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LOCOMOTIVE RAND v. NIETZSCHE


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Rand had some important steady differences with Nietzsche from the first of her publications to her last. She always extolled the virtues of reason and the hard sciences. Rand’s protagonists Kira, Equality 7-2521, Roark, Rearden, and Galt all love science and technology. They embrace technological and social progress, contrary to Nietzsche. They all find the possibility of entirely meaningful work in technical and commercial areas, contrary to Nietzsche’s assessments of work in those areas. They all develop into persons whose moral character is in a stable equilibrium for the best possible human life, contrary Nietzsche’s ideal of endless reach beyond particular tables of good and evil. Rand was constant in her opposition to materialist, determinist reduction of all human thought, will, and desire, contrary to Nietzsche.

Rand contests Nietzsche’s mature philosophy in her 1960 essay “For the New Intellectual.” She stands against Nietzsche’s proclamations “that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his ‘blood’, by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, the ‘superman’ is ‘beyond good and evil’, that he is a ‘beast of prey’ whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim” (36).

That Randian summary of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy is roughly right. Nietzsche would deny, of course, that the ultimate standard of his ideal, super human is nothing but whim. It goes too far to say that Nietzsche’s superhuman is moved not at all by reason. The Nietzschean virtues of intellectual honesty and courage are kin of reason.

We have seen that, for Nietzsche, underneath will to truth and will to life is will to power. This he takes to be in the nature of human life independently of anyone’s whim. That will to power manifests itself in higher humans and in superhumans in the form of those particular virtues is not subject to the whims of those beings. Not just anything an individual might set up as a value for himself can pass for noble or be worthy of a superhuman. Weakness, pity, altruism, unconditional faith, and respect of equal rights for all will not fit the bill. (The middle three are issues on which Rand was in some steady agreement with Nietzsche.) Beyond those constraints on the values of a superhuman are the required perpetual drive to fashion new values and the circumstance that not just any new value can be grown out of his previous values. Notice that Aristotle’s constraint of the mean is not among the constraints on Nietzschean value sets.

For the most part, it remains that the superhuman’s value sets, old and new, are to be peculiar to that individual alone. I should say that a value theory holding that values (and health) are relative to individuals and are idiosyncratic does not necessarily entail that they are not objective. Nietzsche, however, has not arrived at sufficiently specific and objective constraints on idiosyncratic values to provision the superintendence of feeling by reason. That was not his aim.

He has also not established the objectivity of the uniform “noble” values he applauds. For all his questioning of ideals not his own and all his talk of self-criticism, Nietzsche’s own ideals of nobility and egoism are personal sentiments sheltered from objective assessment.

Rand did not accept Nietzshe’s idea that the world that is relevant to us might be a fiction (BGE 34, 24, 230). From Kira fighting to live and make her own life to Tony dying in the arms of Rearden, Rand takes the absoluteness of truth or falsehood to equal the absoluteness of life or death. From We the Living to The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged, she takes rightness in values to be tethered to rightness for life against death. Roark tells Mallory that seeking the best is a law of survival (ET XI 349). Toohey tells Dominique that if the press and the professors valued their lives they should have come to the defense of Roark’s Temple of the Human Spirit (ET XII 369).

Rand had Kira place before Andrei the possibility of wanting something for “no reason of right or wrong, for no reason at all, save one: that you wanted it” (WL 1936, 92; quoted in Milgram 2004, 40). In Fountainhead Rand writes not only of rightness and having rights. She writes expressly of good and evil. Catherine Halsey learns to greatly curtail her personal desires and to devote her efforts to helping others. This she does because she wants to do what is right and because she accepts the idea that selfishness is evil (ET XIII 384).

Catherine also accepts the idea, advocated by Toohey (ET XI 342), that selfishness leads to unhappiness. I have been unable to recall or locate any major thinker who advocated this proposition, but it will follow from the premises that happiness requires morality and that selfishness is immoral.

