Abigail Lashbrook's Second Place Essay

The Burden of Atlas

Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, portrays Rand’s vision of a world where man –specifically man who bases his life on autonomous reason – carries the world on his shoulders, and what happens when that man “shrugs” or refuses to carry this burden; a vision of man as a god. Playing off the ancient Greek myth of Atlas, a Titian god who joined the rebellion against the Olympian gods, and, losing, was condemned by the Olympians to perpetually stand on the earth and carry the heavens on his shoulders, Rand gives the story a different twist: the burden of Atlas is not a privilege or a penalty required by the gods, but one that man himself can take on or cast off at will, and it is not the heavens that he carries (for Rand, there was no Heaven) but the earth itself.  John W. Robbins’ book, Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand and the Close of Her System, is a response to Rand’s vision expressed not only in Atlas Shrugged but also in her other fiction and nonfiction, in which he proposes a theory in which quite the opposite is the case – not that Atlas carried the world and shrugged, but that he could not carry the world and fell, for the burden was too great for him.

Rand’s work is all about the idea of man as an autonomous being, an amoral self-made god who can willfully raise the world or cast it off, doing whatever he pleases for the purpose of gaining his ends, because he is the highest good. To this end she developed an entire philosophical construct which she named “Objectivism” in order to give a plausible framework for her vision, based, she said, on the use of reason and rigorous logical analysis.  Robbins’ response is a critique of this construct from the opposing viewpoint of Christianity, in which God, not man, is the highest good. He seeks to demonstrate, in this critique, the internal failure of Rand’s construct according to her own standard, logical consistency, and to present Christianity as the only truly plausible framework for life on earth. The purpose of this essay is to discuss Robbins’ response to Rand’s ideas, in particular the insight he brings to the faulty foundation of Objectivism -- humanism, the belief in autonomous reason -- and to show how it came about that Rand’s Atlas stumbled and fell, because he had nothing under his feet.

The Analysis of Objectivism

To begin, a brief summary of the philosophy of Objectivism is in order; what it is, and what it has to do with her popular fiction.  Answering the first question, Rand’s summary given to a book salesman who challenged her to give the basic points of her philosophy, in the space of time she could stand on one foot, is helpful:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality

2. Epistemology: Reason

3. Ethics: Self-interest

4. Politics: Capitalism (Rand, 26)^[1]

She claimed Objectivism was the only truly logical and internally self-consistent philosophy, because it was founded on reason alone. She taught that faith, in any context, was irrational, and that all knowledge was (or ought to be) based on the evidence of the senses. To the student of philosophy this will sound very familiar; ‘humanism’ is what we call the belief in autonomous reason which excludes the possibility of revelation, and ‘empiricism’ is the belief that all knowledge is derived from the senses. Just as Rand used the myth of Atlas (with her own adaptations) to communicate her ideal god-man, so also her entire philosophy is a variant of ancient Greek humanism, modernized and adapted to suit herself, but still the same basic humanism (essentially the glorification of man) nonetheless. Indeed, in her afterword to Atlas Shrugged she acknowledged the philosophical debt she owed to Aristotle, perhaps the most famous Greek humanist thinker. Secondly, the connection between Rand’s abstract philosophy and her novels, though at first thought puzzling, perhaps, is in the next instance both brilliant and alarming; her novels were her philosophy in action. Objectivism is the driving force behind all her works. Her expressed purpose in her fiction was to communicate Objectivism in an attractive and persuasive form: “I’m the chief living writer of propaganda fiction, I think- at least I think I’m the only one who knows how to do it properly” (Rand, xi) she said. In acknowledgement of this fact, and in accordance with Rand’s own emphasis on the priority of her philosophy, Robbins in his book chose to answer Rand’s work through an analysis of the philosophy, though less well known, rather than the fiction, because, Robbins says, “Ideas, for better or worse, rule the men who hold them, and through them, they rule the world. When a generation is presented with such a lethal system of ideas so attractively packaged, someone must take the time to suggest that all is not as it appears to be, that Rand’s system is really a Trojan thoroughbred”(p. xiii). By addressing the ideas behind the novels rather than the novels themselves, he reaches the fountainhead whence all the amorality and atheism portrayed in her novels spring.

