Atlas Shagged

My good friends James Valliant and Aaron Haspel are in a blogwar about Ayn Rand's theory of sex. I worked for the Estate of Ayn Rand during graduate school, cataloging her papers and her art-deco jewelry, so naturally I have been called upon to take sides. Personally, I would rather have sex than write about it. But here are my thoughts.

1. The foundation of Miss Rand's view -- the idea that one's physical and one's spiritual lives are not split -- is but one among the ideas (e.g., the evil of altruism) which she could have credited Nietzsche with anticipating. We know that she read Nietzsche voraciously, that he was the principal influence on her prose style, that she took from him certain terms and concepts (e.g., "sacrificial animal"). It would have been at least good intellectual manners for her to have cited his aphorism: "The degree and kind of one's sexuality reaches to the very pinnacle of one's spirit."

2. My own view runs along the lines suggested in that old Yuppie bible, Dress for Success, which my father gave me when I was going off into the world, or anyway into college. The author raised the question "boxers or briefs?" and dismissed it in one clause: "A gentleman should be allowed to choose his own underwear." So it is with one's sexuality-- it's the most intensely personal aspect of one's personality. Therefore, it's the area in which I'm least comfortable with thunderous pronouncements.

3. I would distinguish between (a) the sex scenes in Miss Rand's fiction; (b) the objectivist view on sex as given in her philosophical passages; and (c) the strange behavior of some of her admirers.

(a) I don't understand why sex in her fiction is generally violent, masochistic, sometimes involves the drawing of blood, and is never, as far as I can tell, made to seem the expression of tenderness.

(b) I don't see what there is about sex which should make it the topic for separate inquiry in ethics, unless it is the natural, animal intensity of our sexual drives -- a factor not considered by official objectivism (see point 5 below). In other words, unless there is something particularly problematic about sex, and objectivists do not seem to believe that there is, it would seem to me that, as in any other arena, one should just act honestly, etc., etc.

(c) Many objectivists make the mistake of "holding out for an objectivist." This is just as misguided and destructive as the pressure within Judaism to marry, date, or socialize only "within the tribe." Yes, it's important that romantic partners look at the world in similar, or not totally incompatible ways; and for that there can be little tests: e.g. whether you like the same art (I thank Aaron Haspel for that insight). And of course, you have to sense that the person is your partner, that they "get you." But that goes more to how they think than what they think. I think.

4. Riding home on the subway this evening, reading Martin Amis' The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000, I encountered this sentence, in Amis' discussion of Philip Larkin's pornographic aberrance:

...the relationship between the sexes is based on biological interdependency, which takes complex forms" (p. 162).

This statement, which I take to be importantly true, highlights the principal incompleteness, and therefore weakness, in the objectivist view. Granted, man is "the rational animal" -- but reading objectivists on sex, one might easily conclude that man is rational only, and animal not at all. Thus, we are offered all kinds of intellectual pretzel-knots to explain why a tall, shapely, beautiful blonde woman should produce in men a kind of priapic mania: Must have something to do with her "implicit philosophical convictions, her sense of life."

Far more insight, I would suggest, is offered by the average Discovery Channel documentary -- e.g. Desmond Morris' series, "The Human Animal," which in concept objectivists should be the first to tout, for it shows that beauty is certainly not in the eye of the beholder. Certain features of body and spirit, which we regard as an index to attractiveness (large breasts in women, large bank accounts in men), are universal, found throughout all cultures, at all times, precisely because they are regarded as signs of suitability for breeding.

Miss Rand references none of this. Instead, in her article on "The Money Making Personality" (for... Cosmopolitan), she acquits the entire female sex of gold-digging, explaining straight-facedly that the reason a wealthy man is more attractive to women than a poor one -- i.e., why Donald Trump can date more 19-year-old models as a tycoon than he could as a plumber -- has nothing to do with money. Rather, women are attracted to the "character" which, in a free capitalist society, produces such wealth.

This leaves some questions unanswered, however. For instance: If they care so much about "character," why aren't women in un-free societies, e.g. Latin American dictatorships, or Arab caliphates, more attracted to hard-working peons than they are to the playboys of graft? Unless one factors in the wealthy man's comparatively superior ability to provde for her and support her children, any female preference for bad rich men over good poor men seems difficult to explain.

5. Why should the biological aspects of human sexuality be short-shrifted by objectivism? I suspect it’s because Miss Rand held, as indeed Jim Valliant also asserts, that humans do not have instincts. Whether man is the only animal who is so blessed, or cursed, we are not told; but her student Harry Binswanger once confided to me his belief that no animals have any instincts, that the whole concept is invalid.