Catherine’s success at unselfishness makes her unhappy and resentful. She speaks with her Uncle Ellsworth about it. She acknowledges that he is much brighter than she and that “‘it’s a very big subject, good and evil’” (ET XIII 384). Rand then uses their dialogue to argue the incoherence and pointlessness of absolute unselfishness. Rand’s lead into her case for the goodness of pure selfishness consists of the sensibleness and pleasure of having personal desires (together with having one’s own thoughts and choices) and guiding one’s own actions. (ET XIII 384; GW II 454). We have seen this way of entering the case for egoism before, in the development of Andrei after he meets Kira.

After her deep conversation with Uncle Ellsworth, Catherine gets together with Peter Keating. He is feeling dirty because of his testimony against Roark at the court case over the Stoddard Temple. Peter and Catherine reaffirm their love, which is a first-hand personal preference satisfying their own identities. They kiss. “Then he did not think of the Stoddard Temple any longer, and she did not think of good and evil. They did not need to; they felt too clean” (ET XIII 391). This suggests that at least one reason the concept of good and evil is needed is the human potential for betraying egoistic innocence.

Unlike Nietzsche, Rand does not pretend that everything standing as good or evil is infirm and is malleable by those who are the meaning of the earth. Roark eventually comes to pain from not having known that helping Peter in design matters was wrong (HR XII 664). Roark is Rand’s meaning of the earth, in place of Nietzsche’s superhuman, but she does not make the fact that Roark chooses an action be the source of its moral correctness or incorrectness.

Right after Peter’s scene with Catherine, he has a scene with Dominique. She offers to marry him. That would have advantages for his public personae, but marrying her instead of Catherine would be untrue to what little is himself. “He knew that he was violently alive, that he was forcing the stupor into his muscles and into his mind, because he wished to escape the responsibility of consciousness” (ET XIV 393; cf. Atlas 1148). Humans have a responsibility to be conscious, to connect, to integrate; but they can avoid consciousness at least to some degree. Keating marries Dominique. He is a chronic evader when it comes to self-awareness.

In Roark’s courtroom soliloquy, he argues that creation and thought are necessities of human survival, that they are only possible by individual minds, that creative thinkers live for the truth borne in their creations, they live for themselves, and they need independence and freedom to function (cf. Z I “On the Way of the Creator”). “‘Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self’” (HR XVIII 738). Altruism is evil because it destroys the human creator, the font of human life. Egoism that includes the sacrifice of others to oneself, such as the egoism of Nietzsche, is evil because it blocks the self-sufficiency, the integrity, required for human life, whether the life of a profound architect or such lives as sit on the jury Roark selects for his trial: “two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener, and three factory workers” (HR XVIII 733–34). Not to Nietzsche’s taste for equal rights (BGE 265; TI 48).

In the opening of Galt’s radio speech in Atlas Shrugged, Rand sets aside traditional bases for morality. She sets aside mystical and social bases. An individual needs morality to sustain his or her life, even for life apart from society. Rand rejects the Christian and post-Christian distinction between the self-interested and the moral. They are one. The moral virtues of her fully developed ethics are integral with all the big choices in one’s life. Morality in Rand’s meaning “is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life” (OE 13).

The basis of Rand’s morality is individual human life. The virtues she identifies as needed by anyone for best life are guides for their life. Rand’s ethics are aids for crafting one’s own lived moral ideal. Your ideal is to be the life you might make. Other particular ideal characters and lives can inspire, but they cannot substitute (AS 1017, 1058–59). In this way, Rand’s ethics is a little like Nietzsche’s individualist approach to value.

However, contrary to Nietzsche’s admonitions, Rand proposes values and virtues as right for everyone. It is life itself that is standard for any genuine virtue or ideal (and life itself is not will to power). It is rationality, not irrationality, that enables human lives, every single one of them. Rand stands against “the kind of ‘Nietzschean egoists’. . . who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit” (VS x). Intended self-benefit is necessary but not sufficient for that which is morally right in Rand’s rational egoism (on insufficiency see further Branden 1962a; 1962b; Rand 1974).

