The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldnt Win New York Magazine

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Whenever Ayn Rand met someone newan acolyte whod traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novelshe would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of historys all-time classic icebreakers: Tell me your premises. Once youd managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is A, and so forththe whole Objectivist catechism. And once you conceded any part of that basic platform, the game was pretty much over. Shed start piecing together her rationalist Tinkertoys until the mighty Randian edifice towered over you: a rigidly logical Art Deco skyscraper, 30 or 40 feet tall, with little plastic industrialists peeking out the windowsa shining monument to the glories of individualism, the virtues of selfishness, and the deep morality of laissez-faire capitalism. Grant Ayn Rand a premise and youd leave with a lifestyle.

Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think weve reached bedrock, theres almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosophers own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentionedWhat the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it isand oh so flagrantly!is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.

No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand. Few fellow creatures have had a more intensely odd personal flavor; her temperament could have neutered an ox at 40 paces. She was proud, grouchy, vindictive, insulting, dismissive, and rash. (One former associate called her the Evel Knievel of leaping to conclusions.) But she was also idealistic, yearning, candid, worshipful, precise, and improbably charming. She funneled all of these contradictory elements into Objectivism, the home-brewed philosophy that won her thousands of Cold Warera followers and that seems to be making some noise once again in our era of bailouts and tea parties. (Glenn Beck and Ron Paul are Rand fans; Alan Greenspan, once a member of her inner circle, had his faith in the markets rationality shaken by the crash.)

Its easy to chuckle at Rand, smugly, from the safe distance of intervening decades or an opposed ideology, but in personher big black eyes flashing deep into the night, fueled by nicotine, caffeine, and amphetaminesshe was apparently an irresistible force, a machine of pure reason, a free-market Spock who converted doubters left, right, and center. Eyewitnesses say that she never lost an argument. One of her young students (soon to be her young lover) staggered out of his first all-night talk session referring to her, admiringly, as Mrs. Logic. And logic, in Rands hands, seemed to enjoy superpowers it didnt possess with anyone else. She claimed, for instance, that she could rationally explain every emotion shed ever had. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive, she once wrote, and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. One convert insisted that she knows me better after five hours than my analyst does after five years. The only option was to yield or stay away. (I should admit here my own bias: I was a card-carrying Objectivist from roughly age 16 to 19, during which time I did everything short of changing my last name to Randersona phase Im deeply embarrassed by, but also secretly grateful for.)

Rand insisted, over and over, that the details of her life had nothing to do with the tenets of her philosophy. She would cite, on this subject, the fictional architect Howard Roark, hero of her novel The Fountainhead: Dont ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think. But the things she thought, it turns out, were very much dependent on her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelingsor at least on her relative lack of all that.

Anne Hellers new biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, allows us to poke our heads, for the first time, into the Russian-Americans overheated philosophical subbasement. After reading the details of Rands early life, I find it hard to think of Objectivism as very objective at allit looks more like a rational program retrofitted to a lifelong temperament, a fantasy world created to cancel the nightmare of a terrifying childhood. This is the comedy, the tragedy, and the power of Rand: She built a glorious imaginary empire on that nuclear-grade temperament, then devoted every ounce of her will and intelligence to proving it was all pure reason.

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The One Argument Ayn Rand Couldnt Win New York Magazine