Furthermore, Robbins chose a very specific method for refuting this philosophy: logical analysis. “It is not primarily her conclusions (though some are flagrantly wrong, such as her atheism and empiricism) but with her arguments that I deal, for her arguments cannot and do not logically support her conclusions” (Robbins, xiii). He is clear about his reason for this method: he is meeting Rand on her own ground. “Logic” is one of the main facets of objective human reason, the god she worships, and also one of her main claims to validity; she insisted that her philosophy was the only truly logical philosophy ever posited.  If it be proved that her philosophy was not, after all, logically consistent, her conclusions derived from such faulty means would be automatically invalidated. Rand’s Atlas stands on reason; if reason is not a solid foundation after all, then her Atlas and the self-made world he carries will fall together.

Rand’s Definition of Reason

Another definition is necessary at this point: if reason is the foundation of Rand’s philosophy, it is essential to know how she defined the word. This is where Robbins starts his critique, noting that “the main assumption of all humanist thought is the autonomy of reason; that is, all humanist philosophers claim that their philosophies are independent of religious presuppositions” (Robbins, 8). Rand was certainly no exception; she vigorously insisted that all thought be based on reason and that any faith was irrational: “An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith” (Rand, 25). What was her definition of this all-sufficient reason? “Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies, and integrates the material provided by the senses” (Rand, 8). Robbins points out the underlying assumption implicit in her definition: “that ‘reason’ is independent of and prior to any presuppositions” (Robbins, 10). The importance of this observation may be realized when one sees that Rand’s belief in the priority of reason is itself a presupposition, or a form of faith; but more on that later. At this point Robbins is concerned to show that “if reason is”, as Rand claims, “the source of knowledge, it must of necessity speak with one voice” (Robbins, 13). If reason is really independent of all presuppositions-- the only objective arbiter of reality-- it cannot mean different things to different men; if it did, it would not be objective, but rather a shifting quagmire of subjective opinion. However, a brief look at the history of philosophy is sufficient to show that of all the champions of reason throughout the centuries—and there have been many, varying from Aristotle and Kant to Descartes and Marx—not one agrees with the others. “Men cannot solve their problems and disagreements by an appeal to an autonomous, objective reason, for there are as many autonomous reasons as there are schools of philosophy” (Robbins, 14). Furthermore, Robbins points out, Rand herself used ‘reason’ in many different contexts, effectually giving it many different definitions; she gave it the meaning of ‘rational logic’, but also used it to mean ‘persuasion’ or ‘conversation’, a totally different function of the word. Where is reason as an objective standard? This difficulty is a very serious one. Ayn Rand is basing her whole philosophy on the premise that reason is an objective means by which man’s mind may discover the truth. It is a question of how Rand knows-- a question of epistemology.

Rand’s Epistemology

Epistemology, the study of the question “How do we know?” is of primary importance. Rand herself is very clear about this: “The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology-- the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge... all the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies, or corruptions” (Rand, 26).  Robbins wholeheartedly agrees; “No metaphysical assertion can be taken seriously until one has explained how he knows” (Robbins, 27), and proceeds to examine the means of Rand’s claim to knowledge.

