). Finally, and as Miss Rand herself is well aware, her philosophy is, as yet, incomplete, unsystematized and largely implicit within pronouncements which are scattered widely throughout her various publications.¹

Much of what Miss Rand says is open to attack on a variety of different grounds—logical, linguistic or purely empirical. It is far too pat, however, simply to dismiss Ayn Rand as the progenitor of some new and exotic type of intellectual lunacy. She may be precisely this, but merely “labeling” her as such scarcely establishes the point, and, if she is to be judged guilty of some kind of philosophical felony, she should at least be presumed innocent until the evidence has been presented in some legitimate arena of intellectual enquiry.²

THE IMPACT OF OBJECTIVIST PHILOSOPHY

The scope and impact of Miss Rand’s philosophy of objectivism is very impressive. She is, by any objective standards, one of the most widely discussed philosophers of our times. Eight years after its initial publication in 1959 her most important work, the novel Atlas Shrugged has sold over a million copies, and her other well-known novel The Fountainhead, published over twenty years ago, has sold in excess of two million copies. Each continues to sell between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand copies every year.³ In addition, Miss Rand’s novels have been translated into over a dozen foreign languages and are read widely throughout the rest of the world. Her major works of non-fiction—For the New Intellectual; The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal—have enjoyed astonishing success for works dealing exclusively with philosophical problems and abstruse theoretical questions. The Virtue of Selfishness which was published in 1964, has gone through several printings in both paperback and hard cover and has now exceeded sales of over one half million. Nathaniel and Barbara Branden’s book Who is Ayn Rand? has also managed to sell over one hundred thousand copies.⁴

The popularity of Objectivism is by no means reflected solely in book sales, however. As of 1966, the Nathaniel Branden Institute was sending materials to over 60,000 persons.⁵ The pamphlet-newsletter The Objectivist presently goes out to over 15,000 subscribers. In 1966 the Nathaniel Branden Institute offered lecture courses in over eighty cities in the United States and Canada and was negotiating to begin operations in such varied places as Germany, Greenland, Viet Nam, Pakistan and the trusteeship area of the Marshall Islands.⁶ At the University of Denver a noted objectivist (who is also a Ph. D. in philosophy) Dr. Leonard Peikoff, conducted a graduate course entitled “Objectivism’s Theory of Knowledge.”⁷ During several months of 1964, the Nathaniel Branden Institute’s introductory course, “The Basic Principles of Objectivism” was offered on board a United States polaris submarine located somewhere in the mid-Atlantic.⁸

In 1966, approximately five thousand people—up 30 per cent from the previous year and up approximately 50 per cent from 1963—attended the courses given by the Nathaniel Branden Institute.⁹ During this same year, several thousand others attended individual lectures on the objectivist philosophy. In New York City alone approximately two hundred students were enrolled in the basic course in the principles of objectivism.¹⁰ Approximately two-thirds of these people are reported to be professional adults,¹¹ and some of Miss Rand’s most visible followers are highly trained people who are involved in the intellectual professions. These include physicians, professional writers, attorneys, psychologists, psychiatrists, economists, historians, and even professional philosophers.¹²

In addition to these considerations, Miss Rand’s influence has been significantly augmented by the coverage which she has been able to obtain in the mass media. For a period of time, she wrote a newspaper column which appeared in the Los Angeles Times.¹³ She has, on occasion, contributed a regular radio program entitled “Ayn Rand on Campus,” for the Columbia University Station WKCR (FM) in New York City¹⁴ and currently has a program entitled “Commentary” on radio station WBAI (FM) in New York City.¹⁵ In what is perhaps the supreme accolade which our society is capable of bestowing upon a public personality, she was made the subject of an interview in Playboy for March, 1964.

Miss Rand’s influence is, of course, particularly well-established at the college and university level. Approximately one-third of her readers are reported to be in the college age-group, and she has frequently been chosen as a hero or “most admired person” on polls conducted among contemporary college students.¹⁶ Her book The Virtue of Selfishness was selected as book-of-the-semester at Rice University during 1965.¹⁷ She has received the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where the entire faculty and student body devoted their attentions for a period of time to conducting a thorough discussion of Miss Rand’s ideas.¹⁸

Popularity is not verification, of course, but the fact remains that—however anyone may feel about them—Miss Rand’s ideas are very popular today. For better or for worse, she is winning the free competition of ideas, not only in many parts of the public arena, but, significantly, in many parts of the academic marketplace itself. Objectivists, as The Catholic World indicates, “are far more zealous and numerous than it is comfortable for us to admit.¹⁹

“Objectivism ”

Man needs a philosophy, states Rand, whether he is aware of his need or not.²⁰ He needs a “frame of reference, a comprehensive view of existence, no matter how rudimentary . . . a sense of being right, a moral justification of his actions, which means: a philosophical code of values.”²¹

Ayn Rand’s answer to this need is her philosophy of “objectivism,” which is, in the words of Nathaniel Branden “a philosophy for living on earth.”²²

The term “objectivism,” as it ...