Ayn Rand
From Philosopedia
Rand, Ayn (2 February 1905 - 6 March 1982)
Alice Rosenbaum was born in St. Petersburg to a nonobservant Jewish family. Upon arriving in the United States, she renamed herself Ayn (rhymes with “nine”) after a Finnish woman whose work she had read.
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Facts and Fictions
Exemplary of mis-information about Rand, some have said that while she was living in Chicago, she decided to change her last name but keep the initials. Looking at her Remington-Rand typewriter, she decided upon Ayn Remington, later choosing Rand. According to Dr. Michael S. Berliner, however,
- No, she chose her last name while still living in Leningrad: the Ayn Rand Archives contains a 1926 letter from her sister written before Rand wrote from the USA, in which the name “Rand” is used. No, there was no Remington Rand typewriter (or company) in 1926; they were not produced until the early 1930s.
An atheist at the age of thirteen, Rand became the philosopher of Objectivism - to those who say that she appropriated the term “objective” from the Marxist regime she had fled, Dr. Berliner has written,
- She picked the term “Objectivism” because it indicates her metaphysics and epistemology, i.e., the view that reality exists independent of consciousness (a development of the Aristotelian "A is A"), and the recognition of the fact that a perceiver's (man's) consciousness must acquire knowledge or reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic)." She had wanted to use “existentialism” but it was already taken.
Many have said she adopted a dog-eat-dog outlook, Gore Vidal describing her philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” Others view this as not being the case.
Rand became known for her novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). For college students in the 1950s and 1960s Rand became something of a cult figure. By 1965 courses on her books and ideas were offered in eighty cities, and many started subscribing to her newsletter, The Objectivist. She opposed the altruism of welfare states and espoused a rational self-interest that included a woman’s right to have an abortion. As for underdogs, she once told an audience at West Point,
- Today’s mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy.
Basically, she believed that selfishness is a virtue, that altruism is a vice, that laissez-faire capitalism is our best possible choice:
- Since politics is a branch of philosophy, objectivism advocates certain political principles - specifically those of laissez-faire capitalism.
According to Corliss Lamont, in this outlook she suffers from “the reductive fallacy,” in which philosophers or others oversimplify by illegitimately classifying certain multiple phenomena under one category. Rand’s self-interest fallacy, he says, makes this popular novelist an individual “with philosophic pretensions and semantic naiveté.” But, according to Berliner,
- In his On Ayn Rand (in the Wadsworth philosophy series), Aristotelian scholar Allan Gotthelf disagrees with Lamont, terming her a “highly original thinker” whose thought is “groundbreaking.” And Robert Mayhew (a Seton Hall philosophy professor) writes, in his collection of essays on Anthem, that the novel portrays “the foundation that Western civilization requires, and what will result if that foundation is destroyed.”
Others have noted that the “Me Generation” of the 1970s found appealing her “rational selfishness,” and she had and still has a large following among many atheists. One who definitely disliked her was the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she allegedly depicted in The Fountainhead. This might be true, Berliner states,
- but it’s far from “definite." Wright seemed to say different things to different people. He was positive about The Fountainhead (see p. 112 in Letters of Ayn Rand), and the two had very congenial meetings (and he designed a house for her.
Berliner says it is completely false that Rand was depicting Wright in the work. Others, also have said this, suggesting she had another architect in mind or that she had no specific architect in mind. Adds Berliner,
- I think she she had no particular architect in mind at all (she based the character of Howard Roark on herself), though Wright’s architecture (not his personality or ideas) was by far the one she most admired. (I’ve just completed a book chapter on the topic of the relationship of Wright to Howard Roark.)
John Galt, the heroic inventor/philosophor in Atlas Shrugged complained that
- We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.
That work also includes
- Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value.
On Religion
Of religion, Rand wrote much, including the following:
- Religion . . . is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worse curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.
- For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.
Martin Seymour-Smith, a critic, is quite explicit: “Unfortunately her crypto-totalitarian and ultra-simplistic ideas have had some influence on the conservatively bred young, since they allow people to be ruthless without a bad conscience. Her ‘philosophy’ is capitalistic-Superman (as in the figure in the comics): the ‘great’ men are those who use others, in the name of ‘reason,’ with an enlightened ruthlessness. To this, Berliner says,
- On the other hand: Rand’s ethics and politics are as anti-totalitarian as it is possible to be; she was an uncompromising opponent of every form of totalitarianism, communist and fascist - as shown by her philosophy of inalienable individual rights. Likewise, she and Nietzsche are philosophic opposites, including his Superman view. For example, intellectual historian John Ridpath writes that “Ayn Rand repeatedly stated that her philosophy was profoundly in opposition to Nietzsche. And so, it turns out, it was. . . . Ayn Rand, beyond not being a Nietzschean, is Nietzsche’s greatest twentieth century opponent .”
As icing on the cake, Seymour-Smith added, The Fountainhead - like her other books - is offensively ill written (‘pedestrian, pockmarked with short, clipped staccato sentences’).”
On the other hand: The New York Times praised We the Living for “remarkably fluent English and the [London] Times Literary Supplement praised its “irreproachable English.” The New York Times called The Fountainhead “amazingly literate,” and the New York Herald-Tribune] (review written by a Harvard English prof.) said that its “style would satisfy the most exacting professor.” Clifton Fadiman (in a review of Atlas Shrugged) said that Rand “possessed the story-telling ability of a Dumas or a Margaret Mitchell.” In fact, many reviewers praised her writing even when (like Fadiman) disagreeing with her ideas.
Objectivism
Henry Binswanger, the philosopher who edits The Ayn Rand Lexicon, has written a summary of Objectivism.
The Monist was edited by John Hospers.
Personal Life
While working on a Cecil B. DeMille set, she encountered an extra, Frank O’Connor, with whom she fell in love and they were married for 50 years. She called him “Cubbyhole” and he called her “Kitten Fluff,” details brought out in Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, a movie produced and directed in 1998 by Michael Paxton. The movie shows her as being a histrionically proud figure who loved attention, “tiddlywink music,” and movie star Gary Cooper.
Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to Nathaniel Branden, with whom she had an affair after getting the consent of both her husband and Branden's wife. Branden, who became her principal heir, reportedly lost interest in Rand sexually - she was 61 and he was 36 - and secretly began a relationship with a younger woman. According to Stephen M. Silverman's Where There’s a Will (1991), Rand found out about it in 1967 and not only cut him and his wife out of her life but also cut him out of the will. The final estate was valued at $877,000., all of which went to a close associate, Leonard Peikoff, a disciple who had kept in touch with her daily for the last four years of her life.
The widely different evaluations of Rand as a person and as a thinker continue to be as varied several decades after her death as they were when she was alive.
The Ayn Rand Institute, the Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, has a website describing essay contests, student clubs, internships, teacher and professor resources.
Her Death
Rand’s New York Times obituary was written by Edwin McDowell, who described her belief that “selfishness was good and altruism evil,” and that the welfare of society must always be subordinate to individual self-interest. Objectivism, he said was in her words a belief in “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of life.”
Rand’s final services were held in Manhattan’s Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, where she was laid out next to a six-foot-high dollar sign, her favorite symbol. The services were followed by a private burial at which mourners dropped flowers into the grave. Kipling’s “If” was read.
(See a review by Sam Anderson of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made, (Doubleday, $35, 2009); Adam Kirsch reviewed it in The New York Times.
{Michael S. Berliner, e-mail 25 September 2006; CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; FFRF; Objectivist Newsletter, Issue #1, 1962; TYD; WWS}
