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5

BEING

N. O. Lossky (1951) once wrote: “Philosophy is a science and therefore, like every other science, it seeks to establish truths that have been strictly proved and are therefore binding for every thinking being and not only for a particular people or nation.” Operating at the highest level of generality, the philosopher traces the interconnections between the entities, elements, and aspects of reality. The philosopher must unite “two opposed and not easily combinable faculties: the highest degree of abstract thinking and a high degree of concrete contemplation of reality” (402). In Lossky’s view, however, people have not developed these faculties to the degree required for the truly stupendous tasks of the examined life. That many opposing schools of philosophy exist illustrates that philosophy is at a much more primitive level of development than either mathematics or physics (403). But for Lossky, philosophy was paving the way for a more unified, nondualistic conception of being and knowing.

Though Rand rejected much of the content of Lossky’s philosophy, her own system retained an exhaustive and dialectical form that reflected her Russian roots. Just as significant, however, was Rand’s profound respect for philosophy as essential to human being. Like her teacher, Rand perpetuated a distinctive tradition of philosophizing that stretched back to the days of the ancient Greeks. For Rand, it was the culture of classical antiquity that marked the beginning of humankind’s intellectual maturity. The classical thinkers contributed to humanity the very concept of philosophy as a secular discipline in which the mind strove to achieve “a comprehensive view of existence.” Rand believed that this authentic, nonreligious commitment to the examined life was rarely duplicated in the history of thought: “The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza—but how many others?”¹

Like her teacher, Rand argued that philosophy requires the greatest level of abstraction and concretization, “the integration of factual data, the maintenance of a full context, the discovery of principles, the establishment of causal connections and thus the implementation of a long-range vision” (108). Every aspect of Rand’s thought—from her social ontology to her politics—concentrates on the specifically conceptual nature and needs of human consciousness.

Like most systematic visions, Rand’s Objectivism cannot be fully appreciated until it is grasped as a totality. No totality, however, can be presented as such. Peikoff argues correctly that the whole can only be examined through the parts. Every part of a philosophical system implies both the whole and every other part.² Furthermore, Peikoff understands that Objec-tivism is structured as an internally related system, such that any “change in one element redounds throughout the network.” Indeed, for Peikoff, as for Rand, Objectivism mirrors the very interrelationships that are present in existence and knowledge. Peikoff maintains: “Human knowledge on every level is relational. Knowledge is not a juxtaposition of independent items; it is a unity … a total, a sum, a single whole.” The relational character of knowledge is a reflection of the metaphysical fact that “there is only one universe.” In the universe, “everything … is interconnected.” Peikoff writes:

Every entity is related in some way to the others; each somehow affects and is affected by the others. Nothing is a completely isolated fact, without causes or effects; no aspect of the total can exist ultimately apart from the total. Knowledge, therefore, which seeks to grasp reality, must also be a total; its elements must be interconnected to form a unified whole reflecting the whole which is the universe.³

Peikoff stresses also that no mind can disregard the relationships among its contents because the discovery of such relationships is inherent in the identity of consciousness. Thus every tenet of a philosophy, just like every aspect of knowledge, “must be judged in the light of the total picture, i.e., of the full context.” Since every element of knowledge “is potentially relevant to the rest,” a genuinely integrated philosophy must transcend fragmentation and subdivision. Peikoff (1991b, 125) suggests that Rand’s achievement lies partially in her methodical consistency within the context of available knowledge.

Ultimately, then, one cannot analyze any of Rand’s isolated philosophical insights by disconnecting them from the corpus of her thought. Taken together, each part generates and is generated by the totality. Rand’s approach is so thoroughly integrated that her philosophical beginnings seem to presuppose the results of her entire system.⁴

Yet, as I have demonstrated, Rand’s philosophy was not a mere deduction from first principles. It was a historical product of her revolt against formal dualism. Ironically, Rand has been criticized for the reverse evolution of her thought, for its movement from political to metaphysical themes. William O’Neill ([1971] 1975) suggests, for instance, that Rand’s philosophy really began with ethics and terminated, as an afterthought, with a theory of truth and knowledge: “Her epistemology and her metaphysical assumptions—indeed, the vast bulk of her philosophy—are essentially an a posteriori rationalization for a fervent a priori commitment to the ethics of laissez-faire capitalism” (175).

