by Greg S. Nyquist
Ayn Rand was wrong about many things, as I have taken pains to show in my book Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. But there was one issue that she was clearly right about — namely, her position the independent existence of an external, material world. Reality, Rand insisted, is "an objective absolute"; "facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes, or fears." Rand's unequivocal support of philosophical realism is the most refreshing aspect of her whole philosophy. Her association of realism with the acceptance of things as they are and must be and of anti-realism with evasion and cowardice before the truth constitutes a very genuine insight into the psychological motives behind every effort to deny or explain away the independent reality of material existence. If Rand had only endeavored to remain scrupulously faithful to this one seminal insight, she might have avoided the countless errors that inexorably desecrate the rest of her Objectivist philosophy. Unfortunately, Rand's realism was largely rhetorical. Her deepest convictions were at odds with a thorough realism. Her views of ethics, politics, history, and, most critically of all, of human nature, all betray the elemental realism she so eloquently expressed in her essays and novels.
Given that Rand's strongest point is her realism, you would think that her critics would seek to avoid any discussion of realism and instead focus on the less compelling aspects of her thought, such as her defense of selfishness or her attack on religion. After all, a good general attacks the enemy at his weakest point. Nothing could be more useless than to try to subdue a foe by assailing him at his strongest point. Yet this is precisely the strategy adopted by Rand critic Scott Ryan in his online book Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality, which critiques Rand from the vantage of "objective idealism." As Mr. Ryan himself puts it in the opening pages of his book: "I am ultimately arguing for a revival of rationalistic objective idealism as the proper philosophical foundation for any political theory that bases itself on reason and rights." "Objective idealism," for those who have no familiarity with this odd combination of words, is the view that existence consists, fundamentally, of a vast mental "absolute." Hegel, who first inflicted the civilized world with this species of metaphysics, described it in the following terms: "The Absolute Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea — a notion whose object is the Idea as such, and for which the objective is Idea — an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity." [Betrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 734]
Rather "heady stuff," as one commentator put it! Others have said much worse about it, and since the First World War, this philosophy has fallen into disrepute. But in the nineteenth century, objective idealism was very influential among the English and American professoriat, and included, among its expositors, some of the leading illuminaries of the day. Men like F. H. Bradley and Josiah Royce attempted to translate Hegel's obscure notions of the Absolute into at least semi-readable English. Their labors bequeathed to the world a metaphysical system of great complexity and sophistication, but one which, at bottom, amounts to nothing more than sophistry and verbalist illusion. By reducing everything to the mental, to a single "absolute" mind, the objective idealist has merely devised a kind of supra-personel solipsism in which the subjectivism implicit in earlier forms of idealism is evaded by making a solipsist of God. The world is nothing else but God thinking of a world, and we ourselves are nothing more than God's ideas inflicted with consciousness. The individual finds himself inundated under a pantheist flood. Yet this monistic unity, this "objective" ideality is, as Santayana, the great critic of idealism, pointed out, "apparent only." It is merely a "play within a play." "On the smaller stage the individual is nothing but the instrument and vehicle of divine decrees; in fact he is a puppet, and the only reality of him is the space he fills in the total spectacle. But that little stage is framed in by another, often overlooked, but ever present; and on this larger and nearer stage the ego struts alone. It is I that pull the strings, enjoy the drama, supply its plot and moral, and possess the freedom and actuality which my puppets lack. On the little stage the soul of a man is only one of God's ideas; on the big stage, God is simply my idea of God and the purpose of the play is to express my mind." This philosophy, therefore, concludes Santayana, "is accordingly subjective and all its realism is but a pose and a tone willfully assumed." The "objectivity" of the objective idealist is "only a show, a matter of make-believe, something imputed to things and persons by the mind, whose poetic energies it manifests. Everything must be set down as a creation of mind, simply because it is an object of thought or knowledge." [Egotism in German Philosophy, 85-86]
Idealists, ever since George Berkeley first questioned the existence of material things, have had their hands full evading the obvious solipsistic implications of their doctrines. Repeatedly, we find them maintaining that their denial of an external, subsisting objective world, coupled with their insistence that reality is somehow "created" by the mind, does not mean what most people think that it means. And while it would certainly be unfair to saddle idealists with a view they all claim to abhor, at the same time it is necessary to point out precisely what their philosophy appears to mean if we follow the common everyday meaning of words. At the very least, idealists are guilty of a kind of equivocation, where in one breath they will argue for solipsism and in another they take it back by stealthily inserting realist premises into their doctrines.
