Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (36 page)

From a very early age, children begin to self-program their minds.
Childhood
“experiences, observations and sub-verbal conclusions” determine and shape the course of this cognitive development. In assessing a child’s cognitive skills, neither the content of the mind nor the mind’s methods of functioning can be evaluated in isolation from the other. The methods of acquiring and processing knowledge cannot be fully understood apart from the content of the mind. And the content of the mind cannot be fully appreciated by abstracting it from the process—the particular methods of
awareness
—that make it possible (Peikoff 1985T, lecture 1). According to Rand, “the interaction of content and method establishes a certain reciprocity: the method of acquiring knowledge affects its content, which affects the further development of the method, and so on.”
²⁶
Rand therefore placed great emphasis on the social context within which children develop their cognitive skills. The significant adults in a child’s world, the methods of
education, and the culture itself “can accelerate or hamper, retard and, perhaps, destroy the development of his conceptual faculty” (195).

Thus, how an individual deals with the facts of reality is a function of the interaction between the content and the methods of his or her
consciousness
. The content is not always articulated, however. The subconscious integrates the mind’s contents and serves as the repository of an inarticulate “
sense
of life.” In her earliest published discussion of this concept, Rand defined a “sense of life” as “a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.”
²⁷

In their initial dealings with the world, children begin to form generalized impressions about the nature of reality, of the self, and of others. Growing up in loving households, children might form a benevolent sense of life, see themselves as worthy of affection, and be able to both give and receive love. Children who are victims of abuse, on the other hand, might form a malevolent sense of life, be distrustful of people, and be handicapped by a poor self-image. The range of subconscious integrations between these two extremes is enormous.

A sense of life, then, is formed by a tacit process of emotional
abstraction
. The subconscious classifies things and events, people and places, all of the contents of the mind, “
according to the
emotions
they invoke
[sic]” (27). Relationships are established by subconscious associations and emotional connotations. These subconscious integrations become the emotional equivalent of what Rand characterizes as “metaphysical value-judgments” (28). Such judgments pertain to the general nature of being. They are what
Edith Packer
has called “core evaluations” of the self, the world, and other people.
²⁸

A sense of life is not a logically derived emotional sum. In fact, no emotions are “deduced” through rational deliberation. Rand does not present a promulgation theory of the origins of emotion. True, she holds that emotions are the result of conscious contact with the world. But they are not the product of explicit or deliberate deduction. A sense of life is formed from the earliest moments of childhood as an unintended consequence or by-product of the child’s contact with reality.

For Rand, a
sense of life
is essentially the form in which most people hold their “philosophy.” It is an “unidentified philosophy” for most people, but serves as a kind of philosophy nonetheless. A child’s sense of life will affect its value choices, actions, emotional responses, and, especially, its conscious convictions. As children grow into adulthood, their sense of life continues to deeply influence their approach to living.
²⁹
Rand and Nathaniel Branden explain that a person’s sense of life is rarely explicitly
articulated. In our relationships with others, our sense of life is communicated tacitly by our manner “of moving, talking, smiling,”
³⁰
our ways “of standing, of moving, of expressing
emotions
, of reacting to events … by the things said and by the things not said, by the explanations it is not necessary to give, by sudden, unexpected signs of mutual understanding.”
³¹

Since this tacit dimension permeates nearly every facet of our personality, Branden argues that an individual’s sense of life, once formed, is “remarkably tenacious and resistant to change.” Indeed, even if the adult acquires a great deal of knowledge through observation and learning, his or her sense of life is liable to remain unaffected (N. Branden 1980, 99). Rand likewise observed that the great majority of people remain at the mercy of their tacit sense of life.
³²

Speaking as a philosopher, Rand denied that a person could be judged by his or her subconscious premises, since these premises cannot be known explicitly by the observer (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 12).
Consciousness
can be perceived and evaluated only by its “outward manifestations,” its expressions in action. The task of evaluating the subconscious is a psychological, rather than a philosophical, endeavor. Psychology regards the individual agent as a medical “subject,” to be evaluated according to standards of mental health and cognitive competence, not moral worth.

Nonetheless, a psychologistic element is evident in many of Rand’s commentaries.
³³
In addition, it has been observed that Rand psychologized and moralized in her own dealings with people.
³⁴
Rand was philosophically opposed to such practices, however. She stated: “Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become
psychologizing.
”
³⁵

Though Rand holds that a psychologist should not pass judgment on the “proper” or “improper” desires of the patient, it is clear that she has a definite conception of what is “proper” to human being.
Mack
and others are correct to note that her entire vision of the good colored her understanding of what is healthy and unhealthy in human emotional response. But for Rand, it is not the emotion per se that is immoral or irrational; it is the underlying judgment that must be assessed.
³⁶
Since only the conscious mind is subject to direct control, only conscious actions are subject to moral judgment.
³⁷
And only the guiding hand of reason can enable individuals to articulate their subconscious premises and achieve a more integrated union with their conscious beliefs and actions. When this integration occurs, it is, according to Rand, “the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience.” In Rand’s view:

The transition from guidance by a
sense of life
to guidance by a
conscious
philosophy takes many forms. For the rare exception, the
rational child, it is a natural, absorbing, if difficult, process—the process of validating and, if necessary, correcting in
conceptual
terms what he had merely sensed about the nature of man’s existence, thus transforming a wordless feeling into a clearly verbalized knowledge, and laying a firm foundation, an intellectual roadbed, for the course of his life. The result is a fully integrated personality, a man whose mind and
emotions
are in harmony, whose sense of life matches his conscious convictions.
³⁸