I should pause over the necessity of intended self-benefit for correct values. Not all of one’s potential selves are worth benefitting. Among those who are, Rand maintains that only potential selves whose every value is intended to benefit themselves hold entirely correct values. “Concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and . . . man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions. / The actor must always be the beneficiary of his action” (VS ix–x; also OE 46–47).

One is a beneficiary in ways other than by one’s resulting positive feelings, because one is a self that is not only feelings. Man’s self is “‘that entity that is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego’” (HR XVIII 737). It is the self—one’s soul—that has thoughts, meaning, will, values, desires, and feeling (GW II 454).

Roark loves the buildings he designs not only because of the positive responses they elicit in him. Dagny loves diesel-electric locomotives and the minds that create them not only because of the positive responses they elicit in her. It is not plausible that when she finds that man at the end of the rails, the one for whom she has longed since her youth, she will love him only because of the positive responses he evokes in her.

There is, however, a thread of subjectivity in Rand’s conception of value and love and normative selfishness that is puckering up the fabric. In my judgment, that thread is unnecessary and should be removed. Speaking metaphorically, the solemnity of looking at the sky does not come only from the uplift of one’s head (HR V 598). In extreme desire for another person, the other does not recede in importance compared to the desire (GW IX 539). A rational desire to help someone in need is animated not only by “your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and struggle” (AS 1060, emphasis added). Rather, it is enough for rational egoism that, by design, no actions be contrary self-benefit (of a self worth benefitting). The requirement that all actions should intend primarily self-benefit should be dropped. In this way, one can love persons simply for the particular ends-in-themselves that they are.

The man who dynamited Cortlandt rises, takes the oath, and stands before the court audience. “Roark stood before each of them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room” (HR XVIII 736).

Rand takes benevolence to be people’s natural state when they are not constrained by law or morality to take basic direction from others rather than from themselves and to benefit others rather than themselves. David Kelley has added to Rand’s ethics by reckoning the ways in which benevolence is in one’s self-interest and arguing that the virtue of productivity has a cohort virtue in benevolence towards others (1996). In Kelley’s view, although benevolence is not an obligation by way of respecting the rights of others, it is an obligation to oneself. I think only some occasions of right benevolence are morally required; other occasions are morally permitted, but not required, not an obligation. Be that as it may, my dissent registered to Rand’s account of rational egoism applies to Kelley’s as well. Both of them correctly recognize that genuine benevolent responsiveness is not educed primarily by motives of self-sacrifice. Both are wrong in not recognizing that the genuine, innocent response of benevolence is also not educed primarily by motives of self-benefit.

There is a common modern assumption that value implies sentience (e.g. William James). That is not the position we find in Nietzsche’s mature view. The will to power is the structure of value as the structure of all living things.

Early Rand evidently held, contrary mature Nietzsche, that value implies sentience. Life cannot become value until it can know of itself. Kira says to Andrei: “‘What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something that knows how to want—isn’t that life itself?’” (WL 1936, 496; quoted in Wright 2005, 203). This is not a denial that animal and vegetative life are life. It is a claim that preciousness of life enters the world only in sentient beings who know and culture their desires.

In the manuscript for Anthem (1938), Rand has the protagonist Equality 7-2521 reflect: “I will, for I know my desires, and I am free in that which I desire” (quoted in Milgram 2005, 19). He is not thinking simply that he is presently free from the coercive orders of other men. He is saying that man’s will is free by nature. To be directed by one’s own will is the natural state of human beings. In the 1938 edition, Equality writes: “My will, which chooses, and orders, and creates. My will, the master which knows no masters. My will, the liberator and conqueror. My will, which is the thin flame, still and holy, in the shrine of my body, my body which is but the shrine of my will. Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: ‘I will it’” (quoted in Mayhew 2005b, 40).