If you go through the writings of prominent idealists, you will find plenty of arguments with obvious solipsistic implications. Consider, as one example, a notorious passage from Bradley's Ethical Studies: "People find a subject and object correlated in consciousness; and having got this in the mind, they at once project it outside the mind, and talk as if two independent realities knocked themselves together, and so produced the unity that apprehends them; while, all the time, to go out of that unity is for us literally to go out of our minds. . . . When mind is made only a part of the whole, there is a question which must be answered; 'If so, how can the whole be known, and for what mind? If about any matter we know nothing whatever, can we say anything about it? Can we even say that it is? And, if it is not consciousness, how can we know it? And if it is in and for the mind, how can it be a whole which is not mind, and in which mind is only a part or element?' If the ultimate unity were not self or mind, we could not know that it was not mind: that would mean going out of our minds. And, conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not mind." [323-4, note]
This is about as close as a philosopher can come to espousing solipsism without explicitly embracing the absurdity. We cannot know anything outside our minds, we are told, without going out of our mind! Thus we find one of the great metaphysicians establishing the principle tenet of his philosophy on a mere pun! But if we can't know anything that is not in our minds, that is not part of our consciousness, how then can we know anything at all? If we follow the logic Bradley's argument to the bitter end, we would be forced to conclude that knowledge is impossible. We would all be trapped in our own consciousness, unable to see or hear or touch anything out in the real world of fact. Yet if Bradley himself were confronted with these objections, he would protest vehemently that he had been misunderstood, that he intended no such solipsistic denial of knowledge but had merely been attempting something far more subtle, which we, in our coarse, ultra-simplistic realism, had failed to grasp. Thus, under the mask of vague words and obscurantism, the idealist seeks refuge from common sense.
In his own times, when the philosophy of absolute idealism was ascendant within English and American academic circles, Bradley could get away with such arguments. But eventually they would come back to haunt him, when a new generation of philosophers came along to challenge the idealist orthodoxy of the nineteenth century. By 1940, hardly anyone took the idealist sophistry seriously, and the handful who remained faithful to its absurdities tended to adopt a far more defensive stance than those who, like Bradley a century earlier, could boldly step forward and declare that inorganic nature was a mere figment of the mind. Instead of coming right out and declaring "No object without a subject!" or "To be is to be perceived!" modern idealists have retreated into what could be called a kind of metaphysical agnosticism. Mr. Ryan himself at times shares this willingness to make these shameful concessions to realism. "Is all reality in some way 'mental' in nature, or are there nonmental realities too?" he asks at one point. "For the time being we shall content ourselves with the view of Mary Whiton Calkins: 'The Universe contains distinctively mental realities; it may or may not also contain non-mental entities, but in any case irreducibly mental entities exist.'"
So it is possible that matter might exist after all! It is a sad state of affairs to find idealists giving ground on the central issue of their creed. Instead of arguing, "Matter cannot possibly exist!" they merely whimper "Maybe it exists after all, we just can't know whether it does." A feeble skepticism has replaced the robust dogmatism of yore.
Mr. Ryan warns us from the start not to expect too much in the way of his idealism. "I am defending here only a minimal sort of objective idealism," he writes, "perhaps best described by G. Watts Cunningham: '"To be" is not necessarily "to be perceived," [as the young George Berkeley held,] but it is necessarily "to be implicated."' Reality, that is, is a logically related system, as Blanshard held. Blanshard's view (and mine) was characterized by his former student Elizabeth Lane Beardsley as the view that 'every entity can (in principle) be understood.' This thesis is what I call intelligibilism."
This doctrine, even if it isn't quite the full-fledged idealism of Bradley and Royce, still contains the requisite anthropocentrism shared by most forms of the creed. What Mr. Ryan is saying in so many words (whether he realizes it or not) is that unless something is "potentially" intelligible, it cannot be real. How he has stumbled across this profundity is anyone's guess. There is little in the way of evidence to support it. Indeed, a more critical view of the matter would probably warrant an entirely different conclusion. As Santayana has noted, "There may be surds, there may be hard facts, there may be dark abysses before which intelligence must be silent, for fear of going mad." The fact is, all explanations are partial and inadequate. A scientist tells you that the universe was caused by the "big bang." Very well. But what caused the big bang? "God caused it," we are told by a theologian. Yes, but what was the cause of God? "There is no cause. God just exists, and there's an end to it." Yes, precisely. But that is not an explanation; it is a confession of ignorance. The fact of the matter is, we don't know, ultimately, why anything exists. All "ultimate" explanations are merely verbal and assume the very premises which they seek to prove. Whether on naturalist or theistic premises, the universe remains one vast, inexplicable, raving miracle.
Explanations generally consist in little more than connecting the effect to its cause or in subsuming an event under some observed uniformity or natural "law." Beyond that, they cannot go without doing violence to good sense. Thus, when an apple plummets to the ground, we ascribe the fall to "gravity." This, as explanations go, is a very good one, because here we have subsumed a particular event under a uniform "law" of nature. But as to why objects should observe this particular law and not some other, we remain very much in the dark. To say, therefore, that only the potentially intelligible can be real is to banish from reality the lion's share of what exists. It is to labor under the anthropocentric pretense that the universe exists for the benefit and convenience of the human mind. A more groundless postulate would be hard to imagine.
Mr. Ryan, following the philosopher Brand Blanshard, will later argue that the intelligibility of reality exists precisely in the fact that it is a logically related system held in bonds of "necessity." Since causation is somehow "necessitated" by the "constitution of matter" or "some character within it," this in itself, we are assured, explains everything. "To try to go beyond that point, indeed, would be merely absurd," Blanshard insisted; "for when we have arrived at necessity, the question Why? is no longer in order; the final answer has been given; the theoretical impulse has, on this point, come to rest."