Reason, as we have seen, is Rand’s claim to knowledge. Her (primary) definition of reason, again, is: “the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses” (Rand, 27). She also called it “man’s only means of perceiving reality” and “the only objective means of communication” (Rand, 27). Robbins proceeds to examine these definitions, in connection with a second central definition, man’s senses, saying, “Reason, we must not forget, is only half the Objectivist epistemological story: reason acts only on the ‘material provided by the senses’. The gathering or reception of this ‘material’ and its combination into a form usable by the faculty called ‘reason’ is the first and primary step in gaining knowledge” (Robbins, 29). This gathering of ‘material’ is accomplished by the senses, which go hand-in-hand with reason in Rand’s epistemology, namely empiricism, the belief that knowledge comes from the material world. The logical question one must ask, then, is how information is gained from the senses. Remarkably, neither Rand nor any other empiricist down through the ages has answered this question, for they can not. Robbins observes, “Although Rand’s epistemology requires a full and complete vindication of the senses, she nowhere provided one, or even attempted to provide one. She simply took the cognitive reliability and accuracy of the senses for granted” (Robbins, 38). Indeed, Rand herself states this in the foreword to her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: “I do not include here a discussion of the validity of man’s senses...for the purposes of this series the validity of the senses must be taken for granted” (Rand, 33).  A remarkable statement for one who insisted faith to be the antithesis of reason, here Rand confesses to placing faith in man’s senses.  So here we have two main problems embedded in Rand’s basic premise that knowledge is derived through reason and sense experience: the objective validity of either ‘reason’ or ‘the senses’ as a means of knowledge has not been proven. Upon these two concepts her entire philosophical construct either stands or falls; both humanism and empiricism, the essential elements of Objectivism, require knowledge to be derived from reason and the senses without the aid of faith, and therefore we will focus on these two main elements of Robbins’ critique.

We begin with the beginning of Rand’s source of knowledge, the senses. Are the physical sensations derived from our senses really the origin of all knowledge? There is a philosophical contradiction latent in this position, says Robbins: that of a tabula rasa mind. Tabula rasa means, literally, ‘empty slate’. The term describes the state of man’s mind at birth logically required by empiricism, because if all of man’s knowledge is gained through the senses, then of necessity the mind will be blank at birth, when the senses have not yet begun to function. That makes sense, but poses a major problem: it means that at birth the child has consciousness, but is not yet consciousness of anything. According to empiricism, the child must be born with a mind, or there will be nothing to ‘make sense of’ the senses, but that mind must be empty, or it will have knowledge not gained from the senses. This is a logical contradiction, as Robbins states, for mind presupposes thought: “Rand maintained that the child -- every child -- knows nothing, his mind is ‘unexposed’ and yet he has a conscious mind. The contradiction is inherent in the notion of a tabula rasa mind. A mind that is tabula rasa is simply not a mind. A consciousness conscious of nothing is simply not a consciousness. A mind that is empty is not a mind, any more than a geometrical figure that has no sides is a geometrical figure. This egregious contradiction lies at the foundation of Rand’s epistemology” (Robbins, 30).

A second problem for Objectivism’s epistemology is the failure of reason and sensation to interface. There lies a chasm, linking back to that of the tabula rasa mind, between sensation and perception (the use of reason). Just how does reason integrate the material provided by the senses into knowledge? The senses do not provide knowledge, but sensations; the two are very distinct. Your sense of touch does not tell you, “You are touching a wooden table” or even, “You are touching a piece of wood,” but only, “You are touching something smooth and hard”—not even that, because sensation is not a matter of thought; it is your mind that says you are touching something smooth and hard; the senses communicate only the smoothness and hardness, and the mind must construct the sensation into sense. Rand knew this; sensation is not knowledge. If the mind (or reason) is blank, how is it going to interpret raw sensation? Robbins says, “The logical chasm between these two ideas – (1) that knowledge is possible to man, and (2) that knowledge is gained only by means of the senses – is the chasm that Rand never bridged, nor even attempted to bridge. She was not alone, of course. For two thousand years the world has been waiting for the empiricists to furnish an explanation of how sensation -- whatever that is -- becomes propositional truth” (Robbins, 32). This chasm between physical ‘sensation’ on the one hand and metaphysical ‘truth’ on the other is one that can never be resolved by Rand’s philosophy of objective reason, because in order for human reason to remain autonomous, her philosophy demands that all knowledge be from the material world – and yet truth is not material. There is no way, Robbins argues, for Rand to reconcile mind and matter within her scheme of things, for they are by nature totally dissimilar.