Early Rand held to considerable freedom of the will, contrary Marx and Nietzsche. The will for Rand is spirit. Human will, joy, and thought are of the inner self, which is spirit. If the will were only drives of the body, it would not be free or sacred. This sense of sacredness does not entail belief in the supernatural nor opposition to reason, which is itself part of the holy self.

We have seen that in The Fountainhead, too, deterministic materialist reduction of human life is rejected by Rand (PK VI 77; HR VII 615; HR X 649). Deeper than the bones, for man, is his soul (GW III 471). Roark says to Wynand “‘we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form’” (HR II 558). All living creatures have a life source, which is their constitutional idea. Failure of organism integrity, compromise of its life source, is death (PK XV 205). Similarly, to set against the central constitutional idea particular to one’s self is a failure of an integrity that may be called moral integrity (ibid.). A person of integrity is self-motivated, a self-sufficient spirit (HR XI 660). Life itself for man requires human consciousness, which is independent judgment (HR XI 659). Life itself for man requires creators (HR XVIII 737). The vision, strength, and courage of a creator comes “from his own spirit” (ibid.). Human creators are “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force . . .” (ibid.).

For all individuals, not only extraordinary creators, seeking the best, loving one’s work, and choosing independence is seeking, loving, and choosing life—one’s own life—against death (ET XI 349; HR XVIII 739–40). In her fully developed ethical system of Atlas Shrugged, the choice of life or death remains implicit in one’s choices for virtues such as integrity, productiveness, and independence.

In Fountainhead loyalty to reason had been a virtue alongside virtues such as integrity and independence. In Atlas loyalty to truth in all things by reason, which is termed rationality, is the premier virtue. And the choice to think becomes the life-or-death choice underlying all the life-or-death virtues of Rand’s full system: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride (see also Wright 2009, 258–62, 265–70). “That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character” (AS 1017).

The mind’s grasp of reality at the level required for human survival is not an automatic, physically determined process like sensory perception (AS 1012–13, 1041). Furthermore, the human mind has some fundamental freedom to orient itself to reality or to obscure reality by evasion (or to revolt outright against reason and reality, as with Toohey). It has some power of self-deception. Rand’s Galt says: “‘It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture’. /  ‘Do not remind me that it pertains only to life on this earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you’” (emphasis added; cf. Nietzsche in Pippin 2010, 85–104).

Value comes into the world by and only by the emergence of organisms out of inanimate chemicals (AS 994, 1012–13, 1016). Every organism’s life is “a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil” (AS 1012–13).

Organic value is the deepest basis of moral value, there are no genuine nobilities transcending moral value, and the structure of organic value is not will to power.

“In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. . . . Do not let the hero in your soul perish . . . .

“Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.

“‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’.” (AS 1069)

“‘Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind’” (AS 1045).

“Every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature” (AS 1014). That goes for plants, insects, and right on up to man. A fish cannot live out of water, a dog cannot live without its sense of smell, and neither can a man survive any-which-way-whatever. Man has an identity, a nature. Man’s life is made possible only by thinking and achievement (AS 1014–15). Correct virtues—whether peculiar of an extraordinary creator, or peculiar of an excellent practitioner of a particular profession, or common for all good persons—correct virtues are actions by which one gains or keeps correct values (AS 1012). The correct actions and correct values pertinent to every individual are those judged by the standard of Man’s Life to “the purpose of preserving, fulfilling, and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life” (AS 1014).

In Rand’s characterization of life, every aspect of being alive, including growth, “involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action” (ITOE 81, 24–25).

“For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. . . .

“An animal’s capacity for development ends at physical maturity and thereafter its growth consists of the action necessary to maintain itself at a fixed level; after reaching maturity, it does not, to any significant extent, continue to grow in efficacy . . . . But man’s capacity for development does not end at physical maturity . . . . His ability to think, to learn, to discover new and better ways of dealing with reality, to expand the range of his efficacy, to grow intellectually, is an open door to a road that has no end.