In a certain sense, of course, O’Neill is correct. Rand’s literary project began with a political dynamic and concluded with ontological and epistemological themes. In We the Living, Rand focused on the central question of the individual against the state. By the time she had written Atlas Shrugged, she was examining the role of the mind in human existence and making explicit connections between epistemic and political themes.

But it is ahistorical for O’Neill to suggest that any thinker could develop a system of thought by merely deducing it from metaphysical principles. It is true that many Objectivists imply that the morality of capitalism flows logically from the law of identity. Rand herself wrote with such a polemical flair that many of her ontological and political insights seem self-evident. The fact is, however, that Rand’s system is less a rationalization of her belief in capitalism than it is an articulation of the underlying, interconnected ontological, epistemological, and ethical premises on which capitalism depends.

Rand could never have begun with metaphysics and merely deduced her political ideas. She did not emerge full-grown from the head of Zeus as a modern goddess of wisdom. Her entire philosophical project was a historical product from its genesis to its formal presentation. Indeed, Rand had to develop her thought quite extensively before she could present it as an organic system of philosophical integration.

She begins with ontology and epistemology, breaking up the world into humanly knowable, relational units. This analytical moment of Rand’s method encapsulates a process of intellectual “chewing,” of breaking down the whole into graspable elements. By tearing these elements apart, Rand makes them intellectually digestible (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 1). Her mode of inquiry traces the interconnections between these units on a social scale, reconstructing the totality as an organic whole. Her ethics and her politics are grounded in her teleological and biological insights. Though Rand is known for her polemics, she was quite adept at theoretical integration, expanding and synthesizing the units of her analysis to encompass the whole of reality.

A central aspect of Rand’s exposition is her ability to trace the dialectical relationships between apparent opposites. Rand was never misled into accepting her opponents’ definition of a specific philosophical or social problem. She aimed to “go to the root of the issue,” claiming that the essential aspects of any question often could not be grasped by relying on the static premises and traditional frames of reference in mainstream thought (N. Branden 1989, 215).

Toward this end, Rand analyzed the antinomic “paradoxes” in modern philosophy. For Rand, a paradox had the appearance of a logical contradiction, which is at root, impossible (Peikoff 1974T, lecture 2). Hence, it was incumbent upon her as a dialectical thinker, to trace the links between apparent opposites, to show that the alternatives offered by contemporary schools of thought were false.⁵

Though Rand aimed to document the fundamental links uniting such opposites, she also attempted to show that many contemporary thinkers had merely settled for embracing reductionist monism rather than finding a remedy for the various forms of dualism. They emphasized one pole of a duality as a means of reconciling opposition. In Rand’s view, dualism could not be conquered through the absorption of one polar principle by another. Just as Rand’s philosophy attempts to transcend alleged polarities as a means of providing an integrated view of human existence, so her critique of opposing traditions in Western thought seeks to uncover the fundamental errors they share. In most cases, Rand shows that each of the opposing schools of philosophy is half right and half wrong.

Since Rand discovered value in many of the philosophies she analyzed, some critics have attempted to tie Objectivism to such traditions as rationalism, materialism, or existentialism.⁶ What her critics failed to grasp was that she was working toward a new synthesis, which required that she use established categories in the process of transcending them. She both accepted and rejected significant principles within each of the polar traditions which she analyzed. Consequently, by abstracting particular aspects from the totality of her thought, one can see elements of rationalism and empiricism, idealism and materialism, liberalism and conservatism. Rand explains: “Most men hold mixed premises; most schools of thought are full of contradictions. One may find some elements of value, of truth and of rationality in many people and schools. This does not make them Objectivist.”⁷