The Problem of Universals

This point of contact between sensation (matter) and knowledge (truth) is a topic essential to epistemology, and therefore Robbins goes into it in great depth. It is a variation of the great philosophical problem of the one and the many -- how individuals relate to universals. The sensations of the senses are individuals, discrete, separate things, not in themselves related to any other. But thought requires universals, the abstract ideals that make it possible to say “This is like that.” Universals present empiricist thought with a problem, because empiricism claims knowledge to be based on the senses, which do not provide universals, but only particulars -- as observed earlier, sense communicates textures, scents, colors, etc., but not abstract ideas such as ‘table’ or ‘me’. So where do the universals come from, if not from the senses? Objectivism fails in this epistemological question, because its foundation is the assumption that knowledge is derived from the material world; but knowledge, though real, is not material.

Of course, Rand did attempt to establish a rational explanation for the derivation of knowledge from sensation and of universals from particulars: “Chronologically, man’s consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual...[but that]... epistemologically, the base of all man’s knowledge is the perceptual stage” (Rand, 39). In other words, knowledge does not derive directly from sensation, according to Rand, but through the mediation of ‘perceptions’, which she defines as ‘a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism.’ But this does not help; as Robbins observes, “How this feat is accomplished, we are never told. That it is accomplished, we are told; and that it is accomplished properly, that is, in accordance with ‘reality,’ we are told emphatically. No account, explanation, or argument is given to show how the brain retains, differentiates, and integrates chaotic sensations accurately, that is, in accordance with ‘reality’. We are to take all of this ‘for granted’” (Robbins, 40). Not only has Rand failed to establish the ability of ‘sensations’ to convey knowledge directly to the mind, she has also failed to establish how the brain forms ‘percepts’. “We must have faith in (‘take for granted’) not only the infallibility of the senses, but also the infallibility of the brain” (Robbins, 41). Working from Rand’s assumption that ‘reason’ is autonomous and can accurately know reality based on the senses produces counter-intuitive results; far from resulting in a rational theory of knowledge, it ends up positing faith in the infallibility of man’s senses and brain, rather than in God. Rand has, by her own definition of faith, “the commitment of one’s consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof” (Rand, 8), put faith in man, which is the essence of humanism; this result, says Robbins, is to be expected, because “reason is and must always be the handmaid of faith. The only question that remains is, Which faith – which axiom – shall reason serve?” (Robbins, 22). For Rand, the answer was man. Rand’s foundation for her humanism – reason – turns out to be merely another form of faith in disguise.

Objectivism in Action

 How Rand’s faith in man causes the ultimate downfall of man may be seen in the critique of her religion, ethics, and politics, which are the practical out-workings of her philosophy.

Proving Rand’s epistemology unsound is sufficient to invalidate Rand’s entire philosophy, because invalid premises result in invalid conclusions; however, because her perennial popularity comes from her novels – the portrayal of her ethics and politics in action

-- rather than from her more abstract epistemological work, Robbins continues his criticism of Rand’s philosophy into the visible and the logical conclusions which result from that philosophy in order to deconstruct the myths that attract so many to Objectivism in the first place. We shall examine them in the order that Robbins follows: metaphysics (theology/religion), ethics, and politics, moving from the abstract principles of epistemology to theology, observing the effects of one’s epistemology on one’s theology (and vice versa), and from there into ethics, the discussion of the good, which depends on one’s theology (what we worship is going to be our highest good), all the way down into politics, where one’s epistemology, theology, and ethics may be seen worked out in society.