It may have come to rest for Messrs. Blanshard and Ryan. But that is only because, as good idealists, they are capable of finding satisfaction in what amounts to little more than verbal mumbo jumbo. I see no reason at all why necessity should forbid us to ask questions. Why should one particular form of necessity find exemplification in reality and not some other? Why should the gravitational law of inverse squares, and not some other gravitational law, characterize the attraction of material bodies? Why should light travel at 186,000 miles an hour, and not some other speed? Why should men be mortal, when most of them clearly do not want to die? All these "necessities" are patently groundless in the sense that they could have been entirely different if God or nature had so ordained it. Necessity, as Santayana observed, is a mere conspiracy of accidents. "Truth is groped after, not imposed, by the presumptions of the intellect," Santayana wrote. "And if these these presumptions often are true, the reason is that they are based upon and adjusted to the actual order of nature, which is thoroughly unnecessary, and most miraculous when most regular." [Realms of Being, 417]
Mr. Ryan's attempt to center his idealism on the concepts of intelligibility and necessity is therefore every bit as much a failure as Bradley's attempt to center it on the view that we can't know anything outside our minds without going "out of our minds." Mr. Ryan has merely taken Bradley's solipsistic premise and applied it to other questions of philosophy. If all we can know is mental, then it is no great leap to suggest that necessity and intelligibility, both of which are mental, are the prime realities. But in making them the prime realities, Mr. Ryan has achieved a Pyrrhic victory; for necessity and intelligibility, because they are mental, are, at best, mere perspectives of consciousness. To regard them as inherent realities is to confuse the mental with the physical, the logical with the merely empirical, the sight of a thing with the thing itself.
It is from this specious perspective that Mr. Ryan sets out to analyze Rand's epistemology. To what extent does the absurdity of Mr. Ryan's principles limit the effectiveness of his criticism? Well, there is no getting around the fact that his idealism does constitute a genuine handicap. It is as if he has decided to take on Rand with both hands tied behind his back. Fortunately, he is, like most idealists, a very skilled dialectician with a keen eye for shoddy reasoning. While he is not very good at noticing the absurdities in his own philosophy, he is quite excellent in noticing those found in Rand's.
Mr. Ryan begins his essay with an observation which is sure to exasperate and offend the Objectivist true-believer. Mr. Ryan contends that "there is a basic affinity between Rand's fundamental approach to epistemology . . . and that of historical idealism," and that "the central epistemological plank of the minimal sort of idealism I am adopting is one which Rand herself shared." What is this central plank he is talking about? It is simply that old idealist standby, known in philosophical circles as "epistemological monism," which refuses to acknowledge any sort of dualism between thought and reality, or mind and nature. As J.E. Creighton put it: "[S]peculative idealism, as occupying the standpoint of experience, has never separated the mind from the external order of nature. It knows no ego-centric predicament, because it recognizes no ego 'alone with its states,' standing apart from the order of nature and from a society of minds. It thus dismisses as unmeaning those problems which are sometimes called 'epistemological,' as to how the mind as such can know reality as such. Without any epistemological grace before meat it falls to work to philosophize, assuming, naively if you please, that the mind by its very nature is in touch with reality. . . . If it be said that this is mere assumption, and not proof, I reply that this is the universal assumption upon which all experience and all science proceeds." [Quote by Ryan from "Two Types of Idealism," originally published in the September 1917 issue of The Philosophical Review and reprinted as ch. 14 of Studies in Speculative Philosophy.]
Mr. Ryan argues that Rand's own view of knowledge parallels the views of Creighton and other idealist philosophers. "[O]n the broadest possible reading of the term, [Rand] was an idealist herself," he suggests. But if so, why did she pose as a realist? Mr. Ryan would have us believe that it was Rand's "fear of religion" that was the principle culprit behind her philosophistry. She "resisted" idealism because she was "driven in large measure by a desire to do away with anything smacking of theistic belief or evincing the remotest possibility of entailing it."
There is a sense in which Mr. Ryan is correct: there is in fact a certain strain of idealism running through Rand's thought. But the suggestion that Rand resisted developing this strain because of her rabid atheism is a bit of a stretch. Rand resisted idealism because she found it absurd, not because she feared theism. The fact that there are idealistic strains in her philosophy stems, not from any sort of unacknowledged sympathy with the idealistic creed, but from her mania for certainty. Rand wanted to believe that men could attain certain knowledge of reality. This led her to adopt principles which have no business in a realist philosophy. Certainty is incompatible with realism. For the realist, knowledge is fundamentally transitive; it is, in the words of Santayana, "belief in a thing or event subsisting in its own plane, and waiting for the light of knowledge to explore it eventually, and perhaps name or define it." [Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 182] The transitive aspect of knowledge, the fact that what is known exists independently of the knower, means that all knowledge involves a "leap" from the knower to the known; a leap which is, essentially, a matter of "faith" or "conjecture" and not something that can be "proven" or known with "absolute certainty."