Part 2 examines the distinctiveness of Objectivism, even as it traces significant parallels between Rand’s thought and others in the history of philosophy. But in dissecting the content of Objectivism, much of the following discussion may sometimes obscure the broad fundamentals of Rand’s worldview. Rand herself was once asked to identify the central tenets of her system. Her identification, in each of the major branches of philosophy, is worth recalling:

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality. 2. Epistemology: Reason. 3. Ethics: Self-interest. 4. Politics: Capitalism. If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”⁸

THE REJECTION OF COSMOLOGY

Rand’s revolt against formal dualism first manifested itself in the realm of metaphysics or ontology.⁹ Metaphysics, for Rand, refers to that branch of philosophy which “deals with the fundamental nature of reality.”¹⁰ Metaphysics involves the widest abstractions pertaining to existence as such.¹¹ Whereas the special sciences separate a part of existence and investigate it thoroughly, metaphysics is concerned with the ultimate context of reality and knowledge, that is, “being qua being.”

Rand’s approach to the ontological foundations of philosophy was minimalist. In fact, beyond the general axiomatic proposition of existence, Rand refused—on principle—to commit herself to any a priori judgments about the ultimate constituents of reality. She believed that epistemology was the crux of philosophy because it related to the means of knowledge and was the base of all special sciences. Rand herself considered ontology and epistemology inseparable, and argued that each therefore implied the other (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 4). Thus her axioms serve as the foundation for her theories both of being and of knowing.

Having been schooled in ancient philosophy by Lossky, Rand was well acquainted with the classical Greek thinkers. In the area of ontology, she generally celebrated the accomplishments of antiquity, most particularly the works of Aristotle. But she viewed the inclusion of cosmology in ancient metaphysics as an error that had had disastrous effects throughout intellectual history. Cosmology sought to define the specific nature of the universe. For Rand, the specific nature of the universe was a scientific question. The legitimacy of philosophy depended on its ability to provide the ontological and logical foundations for all forms of inquiry. Philosophy was metascientific.

Rand identified Thales, the father of Western thought, as the first philosopher to define the nature of the universe in cosmological terms. Even though Thales was groping toward a unified view of existence and knowledge, he argued that the universe consisted of water, air, and fire. By concluding “that water was the primary metaphysical (or cosmological) element,” Thales pretended to an omniscience that was impossible to the human mind. Such an approach was profoundly rationalistic because it dogmatized science by reifying the available knowledge into a self-sufficient whole. It made metaphysics dependent upon “every new discovery of physics.”

Rand believed that such rationalism had been duplicated many times throughout the history of philosophy. Later empiricists were correct to repudiate this approach. However, Rand argued that Thales, Plato, and the ancient cosmologists were, in fact, “arrested empiricists” because they had formed conclusions about “the ultimate constituents of the universe” by “taking partial knowledge as omniscience.”¹² The cosmologists had projected epistemological conclusions into their metaphysical foundations. But if the rationalists were “arrested empiricists” for reifying their current state of knowledge, then empiricists displayed a “Hegelian or Rationalistic” tendency to dogmatize their empirical conclusions. Both alternatives depend on the same fundamental error. They

advance conditions for what that primary has to be.… You cannot say philosophically what conditions you will ascribe to that which is not known. We cannot know by what means we will grasp something not known today.… And yet in making any kind of conclusions about the ultimate stuff of the universe, you are necessarily committing that error. You are prescribing conditions of what something not known to you now has to be. (“Appendix,” 292–93)

In Rand’s rejection of cosmology, then, there is an important grasp of the origins of dualism in the history of Western thought. Rand argues that the inclusion of cosmology in the body of philosophy necessarily generated antinomic tensions. Cosmology contributed to the belief that the universe could be defined in terms of two separate spheres of reality. This led to the development of reductionistic, monistic alternatives in which one sphere is emphasized to the detriment of the other. In her journal, Rand wrote: “‘Cosmology’ has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ will be wiped out—or rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.”¹³

