by Charles Ray

Created on: October 31, 2010

Russian-born author/philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, initially introduced her philosophy of Objectivism.  She further developed her ideas in other works, including her magazines The Objectivist Newsletter. The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter, as well as in the non-fiction books she wrote.

Rand believed that reality exists independent of consciousness and that humans contact this reality through perception and can attain objective knowledge through inductive and deductive logic.  She held that a proper moral purpose of a person’s life was the pursuit of one’s own happiness, and that the only social system consistent with such a morality is full respect for human rights. 

Introduced in 1943, Rand’s philosophy was considered somewhat controversial, in that it rejected both faith and feeling as sources of knowledge.  In her own words, “Reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness, independent of any observer’s knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears.  This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are – and that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.”  She rejected any belief in the supernatural, or claims that people or groups are able to create their own reality.  Rand defined faith as “the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and reason".  Faith, she reasoned, is not a ‘short cut’ to knowledge, but a ‘short circuit’ destroying knowledge.  She felt that relying on revelation was like believing in a Ouija board, the need to show how knowledge is connected to reality is bypassed.

Objectivism, when it was introduced in the 1940s, was a radical alternative to the prevailing schools of thought that dominated academia; mysticism, altruism, and collectivism, which Rand believed spawned nihilism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and statism; challenging over 2,000 years of human philosophy.  At a sales conference prior to the publication of Atlas shrugged, for instance, Rand was challenged by one of the book salesmen at Random House to present the essence of her philosophy while standing on one foot.  In a 1962 essay, she recounted this incident, and restated her philosophy as follows:

Objective Reality (Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.  Wishing won’t make it so)

Reason (You can’t eat your cake and have it too)

Self-interest (Man is an end in himself)

Capitalism (Give me liberty or give me death)

A reading of Ayn Rand’s works, fiction and non-fiction, offers a fuller understanding of the basic foundation of Objectivism, which can be summed up as:  1.  Reality exists, independent of our feelings, wishes, hopes or fears, 2.  Reason is our only means of perceiving reality, 3.  Every person is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, and each person must exist for himself, not sacrificing himself for others, or others for himself, and 4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism, in which men deal with other, not as victims

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