Yet the objectivist definition of instincts differs -- conveniently, blithely, I daresay capriciously -- from that which is offered in dictionaries. An instinct, objectivists contend, is "automatic, inborn knowledge." Thus, since we cannot be born with knowledge, we cannot be born with instincts. But “instinct" does not mean automatic knowledge to anyone but an objectivist. To cite the source Miss Rand cited most often when she defined terms, the Random House Dictionary:

INSTINCT. 1. An inborn pattern of activity or tendency to action common to a given biological species. 2. A natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency. 3. A natural aptitude or gift. 4. Natural intuitive power. [1375-1425: Late Middle English, via Latin instinctus: prompting, instigation, enthusiasm.]

The only concepts here which might be construed as cognitive are in the secondary uses of the term, in (3) and (4); and even then, we have only a natural aptitude or "power," a potentiality, a propensity -- not discrete conceptual content. And of course in the Latin root (did Miss Rand ever give a Latin root?) we have only a conatus, a will, a drive.

This all is important because we can now turn to Miss Rand's hero, Aristotle, and specifically to the first line of the treatise which she said was the foundation of her own philosophy. In the Metaphysics he begins by saying, famously:

All men, by nature, desire to know.

By the standard usage of the term, then, Aristotle believes in instincts. He grants an inborn pattern of activity or tendency to knowledge common to man. He posits a natural or innate impulse, inclination, or tendency toward knowledge; a natural aptitude or gift for knowing; an instinct for cogitating; a natural power to intuit reality.

Under Aristotle’s rubric, man has by nature many desires. We desire by nature to know, to eat, to drink, to sleep, etc. Objectivism should not have any problem with such natural proclivities; and indeed, Miss Rand seems to acknowledge them in a justly praised passage of “The Objectivist Ethics,” where she reminds us that our stomachs will tell us we are hungry, but not how to obtain food. Thus too, our loins will tell us we are horny, but not with whom we should sleep. In both cases we must choose consciously whether, and how, to satisfy our appetites. But whether we call these appetites by the name “instincts,” or something else, the plain fact is that we do have them.

How we should manage our appetites is of course an ancient question in ethics. It has been of great concern to the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Christians, the Moslems, and in fact to most everyone except objectivists.

This raises another weakness in official objectivism: its tepid participation in the Great Western Conversation, its tacky and in sometimes counterfactual insistence on its own revolutionary newness, and its marked aversion to the finding of continuities with any pre-Randians but Aristotle.

Take, for instance, Emerson’s statement: “Wealth is mental, wealth is moral” (“Wealth," 1861). This strophe encapsulates, and anticipates, a key theme of Atlas Shrugged. Yet rather than positioning herself as the corrector and reviser of a pre-existent, uniquely American, individualist tradition -- rather than citing Emerson to buttress the very point she tries to make in her Cosmo piece -- Miss Rand dismisses him as “a very little mind.”

So, too, objectivists fail to align themselves with Stoics like Marcus Aurelius -- who espoused self-mastery, defined as the harnessing of appetites by reason. Objectivists thus unmoor themselves from two-plus millennia of answers to uniquely human problems: e.g., how to get over on a Saturday night without feeling bad about it on Sunday morning.

For help in these questions we must turn to sources other than official objectivism. In this connection I’d note that my friend Neil Peart, who is familiar with objectivism and accepts much of it, has written an interesting album’s worth of lyrics on the mastery of appetites (Rush, “Hold Your Fire,” 1987). Neil considers how we must constrain, by thought, “those primal kinds of inner things” which would otherwise drive us to behave badly. The strength of these drives, the difficulty of braking them, brings up my final point.

If we desire by nature to do many things, we do not desire to do all these things in equal degree. Indeed, a keen observer will find it difficult not to conclude that by nature we want to have sex more than we want to be wise. Thus the proverb “Love is blind"; and thus too Nietzsche’s maxim: “Love is the state of mind in which man most decidedly views things as they are not.”

Objectivists will perhaps distinguish themselves from lower types of men by their heroism in sexual matters: by their honesty: by their nobility: by their rational animality: by their refusal to jump in bed with someone, as Jerome Tuccille once put it, “just because they like the shape of that person’s buttocks.” But why can't they just admit that such situations raise issues, or pose problems, precisely because all men by nature desire to fuck?

Posted by Mark Riebling @ 09/16/2002 06:51:08 PM