Rationalists and idealists, empiricists and materialists have traditionally embraced one polar principle over another. Each has sought to identify the primary “stuff” of the world. Rationalists identify the basic substance as spiritual or ideal; empiricists, as atomistic and material. The former view matter as a manifestation of the spirit, whereas the latter see consciousness as a pure epiphenomenon of material elements. The former affirm the identity of consciousness, but reject the material basis of reality, and the latter accept the reality of the body, of the physical world in general, but doubt the ontological integrity of the mind. Such traditions cut “man” in two,

“Setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other.… They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature.” (Atlas Shrugged, 1026)

Both Rand and Peikoff argue that in the history of philosophy, it was the Pythagoreans who first conceptualized this dualism in their distinction between this world and the world of numbers. Their orphic cults taught that the body was the tomb of the soul. Plato absorbed this Pythagorean legacy and distinguished between the world of particulars and the world of universals or Forms.¹⁴ Augustine christianized this dualism and argued that there was an incommensurability between this world and the next (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 7). It was not until Aquinas resurrected Aristotelianism that philosophers began seeing existence as singular, albeit one in which there was a natural, hierarchic totality ascending to God (lecture 8).

Rand contended, however, that at the birth of modern philosophy, dualism reared its ugly head in a more sophisticated form with Descartes, who saw the physical world and human consciousness as two distinct, unrelated spheres. By beginning with the metaphysical assumption that the spiritual and the physical are independent of each other Cartesian philosophy creates the problem of mind-body interaction.¹⁵

By banishing cosmology from the realm of metaphysics, Rand sought to provide a highly delimited, ontological foundation for philosophy. For Rand, whatever the “ultimate stuff” of the universe is, it will have identity—it will be something definite. To this extent, ontology is metascientific. Rand seeks the reconciliation of philosophy and science. Philosophy cannot depend on a changing physics for its ontological foundations. Rand argues, however, that genuine science must depend on philosophy to validate its modes of inquiry.

But the relationship between philosophy and science is not one of logical dependence. It is not a strictly causal relationship. It is an internal relationship in which there is some reciprocity between elements, even though the relation is fundamentally skewed toward the primary element.¹⁶ This asymmetric internality preserves both hierarchy and interdependence, and prevents vicious circularity. As Harry Binswanger (1990) explains:

Some empirical content is and must be contained in philosophical theories. On the other hand, philosophical theories should not be subject to the rise and fall of purely scientific hypotheses, since those hypotheses may come to be rejected in the light of new evidence. Moreover, since science builds upon basic philosophical principles (e.g., the basic axioms, the law of causality, the principles of logic), there is the danger of employing circular reasoning in using science to support philosophical conclusions. (174)

Since knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, all of the principles of philosophy and science must ultimately depend on observation and inference. Even though Rand’s metaphysical axioms can be grasped implicitly by the mind of the infant and the adult alike, they are conceptually identified as primary facts of reality, embracing the entire field of human awareness. As such, the axiomatic concepts serve as the foundation of ontology, epistemology, logic, objectivity, and science itself.

Rand’s metaphysic then is both highly abstract and extremely narrow. It is summed up in the axiomatic propositions of identity and causality. For Rand, “Philosophy tells us only that things have natures, but what these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy’s task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.”¹⁷

Thus it is not the task of philosophy to validate the theory of natural selection or to hypothesize about the evolutionary origins of consciousness (Peikoff 1980T, lecture 8). Philosophy is concerned with the broad nature of existence. It must leave to science the assessment of the ultimate nature of life, the ultimate relationship between matter and consciousness, mind and body. Even if Rand assumed an organic unity of elements within the totality of a single universe, she refused to reflect on the basis of the interrelationships of these elements. Such cosmological speculation depends on an imaginary omniscient standpoint. As Peikoff emphasizes, Rand’s Objectivism makes a distinction between metaphysics and fantasy.¹⁸ There can be no purely deductive attempt to reveal the ultimate substances of reality (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 10).

