From Free Life, Issue 26, December 1996
ISSN: 0260 5112

One day in my teens, leafing through an old bound volume of Punch in the school library, I came across a cartoon (c. 1860?) about the poverty of the English clergy. A vicar had invited his curate to a dinner of boiled eggs. "Oh dear," said the vicar; "I see that your egg is bad." "Oh no," replied the curate; "parts of it are excellent!"

I loved the witty nuances of the piece, and started referring (rather proudly) to any half-good/half-bad thing I came across as "a bit of a curate's egg". I was thus chastened to learn, some years later, that so many had been there before me that `a curate's egg' was part of the English language. (It is still in Chambers English Dictionary).

And unhappily so for Chris Matthew Sciabarra, as it turns out, who has written a book which is, I am afraid, a bit of a curate's egg. Very substantial parts of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical are excellent; the rest, alas, is rotten.

I will begin with the good. Dr Sciabarra claims in his Introduction that his book is "the first scholarly attempt to trace Rand's roots and assess her place in intellectual history" [2]. That is both true and something to cheer about. Certainly, his only predecessor in the field, Leonard Peikoff, did little of the kind. Dr Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), while a well-executed elaboration and integration of Rand's various positions, and basically a good book, treats Rand very much in isolation. There is no discussion of the development of her thought or of what she may have owed to others - even those she acknowledged, such as Aristotle. Dr Sciabarra's whole intention, by contrast, is to address this lacuna. And, since Rand persistently denied philosophical debts to other thinkers, his is a very worthwhile endeavour (i.e., to evaluate her denial), whether one is a friend or foe.

A second excellent feature of Dr Sciabarra's study rectifies another Peikovian shortcoming. Dr Sciabarra has not only examined the entire Objectivist literature - his list of sources is immense - he has incorporated into his subject matter many logical extensions of Rand's thought developed by other Objectivist-oriented thinkers; most notable among these, of course, being Nathaniel Branden. The list also includes Tibor Machan, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas Den Uyl, and others. Dr Sciabarra's determination to be thorough is as prodigious as it is commendable, and it gives his work some of the authority that springs from sound scholarship. My only complaint in this area is that relatively little attention is paid to David Kelley's pioneering work in the philosophy of perception.

As an (independent) Objectivist myself, I was also very pleased to see a well-qualified, unaffiliated academic taking Rand seriously. Like it or not, Ayn Rand had enormous influence on American culture, an influence which remained constant after her death, and which shows every sign of growing. Her books still sell in the hundreds of thousands annually, and new groups such as David Kelley's Institute of Objectivist Studies have enjoyed remarkably rapid and sustained expansion. Nonetheless, with very few exceptions, the academic establishment has disdained or ignored Rand almost completely. The one exception I am familiar with is Professor William F. O'Neill's book With Charity Toward None (1971) which reveals in its title, as in its content, the sarcastic antagonism with which Rand is usually treated, if treated at all. So it is refreshing and encouraging to find a modern philosopher who accepts the fact of Rand's contribution and sets out to understand it. It is an exercise long overdue, and I congratulate Dr Sciabarra for undertaking it.

The last major virtue of Dr Sciabarra's book I shall comment on is his (generally) clear understanding of Rand's ideas and his (usually) excellent presentation and discussion of them. (Chapter 8, "Art, Philosophy and Efficacy", is one exception; I found it quite muddled). I am actually indebted to him for elucidating some aspects of Rand's thought which I had found puzzling - eg, her avoidance of cosmology, and the small attention she paid to the nature of life - both of which, it turns out, she thought to lie in the domain of science, not philosophy. I am happy to acknowledge that in these and other areas Dr Sciabarra deepened my own understanding of Objectivism.

Before proceeding with criticism, I must point out that Dr Sciabarra anticipated my two main objections and defended himself against them in advance [pp. 12-13]. Evidently, I was not satisfied. However, I would like to stress that whatever I may find `rotten' - and my word choice perhaps owes more to Mr Punch's cartoon than Dr Sciabarra's book - I do think the good in his work outweighs the bad. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical is a major piece of scholarship even if some of its interpretations fail.

I should point out, too, that I am aware of the controversy Dr Sciabarra's book has generated, and also that he has defended himself vigorously in publications such as Full Context and the IOS Journal, and at various conferences and seminars. Nonetheless, I have not seen anything so far which would cause me to change my critical opinion. This arose spontaneously during a first reading, and remains with me now as I review the book, nine months later.

Someone once remarked of Karl Popper that whether or not one agreed with him, his every word gave us something to think about. And the last thing I would like to say in favour is that, like Popper, Dr Sciabarra stimulates. So one imagines, hopes, prays, that his book will shake some of Rand's less independent-minded admirers out of their dogmatic slumbers. When Dr Sciabarra concludes his study by hoping that he has contributed to "a serious dialogue on the profound importance of Ayn Rand's intellectual legacy" [382], I am with him all the way.

