Ayn Rand’s philosophy and “sense of life” as presented in her novels are inspiring and very influential to millions of people, including myself. However, I have just finished reading the biography of Rand by Anne C. Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made. It is clear that something was wrong in Rand’s life. She believed that the “Pursuit of Happiness” was the highest calling of rational man, and yet she was miserable for much of her life and certainly at its end, despite enormous success. Furthermore she made those who followed her miserable and in the end rejected almost everyone who had been close to her.
I have thought a lot about this as her ideas are important to me and I am not about to throw out the whole structure of her philosophy. While she clearly got many many ideas right, there are some errors in her epistemology (how we know what we know) which I believe lead her astray, with devastating results to her and her close followers.
Rand believed that reality is objective and that through human consciousness and our senses we can learn about this reality and through our reason we can figure out its structure and laws; its nature. This is fundamental and her insistence on this is one of her great contributions to modern thinking. However, her next step takes her too far. She believed that not only are there absolutes (A is A), but that that you can know these absolutes absolutely. Here she tips over into mysticism, as absolute knowledge is not in the realm of science.
In science, you develop a model of the world (a hypothesis), then you test this model through experimentation to see if it matches what you find in the real world. If you find a good match, then this hypothesis can move to the status of a theory. Again the theory is always subject to testing against the real world. The real world is absolute (A is A) but human understanding of the world is always just a model. It can be a high probability model, but it is never absolute.
The world is complicated. Only the simplest of issues have all of the premises identified. Most issues have so many premises bearing on them, that it is impossible to know absolutely that you have a complete understanding of all of them. Secondly, even if you have correctly identified all of the premises which bear on an issue, and you could somehow know that you haven’t left any out, your understanding of the nature of these premises can never be better than the model (theory) you have of each premise. You can certainly work hard to identify the most likely premises that bear on an issue and you can work hard to construct models of all of the premises which are demonstrably of high probability of being true and thus gain a high probability for your model of reality, but what you know is always just a model of reality not reality itself. As Rand has pointed out so well: Reality is reality and it isn’t affected by what you think about it. The rational man does his best to match his model of the world (his understanding) to the real world. Rand was so proud of the map of the world which she constructed (with so much brilliance) that she confused the Map with the Terrain.
This confusion led to some of her erroneous conclusions. If you can know absolutely the nature of reality, then rational people cannot disagree. With the right premises, there is only one conclusion to be drawn and everyone must share this conclusion. Rand then went one step further, with disastrous effects on herself and the people around her. Since Rand was the most brilliant and most rational person around, her conclusions had the force of fact. If you disagreed with her you must be irrational and not have the right “sense of life.”
The result was an enforced conformity among Rand’s followers. Since Rand believed only one conclusion can be drawn by rational men on any issue (you can know reality absolutely), once Rand had come to a conclusion, then everyone had to agree with it. Any disagreement was met with anger and eventually with expulsion. Many of her followers were drawn by the clarity and beauty of Rand’s model of the world, her “sense of life,” but were hurt by lack of openness and the intolerance of deviation from Rand’s conclusions.
By the middle of her life and through to the end, she had so much confidence in her model of the world that she stopped seeking new data, she stopped testing her Map against the Terrain. In fact she went further: she actively misrepresented the facts as she knew them, to mold them to the model of the world she wanted to project. (She repeatedly said she had had no help in creating her philosophy, except for Aristotle, despite the huge influences she had from Nietzsche and Isabel Paterson. She said she had no help in her career despite money and help from her family and breaks offered to her from a number of people. She hid her sexual relationship with Nathaniel Brandon from even her closest friends.)
This sense that she was right and everyone else either agreed with her or they were wrong corrupted her and her relationships with her friends and closest associates. It went so far that her relationship with Brandon became sexual harrassment.
Imagine how different Rand’s life would have been and the life of her followers if she had fostered an open intellectual environment where new ideas were welcome, tested against the “sense of life” model that Rand had, but also tested against the reality of human nature and used to improve Rand’s “sense of life” model if the new idea proved to be a better fit. Imagine if there had been a healthy skepticism about the “sense of life” model. If it had been treated as an exciting new theory for people to live by, but with an understanding that new research in philosophy, psychology, economics, anthropology, etc. could and should modify and improve the model. Most importantly, imagine if Rand had thought of herself as a seeker of wisdom instead of its source. The enormous influence she has had on the world would have been magnified 100 fold.