Rand could not accept this aspect of realism, because it contradicted her instinctive dogmatism. If certainty were not possible, then how could she justify her scalding moral condemnations of anyone who dared to disagree with her? Certainty was the linchpin of her entire program for secular salvation. She needed certainty in order to believe that Objectivism was the only true, indisputable philosophy. She even went so far as to suggest that no rational person could possibly believe in any other philosophical creed. Taking this premise as her starting point, she concocted a scheme for bringing about the "ideal" society of her fantasies. All you had to do is to just convince everyone to be rational. Once they became rational, they would ipso facto become Objectivists. And once they were Objectivists, the rest would follow.
But if certainty is not possible, if all knowledge is founded on faith and conjecture, then Rand's dream of a perfect world is just that: a mere dream. If no one can be certain, then there will always be room for disagreement, even among rational individuals. And where there is room for disagreement, there is also room for compromise and tolerance. In fact, these two principles of social interaction constitute the very foundations of democratic society. In their absence, the congenital disagreements between men would have to be settled by force. Democracy is a game society plays in order to determine who, in the final analysis, gets to have their way in the political farce. The very nature of the democratic process is such that centrists tend to be the ones who make the lion's share of the political decisions. For this reason alone, the political feasibility of Rand's laissez-faire capitalism can be rejected out of hand. No democratic society will ever choose to set up a system of laissez-faire. To even think so demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the political process under democratic conditions.
Rand's defense of certainty was motivated, therefore, by largely personal reasons. She despised opposition and wanted to rationalize her contempt for people who disagreed with her. But in pursuing this mania for agreement and certainty, Rand was led to adopt principles which, as I have already indicated, have no business rearing their dogmatic heads in a realist philosophy. In this sense, Mr. Ryan is correct when he accuses Rand of sharing his "minimal idealist plank." But her adoption of these principles was purely unconscious and adventitious. She wanted to "validate" the certainty of human knowledge so that no one would ever have an excuse for disagreeing with her. Her "fear" of religion played, at best, only a secondary role in the scandal.
The conflict between Rand's incipient idealism on the one side and her explicit realism on the other constitutes the central thesis of Mr. Ryan's critique. Rand, he argues, "was attempting the impossible: she was trying to show that one could combine (a) a more or less 'religious' outlook on life and humanity with (b) an explicit philosophy of secularism, materialism, nominalism, empiricism, and naturalism." She attempted to bridge these two disparate views by presenting "an explicit philosophy that is basically 'empiricist' in outlook, [while] implicitly relying on principles or premises that properly belong to rationalistic idealism."
As I have already stated, I agree with Mr. Ryan that there exists an idealist strain within the Objectivist system. I also agree that this idealist strain contradicts Rand's explicit philosophy. But I think Mr. Ryan is profoundly mistaken when he accuses Rand of materialism. Rand is clearly nothing of the sort. Rand's idealistic theory of human nature puts her well beyond the materialist weltanshaung. If Mr. Ryan understood how central Rand's view of man is to her entire philosophy, he would appreciate how profoundly at odds Objectivism is with the basic tenets of materialism. Rand did not oppose materialism because it had been discredited. She cared little whether a position had been discredited. What could be more discreditable than selfishness? Yet she embraced the selfish ethic with open arms. The reason why she distanced herself from materialism is because materialism adopts a biological view of human nature which is at odds with the very foundations of the Randian creed. At the very center of Rand's philosophy is her belief in the "self-creating" man. Consciousness, for Rand, is a power; it is "efficacious;" it can be made to control everything within a man's soul. Materialism, on the other hand, takes a deterministic, epi-phenomenal view of consciousness. The materialist denies that mind is a power capable of "creating" a man's character. This denial is at odds with a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental) premise of Objectivism.