Rand recognized that this articulation process was fundamentally therapeutic. Individuals who tend to guide their actions by subconscious and emotional factors must be trained to articulate
conceptually
their fundamental base. In a journal entry written in the 1950s, Rand clearly understood that one could not “simply forbid” such individuals from living by the guidance of their tacit minds. The individual must be taught to build “his conceptual files by a constant process of verbalizing and defining, teach[ing] him to analyze his emotional selector when he catches it in action.” The purpose of such a therapeutic process is to train individuals to discover the “deeper and deeper reasons” of their emotions, enabling them “to remove more ‘onion skins,’ and ultimately to reduce [their] emotional premises down to their philosophical primary base.”
³⁹

Rand emphasized, however, that such an articulation process does not mean that the subconscious mind ceases to function. An articulated philosophy does not supplant an inarticulate sense of life. A sense of life, like all subconscious mechanisms, continues to operate as an engine of automatization. But as individuals move toward the clearer articulation of their thoughts and emotions, they learn to derive value judgments conceptually, rather than as mere by-products of a subconscious sense of life. Rand recognized that for many people this articulation process remains dormant or stunted. In such cases, they may experience a clash between their conscious convictions and their “repressed, unidentified (or only partially identified) sense of life.” In a clash of this nature, an individual’s sense of life cannot be changed volitionally. It can be altered gradually only after a long, difficult process of “psychological retraining.”

But Rand also argued that it is not always necessary to change one’s sense of life, that sometimes the tacit dimension is more consistent with the facts of reality than an individual’s conscious convictions are. “Ironically enough,” states Rand, “it is man’s emotions, in such cases, that act as the avengers of his neglected or betrayed intellect.”
⁴⁰

Thus Rand’s philosophy does not tend toward a rational construction of feelings, but toward an integrated understanding of mind and of its
constituted unity of reason and emotion. In such an organic unity, we grasp the cognitive basis of emotion, and the subconscious-emotive components of our understanding. In Rand’s view, it is neither possible nor desirable to conceptualize every experience, action, emotion, and thought. As
Packer
explains, mental health does not require the articulation of
everything
that is subconscious; it only requires that there be no obstacles to retrieving relevant information held subconsciously.
⁴¹
Hence, the freely functioning subconscious can be enlisted in the service of awareness and
creativity
. Indeed, a “
sense
of life” governs the creative process and the response to
art
.
⁴²
Artistic creation itself rests on the ability of the subconscious to integrate everything relevant to a specific context defined by the creator. An act of inspiration is the product of an automatized subconscious integration triggered by an observation of a new fact in its relationship to established knowledge. Creators work “intuitively,” allowing their subconscious to integrate evidence that not even their
conscious
minds grasp immediately.
⁴³
As Nathaniel Branden argues:

Mind is more than immediate explicit awareness. It is a complex architecture of structures and processes. It includes more than the verbal, linear, analytic processes popularly if misleadingly described sometimes as “left-brain” activity. It includes the totality of mental life, including the subconscious, the intuitive, the symbolic, all that which sometimes is associated with the “right brain.” Mind is all that by means of which we reach out to and apprehend the world.
⁴⁴

None of these observations contradict Rand’s fundamental belief in the centrality of reason. Rather, they are entirely consistent with her expansive concept of
consciousness
.

Thus far I have explored Rand’s conception of the interrelationship between mental content and
method
primarily from the vantage point of content. In this aspect of her analysis, Rand focuses on the automatized content of the subconscious as expressed in the individual’s
sense of life
. But Rand’s investigation goes further. She is also concerned with the automatized, habitual
methods
of
consciousness
.
“Psycho-epistemology”
pertains to the interrelationship between content and method from the vantage point of method. In her earliest published statement on this topic, Rand identified
“psycho-epistemology”
as “a man’s method of using his consciousness” (
New Intellectual
, 21). Nathaniel Branden ([1969] 1979, 98 n. 29) states that Rand was the first philosopher to use this term in print. The concept itself was originated by Barbara Branden, who in the 1950s persuaded Rand of its importance. In later years, Rand expanded
her understanding of the concept “psycho-epistemology” as “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between man’s conscious mind and the automatic functions of his subconscious.”
⁴⁵

Nathaniel Branden’s articles on “psycho-epistemology” from the early 1960s suggest that the study of cognitive methods entails an examination of the relationship between the
volitional
and nonvolitional aspects of consciousness. By examining the link between “
the conscious, goal-setting, self-regulatory operations of the mind, and the subconscious, automatic operations
,” Rand and Branden sought to understand how certain habitual methods of awareness could internalize errors that would distort cognitive functioning.
⁴⁶
Psycho-epistemology seeks to discover—and correct—these errors by articulating the methods people use to process the content of their minds (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 6). And yet Objectivism recognizes that a person’s habitual method of awareness is just as difficult to change as a person’s sense of life. Peikoff (1983T, lecture 12) observes, for instance, that the older a person is, the more likely it is that his or her psycho-epistemology will remain entrenched.

Nathaniel Branden argues that there are three basic cognitive habits. These alternative habits are often practiced by children in what Rand describes as “a continuum of degrees” between two extremes.
⁴⁷
As children grow, they learn to activate and sustain different levels of focus. The clarity of this focus will deeply affect the clarity of their mental contents. Next, children learn to perform independent acts of analysis in assessing the validity of any issue. Their acceptance of an idea’s truth or falsity can result from critical inquiry or from uncritical passivity. Finally, children must learn to distinguish between the functions of their
reason
and the functions of their
emotions
. They learn to direct their consciousnesses by making explicit, logical deductions and inductive generalizations (N. Branden [1969] 1979, 112). But they can also learn to attend to their subconscious emotions in such a way that their emotions serve as psycho-epistemological aids.
This
Brandenian insight serves as the springboard for a far more dialectical interpretation of the reason-emotion distinction.