The Nominalism of Ayn Rand’s Epistemology
I would like to quote the following remarks by author, social critic, and “philosopher” Ayn Rand, in order to point out some of the implications of her views of race on other aspects of her philosophy, and to note, more specifically, instances of self-contradiction in her thought.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage - the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors…
Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements - and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.”
This statement, true to its materialist presuppositions, denies the existence of immaterial referents, specifically those of the laws of logic, and other immaterial, but no less existent, features of the universe, and, among other things, places the locus of reason within the individual mind. But if reason (and, by implication, logic itself) is individual, then there is no explanation for the trans-individual character of rationality that is a feature of Rand’s theory of knowledge, by which all men who are reasonable agree in all matters. Such ‘reasoning’ as Rand employs in the quote above, then, denies the locus of Rand’s own desired immaterial features of existence, namely, the natural law, by which all men presumably know what is right from what is wrong. While denying immaterial existents, and also denying the ethnological character of social nurture, Rand can then only locate the source of logic in biology. But this would imply a genetic basis for knowledge, a basis which might then partake in collectivity.
The denial of a “racial’ mind” is the same, logically, as the claim that there is no “society,” that is, that “nurture” and all that it implies does not exist because men of similar origins do not and cannot think in similar ways as a result of those origins. Of course, it is very difficult to explain the phenomenon of language, a non-individual and quite “racial” relationship among men by which they understand one another. Further, contained in Rand’s epitemology is the denial that there is anything of a social, ethical, or intellectual character that is the common possession of a group of men, by which group relations, and therefore identity, might be mediated. The sociological implications are absurd in the extreme, but, in this short space, we must limit our scope to the implications for Rand’s theory of knowledge.
If only individuals exist, as Rand posits, then neither is there any such thing as a nation, or a species, or a gas, or a metal, or a disease, or anything else that we give a name to in order to identify individuals by their shared characteristics. Thus, epistemology (or theory of knowledge) implicit in Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism is one characterized by a thorough nominalism -that is, a denial that abstracts have existence that is exclusively post res, and therefore have no reality outside of language. Of course, the denial of existence to non-material referents is by implication a denial of the existence of God, who is likewise non-material. Atheism is therefore implicit within the metaphysical position of nominalism. But also, by extension, nominalism presents certain difficulties for the capacity of men to reason together, which her philosophy, and all others, presuppose in order to be communicable and to possess persuasive capacity. Such a theory of knowledge makes of logic, the basis of reason, a social convention -a convention which she denies can achieve commonality, and therefore constitute a system by which men can reach agreement, except by accident. But if reason itself is a social convention, then there is no sense in which one can claim it is absolute, except by consensus. But this consensus raises other problems, by way of exceptions to such consensus, that Objectivism cannot satisfactorily answer.
Moreover, it is quite difficult to posit the Natural Law on which her ethic so critically depends if there are no universals. Such a Law, having no social dimension, but rather being independently apprehended by individuals, fails to locate a medium for the preservation and transmission of its precepts outside of tradition. Yet one may note that Rand, in direct contradiction to her own epistemology, posits above the existence of a collective known as ‘man.’ We can only presume that this collectivity is able to be logically posited because all of its members share precisely the same characteristics in all respects, but, of course, this assertion is quite in contradiction to the common empirical observations recorded by the social and biological sciences. Such a mankind can only be an abstraction itself, and a particularly bloodless one, as it seems to be an existent without any characteristics, to avoid the breakdown of her categorization. When men are permitted to possess characteristics, we soon see that they tend to coalesce into populations around shared characteristics which are precisely measurable, and also heritable. Indeed, if only individuals have any existence or significance, then it will be difficult for us to ascribe any meaning to the term man. And thus, in order to avoid the reality of race (or any other collective), Rand must avoid altogether the use of abstract nouns, which, we are confident, would result in the application of reductio ad absurdum to her epistemology.