Like many idealists, Mr. Ryan seems to confuse belief in the existence of matter with materialism itself. "Idealism is not necessarily antirealist, by the way, and most forms of it are 'realist' in the broadest sense," he at one point tells us. "The traditional foil of 'idealism' is 'materialism,' not 'realism.'" If all he is saying here is that certain forms of realism are closer to idealism than is commonly supposed, then there is nothing to quibble about. But if what he is really attempting to equate the belief in the independent existence of matter with materialism, then he is wrong. It is quite possible to believe that matter exists independently of the mind and yet not be a materialist. As an example, consider Karl Popper's position on this issue: "I believe, with common sense, in the reality of material things, and thus of matter. I am not a 'materialist,' however; not only because I believe in minds, but because I do not believe that the doctrine that matter is ultimate and inexplicable has stood up to criticism." [Realism and the Aim of Science, 129]
I suspect that Mr. Ryan's apparent confusion on this matter stems from a misunderstanding of the central premises of realism. The belief in an "independent" physical existence entails epistemological and psychophysical dualism. No philosopher can be a perfectly consistent realist without also being a dualist. For the doctrine of realism consists precisely in the belief that we are cognizant of substantive realities existing outside of consciousness. As Arthur Lovejoy put it: "The content of our actual experience does not consist wholly, and it is unprovable and improbable that any part of it consists, of entities which, upon any plausible theory of the constitution of the physical world, can be supposed to be members of that world; it consists of particulars which arise through the functioning of percipient organisms, are present only within the private fields of awareness of such organisms, are destitute of certain of the essential properties and relations implied either by the historic concept of the 'physical' or by the contemporary physicist's concept of it, and possess properties which physical things lack. They are, in short, essentially of the nature of 'ideas,' as Descartes and Locke (for the most part) used that term. And it is through these entities that any knowledge which we may attain of the concrete characters of the physical world, and of any other realities extraneous to our several private fields of awareness, must be mediated; so that we are brought back to Locke's conclusion, despite the heroic efforts of so many philosophers of our age to escape from it: 'it is evident that the mind knows not things immediately, but by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.'" [The Revolt Against Dualism, 328-329]
Realism, then, is inherently dualistic; and those realists who, like Rand, deny this dualism are simply not being consistent in their realism. Idealism, on the other hand, is an essentially monistic doctrine. It abhors what it refers to as the "bifurcation of nature," the "separation" of mind from nature. Idealists contend that this separation, this belief in the "independent" existence of reality, makes knowledge impossible. As Mr. Ryan puts it, "If we conceive thought and object to be so completely and absolutely independent that the existence of one makes no difference to the existence of the other, we have in fact destroyed the very possibility of knowledge. For on this theory, our ideas are absolutely independent of their supposed objects, and therefore unlinked by any relation, including causality. The idea has no true relation with its object, and the realist cannot consistently take his own ideas as having anything to do with any 'independent' reality. The realist theory thus ends in self-contradiction. If we try to adopt this sort of realism, then, we shall then be faced with the difficulty of piecing back together what we have thereby put asunder — somehow getting the 'objects' of knowledge back into contact with thought — or we shall end in self-stultification. . . .For as we have seen . . . reality is not absolutely independent of thought."
Here we find a bit of sophistry and willful distortion worthy of Rand herself. I realize that the "absolute" independence argument against realism has a long and distinguished tradition within the idealist fold; but this is one of those traditions that does little credit to those who have perpetuated it. The argument is purely verbal in its thrust, based on little more than the equivocal nature of words. The term independent is deliberately misunderstood in order to gain an unfair advantage in debate. What realist, may I be so bold as to inquire, ever conceived of "thought and object" being "so completely and absolutely independent that the existence of one makes no difference to the existence of the other"? Since this is manifestly not the realist theory, but a mere caricature of it, to say that it ends in "self-contradiction" is to say nothing at all. Realism does not contend that physical objects exist "absolutely" independent of the mind, so that mind can have no relation to them at all. No, what it asserts is that physical objects exist whether the mind knows them or not, and in this sense and in this sense only are "independent." To quote Santayana: "When a thing becomes my object it becomes dependent on me ideally, for being known, and I am probably, directly or indirectly, dependent on it materially, for having been led to know it. What is independent of knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, movement, origin, and destiny of its own, no matter what I may think or fail to think about it." [Scepticism and Animal Faith, 202-203]
If it is suggested that any admission of dependence amounts to incipient idealism (and Mr. Ryan makes just such a suggestion at several junctures throughout his essay), then all I can say is: fine, define it however you please. But bear in mind that the "dependence" admitted by Santayana has very little to do with the "mind-dependence" of traditional idealism. Everyone of course is free to define their terms as they like. But if you define your terms so broadly that they end up collapsing into each other, so that realism lapses into idealism and idealism into realism, then these words lose their cognitive function. There are critical differences separating realists like Santayana and Lovejoy from idealists like Royce and Bradley. Santayana and Lovejoy are dualists. They believe that mental representations are not identical to the things represented. Royce and Bradley, on the other hand, are monists. They believe that knowledge is impossible on dualistic assumptions, that the world can only be known if it is mental all the way through. I leave it to the reader to decide which view is more plausible.
The notion that "mental objects" exist "in" reality is central to Mr. Ryan's critique of Rand. Like most idealists, Mr. Ryan is not a disinterested philosopher. He has a special agenda which his idealistic metaphysics is meant to support. Mr. Ryan is eager to find metaphysical reasons for believing in theism. He believes that if he can prove the existence of "abstract entities" [i.e., mental objects], this will help strengthen the case for God's existence. It strikes me as a bit of a stretch; but there are worse arguments for theism. My only objection is Mr. Ryan's attempt to connect this argument with absolute idealism. The absolute, he suggests, is "personal": it is God Himself. But this view has far too many pantheistic implications for my taste. If God is the "absolute," then this means he's everything; and if he's everything, this means he's good as well as evil, Christ as well as Hitler, the Heavenly City as well as Auschwitz. By making everything divine, pantheism besmirches divinity, and turns the Godhead into a kind of Manichean smorgasbord. A more heretical doctrine is hard to imagine.