The Religion of Objectivism

To address Rand’s religion may seem strange, for she was a self-proclaimed atheist. However, Robbins makes the case that she was religious nonetheless, for she had, of necessity, to place faith in the reliability of reason and the senses; essentially, faith in man and in matter. She claimed as the axiom upon which her philosophy rests, “Existence exists”(Rand, 120), saying that her whole moral code was based upon this. This axiom expressed her belief in the material world, ‘existence’, as the ultimate reality and the source for all truth and knowledge -- and granting this axiom such status sine qua non makes it a god, because it defines her life and philosophy. But that is only half of her religion; we have seen Rand’s double construct of sensation and rationality in her epistemology, and her religion is no different: “The existence of indestructible matter is only part of Objectivist theology. The other part is consciousness, a specific kind of consciousness, conceptual consciousness, man’s consciousness. The fact that Rand regarded man as a god (or men as gods) is hardly to be denied; the evidence for such an assertion abounds in her works” (Robbins, 123). This is a logical result of humanism; if man’s reason determines reality and is the highest value, then of course it is the object of worship to all who so believe. Rand acknowledged this: “The motive and purpose of my writing can best be summed up by saying that if a dedication page were to precede the total of my work, it would read: To the glory of man” (Rand, 132). It is fascinating to note, however, that if man-worship is the logical end of humanism, the beginning intent of humanism is also the deification of man, in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle. As Robbins says, “This is the motive of all humanism: the desire to be free from God” (Robbins, 135). In Rand’s biography there is a very illuminating passage in which she rejects the idea of God for two reasons: “first, there are no reasons to believe in God, there is no proof of the belief; and second, that the concept of God is insulting and degrading to man-- it implies that the highest possible is not to be reached by man, that he is an inferior being who can only worship an ideal he will never achieve. By her view, there could be no breach between conceiving of the best possible and deciding to attain it. She rejected the idea of God as morally evil” (Branden,110).^[2] Robbins notes that in this passage “lack of reasons and proof for the existence of God is treated cursorily, almost as if it were obligatory to say something about reason and proof, and not a very pleasant duty at that. On the other hand, the rejection of God on moral grounds occupies most of the attention of the writer” (Robbins, 111). This truly marks the high point of Robbins’ critique, as he reaches to the heart of Rand’s purpose for her work; the simple observation that underneath all of the rationalizing, all of the attempts to build a world by and for ‘reason’, to construct a political and ethical system that logically works, all that she really wanted to do was to get rid of God and enthrone man in His place, not because she could not believe in God, but because she would not. She wanted to be “the highest possible”. Rand is committing the most basic sin, that of pride against God -- the same sin that caused Lucifer to fall from heaven and Adam and Eve to fall from immortality -- the desire to be as God. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.... I will be like the most High.”^[3] Going back to the Greek humanism that informed Rand’s philosophy, we see the same spirit there, as the ancient mythology is rife with humans who rebel against the gods -- they normally end up being punished by the gods, it is true, but even the gods themselves are merely deified human beings. Rand’s philosophy goes one step further than the Greeks’, for instead of making the gods in the image of man, she says outright that man is the god. Indeed, this subversion of the relationship between God and man is ever-present in her writing; during his seventy-page diatribe in Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s hero John Galt subverts the meaning of man’s fall and claims that it was not a fall at all, but a liberation. Other allusions to Christianity in which she flips the truth upside down abound: for another example from Atlas Shrugged, her hero John Galt is the savior of the world, but he saves it not by self-sacrifice but by selfishness. This is Rand’s religious conception of man; an autonomous Atlas who stands or falls by himself and no other.