The problems with Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical are threefold. In first place comes Dr Sciabarra's English usage. He has a persistent habit of misusing philosophical terms and ordinary English words, or of giving them such stretched shades of meaning that they become actively misleading. Among many examples, the following stand out: project, moment, dualism, dialectic, reify, tacit, praxis, mediated, conflated, and subversive. It is usually possible to figure out what he means. But the continuous employment of `moment', for example, to mean `aspect' or `element'; added to densely packed paragraphs; added to substantial doses of jargon (despite an early promise to avoid it [20]) - eg "Rand's ethos is essentially epistemic" [305], or "reify the tacit dimensions of consciousness" [360] - added to unnecessary over-elaboration: result in prose which is often a chore to read.

And not only are many words misused, some are over-used. I counted the word `moment' - in Dr Sciabarra's precious, idiosyncratic usage - no less than four times on two pages [166-7]. In another instance, `tacit' - which means `unspoken' but is used by Dr Sciabarra to mean `unconscious' - is employed three times in a single short paragraph [202].

Perhaps `moment' to mean `aspect', and `tacit' to mean `unconscious', are current jargon in New York academic circles. For me, they are valueless novelties, and they are so frequently employed in this book that they soon become tedious and irritating.

The second major problem with Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, is Dr Sciabarra's determination to present Rand as a Russian thinker. Yet the first thing anybody who has had any exposure to Rand becomes aware of is her deep loathing and rejection of just about anything to do with Russia.

For instance, from a very early age, Rand would have nothing to do with Russian culture. "It is sick, depraved, rotten", she said, time and again. Nor did she read Russian literature as a child, she preferred foreign romantic fiction such as that of Victor Hugo. When she did read Russian authors, such as Tolstoy - in America, in English, as an adult - she found doing so "the most boring literary duty I have ever undertaken". True, she admired Dostoyevsky's technical expertise, but she utterly rejected his sense of life and everything he may culturally and philosophically be said to stand for - everything specifically Russian about him.

What Rand admired was American culture, and American is what she set out to become. Indeed, from the time of publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, she continuously startled commentators: she had a Russian accent you could have sheared metal with, yet her writing was totally and convincingly American.

Not to Dr Sciabarra it seems. Throughout his book he insists on burdening Rand with a specifically Russian psycho-epistemology (my term) and with Russian "roots", which he alleges informed all her thinking. He ignores her steadfast repudiation of everything Russian. He takes little account of the fact that she was raised in a freethinking Jewish family, i.e., among perennial outsiders. He disregards other obvious facts such as the dislike of things Russian so fashionable among educated Russians themselves, whose preferred language and culture was French.

Worst of all, Dr Sciabarra postulates that Rand absorbed significant elements of Russian philosophy from one of her teachers - Lossky - even though she majored in history, and even though the course in question was on Ancient Greek philosophy. Further, Dr Sciabarra himself presents convincing evidence that Rand was mistaken and probably never studied under Lossky at all. (Since, at that time, under War Communism, young Alyssa Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand) was in such a state of near starvation that even eating a single pea would dominate her thoughts, she may be allowed a few lapses of memory).

All this is not to deny that a person growing up in Russia could reasonably be expected to acquire some Russian values. Rand did like Boeuf Stroganoff! Nor is it to deny that a person may acquire values of which they are not fully aware. Barbara Branden has suggested persuasively in The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) that Rand may have been imbued with an unconscious sense of the proper male/female roles in marriage derived from her childhood home - where her mother was the dominant influence - and which may explain the relatively `subservient' position of her husband Frank in Rand's own domestic situation.

Be that as it may, when Ayn Rand, one of the most independent thinkers of modern times, explicitly disavows her Russian origins - along with all that culture's mysticism, pessimism, religiosity, emotionalism, deep-seated statism, and general gloomy soulfulness - very detailed and concrete evidence is needed to show that she did not know her own mind. Dr Sciabarra gives us none of it. All he offers is supposition. His basic thesis is merely a variant of the post hoc fallacy: Rand grew up in Russia therefore she must have absorbed Russian thinking. Sorry Doc, non seq!

The third problem with Dr Sciabarra's study flows directly from the earlier two. One of the main characteristics of Rand's thought is her rejection of dichotomy: is/ought, analytic/synthetic, rational/empirical, reason/emotion, mind/body, etc. In place of these imaginary bisections, Rand proposed observation of actual, factual integrities.

By way of illustration, let us look briefly at Rand's view of the last-mentioned artificial sundering - one of Western philosophy's favourites - the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy. Rand dismissed this out of hand. She argued that far from being split between mental and physical substances - a mind and a body, conjoined but never connected - men and women are in fact organic integrities, their mental consciousness an inseparable aspect of a physical brain. "There is no such thing as consciousness without a conscious being" she liked to say. Any mind/body separation Rand rubbished as a mystical flight of fancy. Humankind are fully integrated beings - from their first waving strands of DNA to the sad signing of their death certificates.

Along comes Dr Sciabarra. He sees things commonly held to be separate being put together. Now, what does that remind me off, he asks? Of course, Rand was Russian! Who were the Russians most influenced by? Why, Karl Marx! And who taught Marx? Hegel! What did he teach him? Dialectics! Ergo, Rand was a dialectician in the tradition of Marx and Hegel!