It is this search for mental objects, this pursuit of "abstract entities" that motivates Mr. Ryan's to attack Rand's take on the problem of universals. Rand believed that the failure of modern philosophers to solve this problem is the reason why Western Civilization is in crisis. She thought that by solving this problem, she could save civilization and bring about the ideal Objectivist society of her fantasies.
Considering how important this whole problem of universals is not only for Rand and her Objectivist ideology, but for Mr. Ryan and his critique of Rand's sophistical epistemology, a closer examination into the reason why these two thinkers regard this obscure problem as so important should be undertaken. Rand's decision to regard the problem of universals as central to philosophy and Western Civilizations remains, even at this late date, twenty years after her death, a bit of mystery. Given that she had no clear understanding of its historical background, it is odd that she should have considered it the main source of modernity's problems. Where did she ever come up with such a notion?
My guess is that she got it, second or third hand, from Richard Weaver, the great conservative philosopher and literary critic. In 1948, Weaver published what is still probably the most important contribution to conservative philosophy in America, a slender volume entitled Ideas Have Consequences. In the book, Weaver argues that the "dissolution of the West" is the consequence of "the fateful doctrine of nominalism." "Like MacBeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions," wrote Weaver. "It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence." [2-3]
Weaver regarded William of Occam as the prime culprit in the nefarious attack on universals. "It was William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence. . . . The practical result of nominalist philosophy is to banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect and to posit as reality that which is perceived by the senses. With this change in the affirmation of what is real, the whole orientation of culture takes a turn, and we are on the road to modern empiricism." [3]
In the late forties and early fifties, Rand still traveled in conservative circles. She probably heard about Weaver's book from her conservative acquaintances; and although she would have violently disagreed with Weaver's platonist interpretation of the issue, the suggestion that the crisis of the West stemmed from the old scholastic controversy between those who regarded universals as "real" and those who did not appears to have borne fruit in Rand's own philosophy. But instead of looking at the issue in primarily moral terms, as Weaver did, she chose to regard it as a purely epistemological matter. In her view, the controversy over the metaphysical status of universals led, not to scientific empiricism, but to a "concerted attack on man's conceptual faculty." "Most philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies They were unable to offer a solution to the 'problem of universals,' that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts and perceptual data." [For the New Intellectual, 30]
That this theory is wildly, even irresponsibly wrong, is obvious to anyone who knows anything about modern philosophy. Modern philosophers did not engage in a "concerted attack on man's conceptual faculty"; nor did the problem of universals play a significant role in the development of any major modern philosophical system. Modern philosophy, with its epistemological orientation, had little interest in a problem that was primarily metaphysical in nature. The modern attitude towards the issue of universals is well expressed by William James: "From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things. The restriction of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a kind; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum, therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'" [Principles of Psychology, vol 1, 479-480]
The reason why Rand considered the problem of universals so crucial to philosophy is that she was looking for a scapegoat. She needed something to blame for the failure of her moral and political ideals. The notion of blaming it all on an epistemological problem appealed to her megalomania, for she thought that, by solving the problem philosophically, she could save the West from dissolution.
There is no need for me to comment upon the naiveté of Rand's view that history is determined by abstruse philosophical problems, since I have already gone to great lengths to refute the Randian view of history in my book Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature. Suffice it to say that, even on the most generous interpretation, Rand's view is completely baseless. In fact, she would have been much better off adopting Richard Weaver's version of the theory, since at least Weaver's theory, though false in its totality, contains nevertheless an element of truth. Although nominalism is not the cause of Western decadence, it is symptomatic of other attitudes and psychological complexes which eventually did lead to licentiousness and dissolution. Nominalism is symptomatic of a far more searching and skeptical frame of mind toward the great questions of life. The skepticism and empiricism associated with nominalist philosophy helped usher in the scientific age. Instead of looking to speculative metaphysics and theology for the answers to the questions of life, men began turning to the external world, to observation and scientific experimentation. To this we owe not merely the great discoveries of science, but also the technological advances which have ushered in the modern, industrial world. While this has greatly enhanced the quality of our lives, at least in physical terms, paradoxically, it has also enabled individuals to ignore traditional moral uniformities with much greater impunity than ever before. In the Middle Ages, licentiousness was a very dangerous undertaking. Traditional morals, backed by religious sanctions, were necessary for the very survival of feudal society. Today, many living in the West can live in complete defiance of traditional morality without facing any very serious consequences. This, in itself, has helped to bring about the sort of decadence characteristic of the modern world.
Mr. Ryan's interest in the problem of universals runs along somewhat different lines than Weaver's — although, to be sure, there are some points in common. Ryan regards the problem of universals as important because he sees it as a way of establishing the plausibility of his theistic idealism. Universals are clearly mental phenomenon. They are datum of consciousness which can be used to describe many different things. If it can be proved that universals exist, not merely in the mind, but "out there," in the external world of brute fact, then Mr. Ryan's "minimal idealism" will have been established. If universals exist "in" reality, then it follows that "mental objects" can be regarded as "external" realities.
