No other past intellectual, it seems, has solidified the notion of ‘what you see is what you get’ more so than Ayn Rand, the herald of the objectivist movement. I became acquainted with her approach to the world after pursuing totalitarian literature, in the aftermath of my study of Orwell’s 1984, Zamyatin’s We, and Huxley’s Brave New World. Though I have yet to trudge through Atlas Shrugged, a one-thousand page tomb of objectivist ideals, I found a great amount of intellect contained within one of her very tiniest literary contributions- Anthem, a short dystopian narrative that gave me ample insight for the Randian way of thought. A couple of websites later, I was a veritable born-again objectivist.
I continue to find much of what Rand held dear to be incredibly close to the truth of our world. But the deeper I delve into her literature, the more and more often I find an incredible lack of room for a belief in a higher power, nor for any kind of savior, indeed, any way off this planet and into a better place at all. Needless to say, the intellectual grind began to erode at my emotional and spiritual well-being.
Rand writes of faith:
“Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.” (For The New Intellectual, p 178)
But what of faith causes one to cease trusting the divine gift of free will and surrender the capacity of free thought? This Randian argument is an illogical ploy of black versus white- the entirety of God’s will against the individual will of the objectivity reality of the individual. Like any and all things, a grey area must exist.
Faith is trust, in many ways. Faith can be a cry for help, or a warm intellectual conversation, or a deep and intimate moment. Faith does not erode your ability to make decisions for yourself, nor your capacity to learn from your shortcomings and inevitable mistakes. With the full knowledge that a power greater than yourself will guide the circumstances of the world to compensate for any and all actions that you take, that the entirety of your life will put you in the experience necessary regardless of your socioeconomic, political, religious, or intellectual surroundings- faith merely becomes the knowledge of this phenomenon, never an interruption of it.
So as Rand deviates from the truth by way of atheistic endeavor, does she also prove more than reconcilable through her explanation of free will:
“To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call “human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question “to be or not to be” is the question “to think or not to think.”
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.” (For the New Intellectual, 120)
The argument that free will is the central and most crucial difference between man and any other animal is not only exactly correct- it is also the most logical tie back to the sanctity of God’s intentions for the human race. The human condition was built in God’s like image…which is the precise reason we inhabit the Earth in the manner that we do- it was created and intended to be our dwelling, not that of dinosaurs or monkeys or any other species. But the more specific target- the capacity for reason- that is the ‘at-will’ institution granted by God to human beings, and Rand stops short of delving anywhere beyond what her own objectivity allowed her to see for herself.
Part of the journey, methinks, is admitting that one can study one’s own reality all they want, because it was dictated to him or her specifically for that reason, but understanding that which is not intended for your spiritual and emotional psyche, or that which is intended for NO MAN to understand, is beyond impossible to discover, let alone comprehend. Rand acknowledges the objective boundary of each man:
“Objectivity begins with the realization that man (including his every attribute and faculty, including his consciousness) is an entity of a specific nature who must act accordingly; that there is no escape from the law of identity, neither in the universe with which he deals nor in the working of his own consciousness, and if he is to acquire knowledge of the first, he must discover the proper method of using the second; that there is no room for the arbitrary in any activity of man, least of all in his method of cognition—and just as he has learned to be guided by objective criteria in making his physical tools, so he must be guided by objective criteria in forming his tools of cognition: his concepts.” (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 110)
However, the divine origin of our capacity for reason remained unknown to Rand for the entirety of her literary livelihood.
I applaud Rand’s remarks of the nature of man’s capacities. I have yet to find a description of life on Earth to be more profound than the objectivist explanation. However, grasping the ‘imaginary numbers’ of the universe’s underpinnings- an existence beyond the capacity of man’s resources, the nature of a being that is more powerful than the whole of our comprehension- is a side of Rand that is embarrassingly terse and concrete. Just as yin and yang are considered opposites, as are the concrete and the abstract portions of our world and beyond. Failure to grasp both is an unbalanced viewpoint of a fascinating and unendingly-complex phenomenon that transcends traditional religion, ridiculous politics, or proletariat entertainment. Faith is the only channel by which a mere man can hope to attain comfort in the face of such awe-inspiring capacities.
I wrote something along similar lines, though it's not as well explained as yours.
ReplyDeletehttp://tofindaspark.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post.html