  Robbins continues his logical critique by asking the question, Can man indeed stand by his own efforts and carry the world on his shoulders? and suggests that the very nature of man’s attempt to be god sabotages his own efforts, stating, “Humanism is inherently murderous”(Robbins, 137). He proceeds to show why; because of Rand’s empiricism, her conception of reality is based on the two axioms of both objective reality and man’s mind as first causes. “Both man and nature,” he says of Rand’s philosophy, “are first causes or prime movers; that is, both beings have attributes usually assigned to God. Because of this, a tension arises between the gods, a tension that is aptly caught by one of Rand’s favorite (though never acknowledged) quotations from Francis Bacon: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Robbins, 140). Materialism causes this dilemma between man and matter because it claims that man is matter and yet is also master over it. If, as materialism/empiricism asserts, man and his knowledge are derived from the material world, then how is man’s power over nature (which Rand certainly endorsed) different from man’s power over other men, who are also merely nature? “Because she is a naturalist, the conquest of nature is, finally, the conquest of man”(Robbins, 141). The abolition of God results in the abolition of man, for man is made in God’s image; all that is human in man is a shadow of God’s likeness, and when God is denied, logically man’s humanity is denied as well. If man is merely matter, then he is not qualitatively different from any other part of matter.  “When she repudiated the God of the Bible, she also began the inexorable sequence of thought that must conclude in the elimination of the image of God: man” (Robbins, 142). Just as her epistemology failed, Rand’s faith in man fails to enable her Atlas to stand, but rather crushes him.

The Ethics of Objectivism

What then of Rand’s ethics? If her highest value is man, then how does her ethics, her theory of morals or values, work out? Logically, her values need to be based on man; again, Robbins shows this concept to be self-defeating. Rand defined ethics as “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions -- the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life” (Rand, 145). We would do well to keep in mind Rand’s epistemology, empiricism; she bases her theory of knowledge upon ‘objective reality’, and does the same with ethics. They, like her epistemology and religion, are based upon life on this earth. Rand stated this when she said that the standard for ethics was life: “An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil” (Rand, 147). Stop and think about these two definitions -- ethics are a code of values to guide man’s choices, and and man’s values are determined by his life (i.e. his choices -- Rand believed in free will). This is circular reasoning; it is saying that man’s choices are determined by man’s choices. It is Atlas trying to carry the earth while also trying to stand on it; it doesn’t work. Either he is standing on it or he is carrying it; and if he is carrying it, what is he standing on? Nothing, as we shall see; Rand could not establish values from the axiom “existence exists”. Robbins summarizes her position well when he says: “in ethics, as in every other branch of philosophy, Rand taught a logical contradiction: that biological life is beyond values and the basis for values, and that biological life is the ultimate value. If she had denied that life is the ultimate value, the end in itself, her ethical system would have collapsed for lack of a summum bonum. On the other hand, if Rand had denied that life is beyond (the presupposition of) value, her hierarchy of concepts would have collapsed. The confusion, of course, was already contained in her initial and absurd assertion that value presupposes value” (Robbins, 149). Robbins uses the question of suicide to show the failure of her system as a practical ethics, first noting that suicide is “logically the most fundamental question in ethical theory, and every ethical decision implicitly includes a decision to commit or not to commit suicide. The alternative of life and death... is part of every choice one makes. Therefore, to place this decision outside of one’s ethical system is to place all decisions outside one’s ethical system” (Robbins,150).  Rand could not answer the problem of suicide, for she was basing her ethical system on the assumption that man’s life is the highest good. She never answered the question, Is life the highest good? What if death is better? Interestingly enough, despite her fundamental presupposition that life is the summum bonum, the main character of Atlas Shrugged, the god-man John Galt, threatens to commit suicide if his love is harmed-- and fails to explain how that is furthering his life as the highest good. Isn’t he putting his love as the highest good, saying that if she dies, his life will be worthless?  Robbins makes an astute comment on this contradiction: “It is not her argumentation, which is hopelessly illogical, but the emotional appeal of her stories that keeps Rand’s works in print” (Robbins, 154). Her failure to establish the principle behind her ethics-- life as an end in itself-- causes her ethical system to crumble, in spite of the literary rhetoric that makes it so attractive. There is no standard by which she may judge any action.