If this sounds like caricature, I assure the reader it is not. Open the book at random, and you will soon find phrasing such as: "Rand reflects the very Hegelian Aufhebung she ridiculed [10] or "She gropes towards a philosophical synthesis..." or "In typically dialectical fashion, she responded..." [96] or "Rand's approach echoes the dimensions of the Marxian perspective" [276] or "her fundamentally dialectical methods of inquiry" or "Rand shared this integrated approach with Marxism" or "Rand was actually closer to Hegel than to Marx" [277] or "Rand's critique duplicates the comprehensive, integrated character of the Marxian analysis of culture" [323] or "Rand's analysis... resembles the dialectical formulations of Marx" or "Like Marx.... And also like Marx..." [341] or "Like Marx before her..." [355] or "Given that Rand was a deeply dialectical thinker" [360]; all of which reaches a climax in: "Rand achieved a dialectical Aufhebung - a sublation of dualities that simultaneously abolished and absorbed, transcended and preserved elements of the Russian communitarian vision" [376]. And it is not just to Marx and to Hegel that Dr Sciabarra attempts to tie Rand with this agonising twaddle. All sorts of other `leftists' are roped in: Gramschi, Habermas, Kolko, Trotsky, even Erich Fromm. To cap it all, Dr Sciabarra alleges that Rand endorsed a form of the labour theory of value [291], and tries to turn her, of all people, into a determinist [360].

The superficiality of the alleged resemblances is usually quite astonishing. It is on the level of: `Marx was an atheist. Rand was an atheist. Therefore Marx and Rand must belong in the same school of philosophy.'

What I think is mostly at work in all this is Dr Sciabarra's slipshod use of language; though whether that is due to carelessness, misunderstanding, sleight of hand, idiosyncrasy, provocativeness, or sheer perversity, is hard to tell.

We all know that `dialectic' has meant different things at different times. It did not mean to Aristotle what it did to Kant. The term has had at least half a dozen uses. It is also possible to study thinkers' methods apart from the content of their thought. Dr Sciabarra shows he is aware of these obvious facts [15. Cf also his article "Dialectics 101", Full Context, September 1996, p. 8].

But in the philosophical context of Hegel and Marx, dialectic is quite specific. It refers to a metaphysical notion of the fusion of opposites - thesis and antithesis merging to produce synthesis. What characterises Rand's thought, in total contrast, is a radically different conception: the denial of the necessity or even possibility of such a synthesis. Across the centuries, philosopher after philosopher has argued that we have to choose either rationalism or empiricism; either logic or fact; either apriori or aposteriori; either analytic or synthetic: we cannot simultaneously enjoy both. Indeed, according to Professor Anthony Quinton, speaking on a BBC television programme in 1987, the analytic/synthetic dichotomy has been philosophy's central issue for the last two or three hundred years; so much so that teachers of philosophy used to maintain that if students could just learn the distinction between analytic and synthetic, that alone would make their study of philosophy worthwhile.

To repeat, Rand dismissed all such distinctions and separations as specious or spurious. Far from proposing syntheses, she denied there had ever been dichotomies. And of course it was her thinking which inspired Leonard Peikoff's important article "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy" (1967) in which far from being a central issue of philosophy, Kant's old chestnut is shown to be one of his more egregious errors, even if he didn't originate it. Therefore, to present Rand's holistic, integralist thought as a type of Hegelian dialectic; and further to pretend that she absorbed her philosophical methods from teachers and "Russian ancestors" [200] unthinkingly - in a milieu she utterly despised and consciously rejected - I find more than bizarre or preposterous: it seems to me to be a perverse misrepresentation of the facts.

Which leaves us with the question: how could an able and hard-working scholar get so totally lost in such familiar territory? Since the notion that Rand might acquire respectability through Marxist or Hegelian roots is too bizarre to contemplate, the only solution I have been able to come up with is that somebody set him up.

In his Introduction, Dr Sciabarra tells us that he studied "dialectical method" with Bertell Ollman, a prominent member of "the left academy" [a coy euphemism for latterday Marxists]. The same teacher later encouraged him to undertake a systematic study of "the dialectical aspects of Rand's philosophy" [8-9]. On the back of the book, Professor Ollman reappears - as author of Alienation, and Dialectical Investigations - warmly endorsing his pupil's work. Perhaps I am prejudiced, but Left Academician Ollman seems to me to be crowing: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Dr Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim".

I have therefore come to suspect that young Mr Sciabarra's wily advisers from "the left academy" saw a neat and rather amusing way to deflect and defuse this earnest Randian graduate student when he swam into their ken. They cooked up a mish-mash of superficial parallels and sent him off on a wild Marx chase.

To return to the clerical, and comedic, allusions with which I began, I think Christopher Matthew Sciabarra would have been better off to stick for guidance to the St Christopher medal his Sicilian grandmother no doubt hung around his neck.

Alternatively, though I'm not a Christian myself, the advice of his other namesake, St Matthew, isn't half bad at all: "Beware of them that come to thee in sheep's clothing, for inwardly they are ravening wolves".

Nicholas Dykes