Ayn’s Creature
Kate Sinha, June 2019. This text was commissioned by De Balie for the event ‘Great Thinkers: Ayn Rand’, as a reflection on Ayn Rand’s ideas about art.
When I read Ayn Rand’s texts, whether fiction or theory, I feel so insulted by their particular combination of false assumptions, fallacies and overwhelming lack of self-awareness that the thought of having to keep digging through her considerable mass of incoherent sludge in order to produce a coherent critique is enough to send me into a spasm of indignation that longs to be, in and of itself, sufficient proof of the sincerity, and therefore the correctness, of my judgment. I suspect I will not get away with that, and that if I want you to agree with me — and I do — I will at least have to support my judgment with a well-formed argument. And so I return to unravelling Rand’s misconceptions with the tenacity of a prosecutor determined to secure a swift and just conviction.
Once I get into it, I rather enjoy myself. I like putting people before a jury of their own making; I like arranging an idea so that it stares its own impossibility straight in the eye: the moment a perfect, dazzling circle appears, the dissolution of the idea in the great thinker’s mind. It does not matter that Rand is no longer here to experience it, because even when she was, she was incapable of accepting an intellectual defeat. She refused to accept the refutation of her assumptions; throughout her life, she clung to her defective objectivism, that interminable hymn to reason that never produced anything reasonable. She summed it up herself as follows:
‘My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.’
That final phrase matters: reason as the only absolute. Ayn Rand’s great failing is that she did not recognise the relationship between irrationality and rationality. Reason, and the worship of it, has always been an irrational affair, and this is how it works: reason orients itself towards the ideals of equality, autonomy, freedom, progress and happiness, and these ideals cannot be questioned without also jeopardising the primacy of reason itself. Without this orientation, it loses direction, meaning. As such, these ideals give shape to the irrational — because unprovable — moral imperative underlying the concept of ‘reason’: the idea that one applies reason because doing so is right. And in Kant’s case: the idea that reason is right because one applies it.
The finest moment in Western philosophy is therefore the moment when, from within this problem of integrity, the Enlightenment allowed itself to be devoured by Friedrich Nietzsche. He writes:
‘The drive present equally in the highest and the lowest human beings, the drive to preserve the species, erupts from time to time as reason, as a passion of the mind; it then surrounds itself with a splendid retinue of reasons and wants, by every means, to make us forget that, when all is said and done, it is nothing but drive, instinct, folly, meaninglessness. You must and shall love life, because! Man must and shall help himself and his neighbour, because!’
Nietzsche was not the only one, or even the first, to identify this problem. But he was the only one to grasp its nature and potential in their entirety. His rejection of ‘the religion of pity’ was such a tremendous, profound insult to the moral establishment that he immediately hooked that enormous, fat, indignant fish. The Gay Science is one long feast of reeling it in and serving it up. For both Nietzsche and the reader, the pleasure of the attack and the abundance of the catch form part of understanding the philosophical problem. And here again we see the limitation of reason, which does not know what to do with bloodlust — that is, unreasonableness — and believes that, in the name of truth, it can and even must exorcise it.
As may be becoming clear, Nietzsche has had an enormous influence on the makers of Kirac; his philosophy is fundamental to how we make and judge art. He shows us how judgments of taste, morality and integrity relate to one another. When someone declares with the utmost certainty, ‘Yes, but that is simply a false note’, or ‘How unreasonable!’, or ‘I agree with the message, but the tone…!’, you know for certain that you are dealing with deeply rooted cultural prejudices, and that it is worth wrenching them out of their safe context, since doing so unleashes a beautiful world of bewilderment and indignation.
That does not mean every artist has to work this way. The only universal criterion for a good work of art is the extent to which it succeeds in dictating its own criteria of judgment. The artwork does not then say: I am good because I was made by a woman. I am good because I am pious, original, Cubist, critical… I am good because I am myself, daring, neurotic, a slow film, engaged, disengaged… No. It says: I am good because you want to know what I am, and don’t worry, because I decide what is beautiful and what is ugly, and when you tolerate me, that will have consequences — however modest — for the way you see things from now on.