This, in any case, is the crux of Mr. Ryan's argument; it also constitutes the main reason for his attack on Rand's own take on universals. Rand rejected the notion that universals were "real." Although she shunned labels, her position, despite denials to the contrary, comes pretty close to "conceptualism." She appears to have rejected the belief that universals actually exist "in" reality or are in some way "mind-independent." She believed, instead, that universals were mental creations developed by the mind in its effort to interpret and understand the external world. In the words of Rand's protégé, Leonard Peikoff, universals are both "man-made and reality-based."
Mr. Ryan notes the similarities between Rand's position and that of the conceptualist philosopher, Roy Wood Sellars, who, like Rand, believed that universals were both man-made and reality based. As Sellars himself put it: "In short, universals are concepts held in the act of knowing to reveal the disclosable texture, behavior, and connections of things. In the strict sense, the only universals are concepts. But the controlled correspondence and revelatory capacity of these concepts makes it seem to us as though there were universals in nature." [Philosophy of Physical Realism, p. 168]
Mr. Ryan argues that this position is indefensible, because it fails to explain how universals can be both man-made and reality based if no such universals exist in actual reality. Conceptualism, contends Ryan, needs to explain "how the mind goes about 'creating' (apparent) universals. And this account must both (a) show positively that genuine knowledge is still possible even though the mind regards certain qualities and relations as 'identical' when they are really no such thing, and (b) itself avoid any reliance whatsoever on an underlying 'substrate' of real universals."
There is a valid point in Mr. Ryan's criticism. If, like Rand and Sellars, you are obsessed with "proving" that universals correspond to reality, then you're going to have a heck of a time explaining how this is possible unless universals are "real." But Mr. Ryan's solution to the problem is not a jot more felicitous. Indeed, Ryan has simply traded one difficult for another. Universals refer to reality, he argues, because universals exist in reality. But how does he know that universals actually exist in reality? Here we find our intrepid idealist guilty of using one premise to prove the other, when neither has ever been established in the first place. That sort of Petitio Principii is clearly indefensible.
There is, to be sure, a far more fundamental criticism that could be aimed at Rand's epistemology than the merely technical ones chosen by Mr. Ryan. Rand's entire epistemological program is based on the notion that no one can know anything until they can "prove" the validity of the knowing process itself. This assumption is obviously at odds with the facts. Who among us can "validate" the knowing process? If by "validate," one means logical proof, then it is an impossible undertaking. And not only impossible, but unnecessary. The assumption that knowledge in general has to be "validated" constitutes a false demand, a meretricious ideal of philosophy. Knowledge is conjectural right from the start and must look to the practical affairs of everyday life to find whatever justification it may have. To try to prove it verbally, according to the wretched doctrines of this or that school of philosophy, is pure folly.
There is another fundamental error lurking at the bottom of all these futile speculations about universals. I am here referring to Mr. Ryan's supposition that mental universals, in order to be valid, must refer to universals existing in external reality. The denial of real universals," he argues, "forces us to do some pretty complex tap dancing to make plausible the contention on which a nonskeptical nominalism must ultimately depend: that in every case in which we think we have discovered a genuine identity, we have actually discovered a 'similarity' and created an identity — and that this claim does not undermine itself by undermining the very possibility of knowledge."
The point Mr. Ryan attempts to make is that a mental universal or concept cannot truly correspond to a class of things unless that class shares something identical in common. It is not enough that things can be "identical" when taken mentally, but only "similar" in the real world, because if it is only similarity that binds them in reality, what right do I have to make them identical in terms of thought? This entire manner of looking at the problem misinterprets the dualistic nature of knowing. The universals which form the building blocks of human knowledge are descriptions of things, they are not the things themselves; they are aesthetic symbols, not images or copies. To assume that knowledge, in order to be "valid," must somehow be reduplicated in the external world is a piece of naiveté hardly worth the trouble of refuting: for if we assume that no piece of knowledge can truly describe reality unless it is somehow identical to it, then all we would have accomplished is to make the "possibility of knowledge" far more implausible than it is on even the crudest dualistic premises. If we assume this literalist view of knowledge, then all verbal descriptions of events or landscapes can never qualify as knowledge. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire becomes, under this view knowledge, mere sophistry and illusion; because how could anyone in their right mind believe that the words which make up the history are identical to the events which it describes? The history is written in a language which didn't even exist when the events it details took place. Where, then, is the "identity" between Gibbon's great book and Rome's real world decline and fall? There is obviously no literal identity. Gibbon's book is an immense idealization of events that required nearly half a millennium to unfold.
