[This was written on 11/17/1995 and posted to the now defunct Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy. I've made a few changes to it. I post it mainly because at least one person was under the impression that I had major disagreements with Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. This should prove I did not in 1995. I am of much the same opinion now – with one exception being I think I agree more now with Sciabarra's take on Rand's social theory.]
Though it may be the intention of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical's author, Chris Sciabarra, to gain "recognition and respectability in the scholarly community," Ronald Merrill should live up to his own rhetoric and judge the book on whether it identifies Rand's debt to Russian philosophy and shows Objectivism to be essentially dialectical. Whether the book will affect academy is of secondary importance. (The truth is, the number of Objectivists and Objectivist professors, is and has been growing. Thus, I believe the "recognition and respectability in the scholarly community" will come regardless of Sciabarra's book.)
I agree that the book is not light reading, but this is a minor attack. Is every philosophy book supposed to be written at the eighth grade reading level? Yet the book is not obscure, nor is specialized jargon as plentiful as Merrill would have us believe. The quote that Merrill uses to illustrate his point – "Rand's approach to the ontological foundations of philosophy was minimalist." (p130) – comes after Sciabarra defines what is meant by ontology. (The word "ontology" can be found in most dictionaries!) He does not try to belittle his readers or speak in code words to the knowing few. Instead, he's fairly good at describing what he means. He then goes on to use his more technical terms repeatedly. This may lead to a problem to those who skim the book and aren't familiar with what his terms means, but how often have Objectivists criticized others for taking Rand out of context?
Also, if any Objectivist armchair philosophers – people whose experience of philosophy is limited to Rand and her followers – are not "proficient in... philosophical terminology" they should be. If Objectivists are to be taken seriously they must not only know what they are dishing out, but have some ability to understand other philosophers. I'm not maintaining this as an absolute virtue. Obviously, not everyone can be, wants to be or should be a philosopher, but it's a sad commentary on the Objectivist movement – a movement that allegedly holds individual judgement in high esteem – when most of the people involved do not know the ideas they are against, or even take the time to analyze things outside their worldview.
While I disagree with Merrill's simplistic characterization of Sciabarra's application of "dialectical," the latter does seem to go overboard – using dialectics to explain almost all of Objectivism. However, the contention is that Objectivism is essentially dialectical. If this is so, dialectics should underlie all aspects of the philosophy. Even if Sciabarra only concentrated on the anti-dualist bent of Objectivism, he would have been identifying an important strand in Objectivism. While Rand even casually admitted this, an extended study would still be beneficial. It would be another way of showing how Objectivism works. This would then make its insights more easily applicable and its limits more appreciated.
Anti-dualism, in fact, is something covered in mainstream Objectivism. Leonard Peikoff, in the close of Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, sees the history of philosophy as a duel between Plato and Aristotle. He criticizes the former for separating body and mind, the archetypal dualism present in Western philosophy. However, it is only by going beyond this and looking dialectically at this history that we see mind/body and related dualism not as mere splits, but as creating tensions. These tensions act to create further distortions as well as to constantly open new possibilities for opposition. In other words, because reality is whole, those who deny one part while reifying another build the very ground for their opponents. Idealism helps materialism – in the same way the ex-Catholics made the best Protestants! (And who make the the most strident Dry's but ex-alcoholics!)
In order to escape the trap of dualism, a dialectical understanding, as Rand seems to have had, is necessary. Her method was to question the framework within which the oppositions exist. Much of her philosophy is really, in terms of the conventions she grew up around, an attempt to transcend the fragmentation and the arbitrary "package-dealing" all around her – in both Russia and America.
To equate "anti-dualism" and "dialectics" is a profound mistake, I believe, because dualism is usually arbitrary. Anti-dualism, like counterfeit individualism, can be just as arbitrary as the dualism it purports to overcome. In this respect, Merrill oversimplifies.
As for the dialectical thread running through "Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Rand," one should not assume that using dialectical method makes one identical to all other dialecticians. I believe Sciabarra should have gone into more detail on this matter. He should have provided a longer catalog of dialectics and dialecticians. This, I admit, is a problem with the book.
However, in light of Merrill's criticism, I ask does the fact that d'Holbach, Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Lenin, and Rand were all atheists make the concept of atheism "unconstitutionally vague"?
Also, look at the following paragraph from Merrill's review:
Sciabarra is on to something much more productive when he discusses "anti-Dualism" in a second sense, as a methodology, not philosophical content. In this sense of the term, anti-Dualism means the tendency to reason or argue by means of rejecting false antitheses. This "dialectical" method of argumentation, says Sciabarra, can be traced back to the "thesis-antithesis-synthesis" sequence attributed to Hegel, and further to the "golden mean" sought by Aristotle. But this is not really anti-Dualist in the sense of rejecting antitheses. In fact, if we examine Rand's reasoning in detail, we find that almost always she ends up replacing the false antithesis with a new, corrected antithesis. Nonetheless, Sciabarra's insight is valuable because it stimulates us to analyze more closely the various lines of argument that Rand used.