“When man discovered how to make fire to keep himself warm, his need for thought and effort was not ended; . . . when he moved his life expectancy . . . his need of thought and effort was not ended . . . .

“Every achievement of man is a value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and values. Life is growth . . . . Every step upward opens to man a wider range of action and achievement—and creates the need for that achievement. . . . Survival demands constant growth and creativeness.

“Constant growth is, further, a psychological need of man.” (Branden 1963, 121–22)

As in Greek philosophy, psychological well-being and happiness is serious business in Rand’s philosophy. “Just as a man is free to attempt to survive in any manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man” (AS 1014). Think of Peter Keating (ET XI 341–43; GW II 449–50). (See also Enright 1991; Wright 2005; Salmieri 2009, 236–45; and Locke 2009, 323–32.)

In The Fountainhead Rand sometimes calls certain human behaviors instinctual. Speaking to Roark, the sympathetic character Kent Lansing says: “‘Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood. . . .’” (ET X 332). Rand also writes: “People began to ooze towards Ellsworth Toohey: the right kind of people, those who soon found him to be a spiritual necessity. The other kind did not come; there seemed to be an instinct about it” (ET IX 320). In the later years of the story, when Toohey has stopped promoting the career of Keating, the latter “tried not to think of Ellsworth Toohey. A dim instinct told him that he could preserve a precarious security of spirit so long as he did not touch upon that subject” (HR VII 612). Wynand says to Roark that second-handers will “‘accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct’” (HR XII 659).

That talk of instincts, which humans have about themselves and each other, probably only meant either a deep-seated knack not requiring an articulated reasoning process or a deep-seated disposition manifest in feelings. There was a different, more elaborate, concept of instinct in use in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific characterization of animal behavior. Schopenhauer wrote of instinct in this sense as requiring will, perception, and some apprehension of elementary causal relations. In his characterization, animal instincts are infallible, like perception, and they are supplanted by reason in man (WWP I.2.136; I.2.180).  Animal instincts, such as nest-building in birds or web-spinning in spiders, are not guided by the ends towards which the animal works. Schopenhauer’s picture of an animal faculty of instinct was in the tradition of medieval Aristotelians, but without supposing the faculty to have been instilled in animals by an intelligent Creator. (On concepts of instincts before Charles Darwin, see Richards 1987, 20–70.)

Like Schopenhauer, Rand saw humans as needing to use intelligence for survival. “Man cannot survive except through his mind. . . . He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought . . . . Everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind” (HR XVIII 737).

Nietzsche writes of all sorts of social instincts: an instinct for mediocrity (BGE 206); a cunning instinct of the middle classes against higher spirits (BGE 218); feminine instincts (BGE 239); and instincts for rank (BGE 263). Beneath all faith, or belief without conscious reason, is instinct (BGE 191). Beneath unegoistic morality is the herd instinct (GM I 2). We have a tendency towards self-preservation, and this is a common consequence of the more fundamental constant drive of life itself, the drive of will to power (BGE 13). Social instincts, too, are manifestations of organic will to power. The instinct for social freedom is a will to power (GM II 18).

In the walls of society and peace, the human animal lost his fitness to wilderness, war, prowling, and adventure. His instincts became disvalued. He lost his former guides, his drives regulating, unconscious, and infallible. These, unfortunate human animals, “were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, . . . they were reduced to their ‘consciousness’, their weakest and most fallible organ” (GM II 16; also AC 14). Inhibited from their outward discharge, the instincts of the human animal turned inward, giving rise to the inner world called soul and the misery of bad conscience.

The change from wild to civil, from unrestrained instinct to bad conscience “was not a gradual or voluntary one and did not represent an organic adaptation to new conditions” (GM II 17). Rather, institutional organization of nomadic men was effected by the violence of “some pack of blond beast of prey, a conquering and master race” (ibid.). These hypothetical unconscious creators of social structure were themselves without bad conscience, though they begat it.

Civilized, man turned himself into “an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness” (GM II 16). Now man “gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if within him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise” (ibid.). Tomorrow, the overman.