The Politics of Objectivism

This leads us into Rand’s politics, which, she said, “are based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics...” (Rand, 180); based on our logical progress through her epistemology, religion, and ethics, her politics are already in a very bad way. Politics were very important to Rand; she is well-known for her support of capitalism, which she called “the only system geared to the life of a rational being” (Rand, 181). However, Robbins proceeds to show that her humanistic presuppositions lead not to a free society but to anarchy and totalitarianism. The trail leading from reason to lawlessness starts with the unsolved ethical problem: what is the standard for a free society, for a rational being -- for life? Rand begins with the statement: “If one wishes to advocate a free society... one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights” (Rand, 181). Necessarily we must inquire into the nature of these rights, being the foundation of free society; a right, she said, is “a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context” (Rand, 183). This statement is problematic, firstly, because of her previous failure to establish morals; furthermore, says Robbins, “if the source of man’s rights is himself, and those rights are based on right actions, then man also becomes a source of violations of his own rights” (Robbins, 185). He states it another way using the problem of suicide: “Why cannot a man violate his own rights? ... If it is right for him to live, and rights are inalienable, is it not a violation of his rights to commit suicide?” (Robbins, 185). It doesn’t make sense to say that man has total freedom of action and yet has moral prerogatives; total freedom of action is amoral. Her idea of rights is a garbled one, and that is a serious matter, being the foundation for her politics. If it is not known what is a right and what isn’t, there is no way to say what a violation consists of. Furthermore, Rand tells us that the only way to violate rights is by physical force-- by preventing man’s freedom of action. However, says Robbins, “If men have natural inalienable rights, then all punishment is immoral... the theory of natural rights logically requires that there be no punishment, for punishment itself is itself a crime, a violation of those rights” (Robbins, 192). This is anarchy; if all force is morally evil, then the government can never take action against evildoers; it would be every man for himself. This dilemma of the rights of man versus counteracting crime, which is the very purpose of government to address,  raises the obvious but often-overlooked problem inherent in the idea of government; the inherent wickedness of man. ‘Inalienable rights’ seems to presuppose that man is morally good, because if a man has inviolable rights he must deserve them-- as indeed all humanism assumes, because it elevates man to the status of a god, and gods are not subject to an extrinsic moral standard. Yet even Rand admits that government is necessary for the very purpose of combating evil in man: “Such, in essence, is the proper purpose of a government, to make social existence possible to man, by protecting the benefits and combating the evils which men can cause to one another” (Rand, 195). Robbins clarifies:  “Lest my argument be misunderstood, the question is not whether some (or all) men commit specific evil actions, for Rand was quite willing to admit that some men do and thereby deserve to be called evil men. The question is whether all men are ethically evil by nature, whether there is a one hundred percent chance of a man thinking and doing evil. It is this idea of sin that Rand castigated as a ‘monstrous absurdity’. For Rand, as for the enlightenment thinkers, nature was normative: ‘To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature.’ We must conclude, then that Rand believed man to be naturally good. Now these two beliefs, namely that government is necessary and that man is good, are in conflict” (Robbins, 195). If man were perfect, he would not need to be governed; but as Rand admitted, he does need to be governed. Inherent in her political theory is a contradiction that is never resolved. She implies in her epistemology and ethics that man is inherently good, in his reason at least, and yet admits that government is necessary for restraining evildoers. 

 This is not the only contradiction involved in the idea of inalienable rights; another problem is that it “posited the priority of man and the derivative nature of government. Starting with such an assumption, she must logically conclude that anarchy is the only proper and moral social arrangement” (Robbins, 198). And in fact, anarchy makes perfect sense in the kind of world Rand imagines, inhabited by morally faultless god-men whose inalienable rights are never violated. It does not work in the world as it is; as pointed out, the purpose of government is to control evil-doers. In her attempts to reconcile the rights of humanism with government, Robbins says Rand “eliminated inalienable rights by eliminating human nature” (Robbins, 205). To elaborate, Rand said that although men had inalienable rights, they could forfeit their rights (hence making their punishment moral) by forfeiting their status as human beings; if they chose to act in an ‘inhuman’ manner, they actually would not be human and would no longer have their inalienable rights. The implications of this are frightening; ‘rights’ may be inalienable, but human nature is not. According to Rand’s scheme, human nature is something that must be earned; it is conditional rather than intrinsic. It was this concept of human nature that led Rand to wholeheartedly embrace abortion, because within her construct babies are not humans; they have not yet earned that right. Nor do the murderous implications of humanism stop there, for if some human beings are not human, and it is only by acting ‘as a human’ that one becomes a human, who determines who is acting as a human and who is not? This is a road that leads very quickly to totalitarianism, as those who are in power are the ones able to choose who have inalienable rights and who do not.