How does such a work of art come into being? Ayn Rand tries to answer this question. The Romantic Manifesto is a sincere attempt to understand and describe art as a phenomenon, one that fails because every observation, whether accurate or not, originates in or culminates in her personal addiction to a monstrous ideal of the artist. She expressed this most unequivocally in the form of Howard Roark, the architect with the straight back and humourless expression whom you just saw in the clip, talking about the single-mindedness with which he pursues his artwork, driven to show what he considers important.
But making art is a psychosis, whether you are writing, painting or editing a film. It is a psychosis because, perhaps by performing certain ritual actions, you numb your mind in such a way that it begins to concentrate on an initial impulse that has no substance at all yet, such as ‘a dialogue with Ayn Rand, because De Balie has asked for it’. And as you descend into that concentration, the mind does not yet know what a dialogue with Ayn Rand is, or what it wants from one: that is what it will hopefully create. For the moment, it is as if two mirrors stand facing one another, with nothing but air between them. The only thing the mind can do to break the eternal nothingness is take a blind chance, and perhaps then everything will turn out all right. Reacting to chance and experience, the mind bluffs its way forward; it discovers something, feels disappointed or proud, and with every discovery its appetite grows and it tastes victory, until the concentration breaks and you suddenly look at your own psychosis again with sober eyes.
That is why a successful work of art is never the outcome of the thought ‘this is important for me to project and for others to see’. It is just as likely to begin for banal reasons as for lofty ones: you are bored, De Balie calls. But once you are inside that psychosis, everything is up for grabs. Values acquire a new specific gravity along the way, and nothing is important: there is only the relationship between the various motives. Sometimes, against your better judgment, you think: ‘I am going to express this, because it matters, because it is a good insight.’ But during the process it invariably turns out that the thing you valued so highly is precisely what now makes the artwork boring and shit, because everything is chained to that petty insight and no unexpected movement or discovery is possible any more. I value those unexpected moments; I now know they are the moments when I bring about something I can look at. It grows, becomes greater than I could have conceived myself, and I grow along with the artwork. Suddenly there is a whole new world of possibilities and prospects.
It is not that Ayn Rand was entirely unfamiliar with these feelings. Her debut presents a moving portrait of a young Ayn Rand looking with courageous openness at the harsh reality of the young Communist state. We the Living ends with the death of this Ayn Rand-like protagonist, who is shot at the border while trying to flee Russia. As she bleeds to death in the snow, she calls the name of her beloved, the beautiful Leo, whom the hardships and cruelties of the Soviet regime have turned into a nasty, nihilistic alcoholic, and who has left her to play gigolo to a wealthy woman.
‘Leo!…’ she repeated. She was calling to him, to the Leo he could have been, and surely would have been, had he lived where she was going, across the border.
It begins to dawn on us that this Leo is a kind of blueprint for the heroes of her future books, stripped of everything that makes him complex, everything that makes him weak and unhappy — in short, everything that makes him Russian. Howard Roark is Ayn Rand’s attempt to turn Leo into a kind of American Golden Boy, resulting in a monstrosity: a giant with narrow shoulders, a rancid coagulation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Kant’s categorical imperative; a Frankenstein’s Creature barely able to turn around, so rigid is he with inflated expectations. Howard Roark has been chosen to succeed.
Looking back, Leo’s failure thus turns out to be the last surprise Ayn Rand allowed herself. After We the Living, her Russian trauma manifests itself fully in her work, which seems designed to exclude every possible surprise. In The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you can taste it in the metallic euphoria with which she marches on, as it were, climbing the slope of pure reason without slowing her pace, her eyes fixed on the approaching horizon, on the glorious, promised redemption. This path leads to the abyss, and Rand can only keep walking straight ahead: the heroes of Atlas Shrugged ultimately set the world on fire so they can then rebuild it according to purely capitalist principles.
However much she despised the Communism of her homeland, the idea of an all-transcending utopia never let go of her. All her novels end with the promise of transcendence and rebirth after the crushing fall. It reminds us that socialism was, first and foremost, a Romantic movement, and that it was precisely with this Romantic disposition that Ayn Rand embraced American capitalism. How else can one explain the lack of irony with which the character John Galt traces a dollar sign in the air at the end of Atlas Shrugged, like a good communist clenching his fist? With this mythology, Ayn Rand gave capitalism a depth and heroic justification of which the simple capitalist himself would never have dared to dream. In that form, she sold capitalism back to her American readers, who in return needed only to surrender their altruism: a small payment for so great a gain, or, in other words, a good deal.