"Discourse is a language, not a mirror," Santayana would remind us. "The images in sense are parts of discourse, not parts of nature: they are the babble of our innocent organs under the stimulus of things; but these spontaneous images, like the sounds of the voice, may acquire the function of names; they may become signs, if discourse is intelligent and can recapitulate its phases, for the things sought or encountered in the world. The truth which discourse can achieve is truth in its own terms, appropriate description: it is no incorporation or reproduction of the object in the mind." [Scepticism and Animal Faith, 179]
It would seem that Mr. Ryan, in his zeal to find reasons to support his idealistic pantheism, has placed his faith in certain presuppositions of knowledge that cannot withstand the light of criticism. Rand, however, shared many of these very same false ideals, despite the fact that she abhorred both idealism and God. Rand was a "direct" realist. She rejected the idea that "man's perception of reality is 'indirect.'" [Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 51] Why did she do so? Because she couldn't tolerate the implication, embedded in this view, that man's knowledge can never be fully adequate. This seemed to her blatant skepticism, which she could never abide. If man's knowledge can never be fully adequate, how would she ever manage to convince anyone that Objectivism is fully true? Objectivism, if it was going to change the world, had to be completely and unconditionally true. For how else could she justify condemning all those who refused to become good little Objectivists, slavishly doting on her every word and regarding her as the very fountainhead of truth and rationality, if all knowledge, including the knowledge gained through Objectivist principles, was, in some way, tainted by inadequacy?
This essential inadequacy, which anyone who grasps the relationship between man's ideas and the world must understand, I regard as one of the very first principles of epistemology. Again, to repeat what I said earlier, knowledge is conjectural. It is not a dogma, but a research program, an object of "animal faith." Does this view of the matter make knowledge impossible? No, of course not; it merely indicates its limits. "Any degree of inadequacy and originality is tolerable in discourse, when the constitution of the objects which the animal encounters is out of scale with his organs, or quite heterogeneous from his possible images," explained Santayana. "A sensation or a theory, no matter how arbitrary its terms (and all language is perfectly arbitrary), will be true of the object, if it expresses some true relation in which that object stands to the self, so that these terms are not misleading as signs, however poetical they may be as sounds or as pictures." [Scepticism and Animal Faith, 180]
Santayana's description of the inadequacy of knowledge is itself not fully adequate, for it is expressed in terms that are scandalously vague, and are sure to be maliciously misinterpreted by those who resent the point he is trying to make. And indeed, that appears to be the real issue at stake between Ayn Rand and Scott Ryan: we have two contrary agendas clashing, their real differences masked by an inextricable thicket of technical philosophy. This is what explains the element of truth in Mr. Ryan's claim that Rand shared his idealist plank. The incipient idealism in Objectivism arises from the fact that, like Mr. Ryan, Rand was not a disinterested philosopher. She, too, had an agenda to promote; and in her eagerness to rationalize her heart's desires, she slipped into idealism. What could be more human? The real problem--and unfortunately, Mr. Ryan does not address this in his essay--is that Rand's ideals, though pursued out of human weakness, were, at bottom, inhuman. She sought the "ideal man" of her fantasies, a bloodless creature who was little more than a money making machine that went around attacking venerable traditions and spouting ideological slogans. Of the two agendas, Mr. Ryan's is by far the more preferable. And although I have little sympathy for his incipient pantheism or the idealist philosophy in which he cloaks his deeper intuitions, these intuitions themselves appear to me fully worthy of respect. They reveal perspectives on life and existence which, although not literally true, nevertheless contain glimpses of metaphorical truth. Existence outside of consciousness is not mental, nor does God exist in everything, but this does not mean that physical existence is the sum total of all that can be explained, or that nature doesn't hide within its bosom mysteries which would baffle the crude empiricism of atheists like Rand and her ilk. The universe is shot through with unfathomable adumbrations of intelligence; and even though the human mind, in its feeble, quixotic attempt to make sense of these flashes of light, can only stammer unintelligibly, I would be the last to ridicule the broken syllables that emerge from this bold attempt to know the unknowable. If the syllables themselves, when interpreted literally, lead to absurdities which contradict the demands of everyday life, what of that? These syllables were never meant to be taken literally. They are metaphors of man's unquenchable thirst to penetrate the veil of existence and gain knowledge of the inner workings of things. I see no reason to resent them or condemn them as dangerous. As long as they are not confused with practical intelligence, they are perfectly harmless. They are, in any case, certainly preferable to the dogmatic inanities and the polemical hatreds inspired by Rand's ideals. How can anyone, I would like to know, defend a philosophy that turns its partisans into raving ideologues, incapable of discussing any philosophical issue without distorting it for their own malicious purposes? The idealists, for all their manifest absurdities, have never been guilty of such abhorrences. When they have been guilty of distorting the ideas of their philosophical antagonists, they have done so innocently, without rancor or malice.
What, then, is my final verdict in this clash between Rand and the idealist? I don't think there can be any doubt as to which side I owe my respect, if not my allegiance. Rand may have presented herself as a realist; but since her entire philosophy consists of little else but one long and discreditable betrayal of the fundamental implications of realism--a betrayal, moreover, motivated by allegiance to false and jejune ideals--I see no reason to side with Rand in this contest. Mr. Ryan, despite the limitations of his technical argumentation and the false ideals behind much of his criticism, clearly gets the best of Rand in his essay. His philosophy, if nothing else, at least has the merit of an intelligence tempered by humanity; whereas Rand's is all heat and no light, a blind rage against facts it refuses to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.