The true synthesis at the end of the triad is not supposed to be merely the opposite of the antithesis in the middle. If it were, we would be back with the thesis. A true synthesis would have to be something that identified the original thesis and antithesis as parts of a larger whole. By identifying this larger whole, the synthesis has transcended the narrow confines of the original dualism (i.e., the range fenced in by the thesis and antithesis).
By identifying that some opposing views – e.g., the Christian view of splitting sex and love – are really restrictive, Rand was able to identify the package as well as offer a solution – e.g., the unity of sex and love in a romantic relationship – that could not provided within the old dualism. Whether Rand does this to point out the false dichotomy or to offer an alternative as yet unpresented within the dichotomy, she seems to be using a dialectical process. The solution often is not merely something outside of the false dichotomy, but something which combines the fractured parts of the dichotomy. To stick with the same example, Rand's view of romantic relationships is not one of rejecting both love and sex, but of combining them.
There is also a problem with seeing dialectics as compromising (in the Golden mean or any other sense). Dialectics as used here cannot be a compromise. A compromise would be an admission that the problem offered by a given dualism is insoluble at the current time. Dialectics offers a solution not by mindlessly mixing one side with the other, but by taking what is true and valid in either side and integrating them. The Objectivist theory of perception is not a blend of naïve realism a la Aristotle and subjectivist idealism a la Berkeley. It is a theory which admits both the existence of external objects and the relativity of the senses. It ignores the diaphanous model accepted by previous realists and idealists. Even in dialectics, old unities can be overthrown when they are shown to be false or hasty.
Merrill brings up a good point about influences. It is hard to see how someone can absorb something and reject other things, given some sort of cultural determinism. However, Sciabarra does not deny free will and he does not support cultural determinism. The point is that if Rand was a certain type of thinker, then she had to get her method from somewhere. Partly, she made innovations, but, one must admit, partly, she took what was present around her when she was growing up. This is not to surrender to some form of determinism but to show that even volition has limits.
However, to truly demonstrate that Rand got her method from Russian philosophy, one would need more access to her notebooks. Even then, it's not likely Rand wrote something like "Gee, that Lossky, I think I'll take his methods and throw out the mystical claptrap..." The case will remain, most likely, like much of the biographical scholarship, tentative. (I confess that I'm not an expert on Russian philosophy. I found Sciabarra's sections on it interesting, if a little repetitious.)
(James Lennox also brings up a similar point, though with much more facility than this author in his review of the book, "The Roots of Ayn Rand?" IOS Journal 5(4). I have some disagreements with Lennox's characterizations of dualisms in Objectivism. I hardly think the dichotomy between "existence" and "consciousness" is similar in any "important way" to the previous incarnations of dualism, such as Descartes' division between spirit and matter.)
That both Lossky and Rand sought to avoid competing "schools of thought" does not mean they succeeded. Here, I part company with Sciabarra. I think it is too early to tell what will become of the various factions within Objectivism. Who could have predicted that Martin Luther's 95 Theses would spark the Reformation that has led to there being hundreds of sects of Christianity? Who can tell if the issues now motivating the factions within the Objectivist movement may not diverge in the future. People who originally fought over whether libertarians are hopeless nihilists may in the future find other differences – more important to them – to fight over. This seems to be the case with the Peikoff/Kelley split.
Anyway, real science, if that is the benchmark to be used, is not so monolithic. Despite 130 years of Darwin, there are factions within evolutionary biology for instance. Questions over the tempo of evolution, the units of selection, and the role of initial conditions are sources of controversy. They are also, in a seemingly dialectical fashion, sources of growth. (See, for instance, Daniel Brooks' and E. O. Wiley's Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology – which I hope to review one of these days!)
I also disagree with Merrill's characterization of the third part the book – "The Radical Rand." This section deals with Rand's social theory – her views of the dynamics of the welfare state, the role of ideas in society, and the means of effecting social change for the better. This is, but should not be, original work. Outside of Rand's own works, this field gets little attention from Objectivists. Sciabarra is really the first to break out into the open about it. Much of his work seems tedious and will probably be refined by later thinkers. I wrote that this "should not be" original because many Objectivists go on and on about changing society. One would think this would be the most studied area of her philosophy. Instead, with the exception of Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels, this area has relegated to the dustbin. It is good to see Sciabarra recover it – even if one may disagree with his particular analyses.
I hope I have at least shown why Sciabarra's book is not worthy of the review given by Merrill. One would hope reviewers would not go to their keyboards with axe in hand – that instead of being ready to attack, they would be ready to learn.