In Atlas Shrugged, the true result of Objectivism in politics is revealed in her description of Atlantis, the utopia founded by her hero. In Atlantis, there is no government; only those who are truly human (those who agree with John Galt) are invited there in the first place, and apparently they are all enlightened enough that there are no disagreements after they get there, so that no government, says John Galt, is necessary; they all live just as they please, and in doing so get along. This, besides the fact that Rand here very clearly assumes perfect humanity as a necessity for the ideal world, is nothing less than anarchy in action. It is ironic that she portrayed in her novel the true anarchy of her philosophy, despite the fact that in her political writings she insisted upon capitalism and the virtues of limited government.  To sum up, Robbins says that Rand’s political system, far from establishing inalienable rights for men, “logically implies two doctrines: a pantheistic ‘reverence for life’ and a totalitarian survival of the most human” (Robbins, 214) .There is no basis for a free society here.

The Fall of Objectivism

The collapse of Rand’s entire philosophical construct, says Robbins, proceeds together with its clarification; “Once the ideas are examined, stripped of Rand’s literary prose, it becomes clear that they are blatantly self-contradictory” (Robbins, 216). Atlas never shrugged; he never actually held the world on his shoulders in the first place. But he fell, because he tried to. Robbins points out that a fall is the end of all secular philosophies, because they all build on false ground—humanism, the idea that man can discover knowledge and build a world based on reason alone. If self-destruction is the result of the best attempts of human rationality, where then can truth and knowledge and a basis for life be found? In the revelation of God almighty, revealed to humanity in His words. It is the only truly rational foundation for knowledge, because only by starting with revelation, rather than with human reason, can we attain to certain knowledge. Going back to the epistemological problems this essay began with, only the concept of revelation -- knowledge preceding and preexisting ourselves, which is not dependent upon us but which rather we are dependent upon -- can answer the question of how we know. And the answer is, not that we can attain to knowledge based on our own efforts, for we saw how the ability to think in itself presupposes some sort of knowledge, and any attempt to establish rationality as being independent (think of the problems inherent in a tabula rasa mind) end in confusion, but rather that we are given knowledge, through revelation.  The relation between universals and particulars, also never answered by any form of empiricism, is solved in God, because in Him all of the particulars find unity; He provides the supernatural link between the material and the spiritual which can be found nowhere on earth. Likewise, the many murderous implications of a religion of man-worship, which end up in a sort of totalitarian survival-of-the-fittest, are all solved in the belief of a transcendent God who rules over men through the truth which sets them free of themselves. Morals and politics are implicated in this, as instead of following unhinged human reason in whatever direction it may chance to swing, they follow the unchanging Truth revealed by God and there find true freedom. Robbins anticipates the objection that revelation is not rational, but mystical, because it requires faith, and returns with the answer that although the axiom of revelation itself, being a first cause, has no ‘proofs’, it may be rationally proved in the same way Rand’s axiom, the sufficiency of reason, was disproved: by following out the axiom’s logical implications and seeing whether it is internally consistent. Christianity’s axiom that truth is revealed to man by God’s word holds true in all the areas of thought-- epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics-- where Rand’s humanism so miserably failed, because it does not base itself on the contradictory idea that man can be an end in himself, but on the reality that “ in Him we live, and move, and have our being”,^[4] rationality, ‘objective matter’, and the laws of logic included. Rand’s attempt to rationally build a system based on man failed logically because she was trying to reconcile two contradictory things -- God-created rationality with man-created humanism. As Robbins concludes, “She stands condemned by her own standard.” And by that standard her philosophy, along with all other forms of humanism, will fall.