“The greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctual activity, and this is even the case for philosophical thought. . . . Most of a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced into determinate channels by the instincts” (BGE 3). In Nietzsche’s view, most of conceptual consciousness is directed by instinct, which is activity of body, physical, not spiritual. “Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit” (Z I “On Reading and Writing”). Said by a materialist, that line means also: spirit is blood.

I do not mean to suggest that mature Rand was allied to spiritualism in contrast to materialism. She rejected mysticism of the spirit equally with mysticism of muscle (AS 1027, 1035–39, 1042–47). “‘You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness’” (AS 1029). The parts of consciousness over which humans have free first-person control are not something beyond the biological nature of humans. I should mention that Rand took each person and his or her life to be something absolutely irreplaceable, therefore unrepeatable (unlike Nietzsche). So it is not clear that she would accept the traditional conception of free will as the ability to have done something different in exactly the same circumstances, including brain state. It may be enough for the physical possibility of what Rand takes to be intelligent free choice that it be free of determining physical causes that are not neurological correlates of one’s thinking self (cf. Peikoff 1991, 55, 64–65; Pippin 2010, 68–84).

Rand denies humans possess animal instincts. The concept desire should be distinguished from the concept instinct. A desire to live is not an instinct for self-preservation. One may desire to live, but that of itself would not include the knowledge required for living (AS 1013). Such knowledge is not automatic in the way of instincts. One has no instinct for tool making. Acquisition of human knowledge requires the voluntary action that is thinking (AS 1043–44). Not only conceptual thought, but even the desire to live is not automatic for human beings (AS 1013). Furthermore, man’s “moral instinct” is nothing more than his reason (AS 1017). Lastly: “Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instincts” (AS 1012).

Humans have a conceptual capability for giving integration to their existence. Man’s consciousness is an “enormously powerful integrating mechanism” given by his organic nature. “His only choice is to drive it or to be driven by it. Since an act of volition—a process of thought—is required to use the mechanism for a cognitive purpose, man can evade that effort. But if he evades, chance takes over: the mechanism functions on its own like a machine without a driver; it goes on integrating blindly, incongruously, at random” (PSL 27; contrast with GS V 360). It is then no longer an instrument of cognition, but bringer of delusion, self-torture, and fear (PSL 27; also AS 1037).

Ayn Rand did not find the coming of reason and morality into the pre-human race to be in any way unfortunate. Inner self-torture of a human being is from weakened reason. In health and innocence, there is indeed inner tension and promise in the human soul. Not for the coming of beings beyond the human. For the coming creations of man. So many days have not yet broken.

References

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——. 1962b. Isn’t Everyone Selfish? In Rand 1964.

——. 1963. The Divine Right of Stagnation. In Rand 1964.

Enright, M. 1991. Why Man Needs Approval. Objectivity 1(2):67–93.

Kelley, D. 1996. Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence.

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Locke, E.A. 2009. The Traits of Business Heroes in Atlas Shrugged. In Mayhew 2009.

Mayhew, R., editor. 2005a. Essays in Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Lexington.

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Milgram, S. 2004. From Airtight to We the Living. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. R. Mayhew, editor. Lexington.

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Richards, R.J. 1987. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago.

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——. 2009. Ayn Rand’s Ethics: From The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged. In Mayhew 2009.

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I mentioned earlier that my Nietzsche/Rand series of articles had been composed in 2010 for the Boydstun Corner at OBJECTIVIST LIVING, and that by now the series there had received 20,600 hits. I have now removed this series and a couple of others from that site because OL has taken on a type of outside advertising that I saw was dispersed within the Nietzsche/Rand thread. The ads use motion to get the eye's attention, distracting from extended concentration that these posts need in order to assimilate the information. The ads have  headers like "Seven Women for Every Man" and other such irrelevant foolishness. So OBJECTIVISM ONLINE is now the exclusive public sharing place of these compositions.

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