Philosophy, then, begins with the knowledge of everything-in-general. It begins with that which exists. Physics, by contrast, requires greater particularity. Like all theories, the hypotheses of physics may change with the growing context of knowledge. Even the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle leaves Rand undaunted. For Rand, the inability to predict a subatomic event does not prove that causality does not apply to subatomic particles. Our current inability to measure the simultaneous position and momentum of subatomic particles does not show that in reality such events are causeless. Epistemological ignorance does not disprove ontology. In Rand’s view, scientific explanation (or the lack thereof) does not erase the reality it seeks to explain.¹⁹

Thus Rand’s Objectivism accommodates all scientific theories.²⁰ Furthermore, although Rand criticized some of the epistemic foundations of contemporary “pseudo-science,”²¹ she did not feel threatened by the nearly anarchic variation within modern theoretical science. As Tibor Machan (1992) notes, Rand’s Objectivism is based on “an open-minded ontological pluralism, and an (almost) anything goes, (almost) Feyerabendian, laissez-faire attitude toward the methods of empirical investigation” (53).

AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS

For Rand, ontology must begin with much more basic, prescientific, fundamental propositions about existence, axioms that can be grasped even implicitly by primitive peoples (“Appendix,” 247–48). Rejecting cosmology, Rand argues that reality is what it is independent of what people think or feel and that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving and understanding reality. As her protagonist John Galt exclaims in Atlas Shrugged: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (1015).

Existence and consciousness are axioms at the base of knowledge. Such axioms are contained in every fact, perception, observation, statement, proof, explanation, and utterance of any human being, whether it is formally acknowledged or not. An axiom is not a meaningless tautology; it identifies “a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts” (Introduction, 55). An axiom is so fundamental that even those who refuse to recognize its veracity must “accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it” (Atlas Shrugged, 1040).

By articulating the axioms of existence and consciousness, Rand did not embrace a dualistic perspective on reality.²² She merely identified the foundations that lie at the base of all philosophical inquiry. As Peikoff (1991b) explains, these axioms “cannot be sundered. There is no consciousness without existence and no knowledge of existence without consciousness” (149–50). And yet, as a philosophical realist, Rand emphasized the primary axiom of existence. She affirms the primacy of existence. In a sense, existence and consciousness are internally, but asymmetrically related.

Existence exists; it does not depend upon consciousness and would continue to exist if every last form of conscious life were obliterated from the universe. The universe simply is; there is nothing outside, prior to, or at the culmination of existence. Existence cannot be derived from any prior certainty of consciousness, nor is it the product of divine will. There is no first cause or teleological design. There is only existence as such.

By contrast, consciousness is radically dependent on existence for its contents. It is metaphysically passive and, as Kelley (1986) explains, “radically noncreative” (27). This metaphysical passivity does not imply epistemological passivity. People are capable of creativity; they are able to selectively reorganize the mind’s contents and to project imagination. The radical noncreativity of consciousness refers to the fact that the mind does not create or constitute the objects it perceives. They exist independent of consciousness. Consciousness as such is purely relational, and what it relates to is objective reality. In Rand’s view, “A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something” (Atlas Shrugged, 1015). Every phenomenon of consciousness derives from an awareness of existence. Rand writes:

Some object, i.e., some content, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in relation to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.²³

Rand’s emphasis on the primacy of existence is equally a recognition of the fundamentality of ontology in the hierarchy of philosophy. In this regard, Rand may have learned much from her Marxist professors at Petrograd University, who emphasized the primacy of existence over consciousness. The “objectivist” strain in Marxism was particularly apparent in the Leninist worldview, which dominated early Soviet intellectual life. Rand’s metaphysic echoes the Marxist preoccupation with “the world as it is,” what Scott Meikle (1985) has described as “the recognition of the primacy of ontology over epistemology” (174).

Marx also rejected cosmology and endorsed the ontological view of logic. He writes:

Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it’s wrongly put.… When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as nonexistent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?²⁴

Rand would certainly have taken issue with Marx’s solipsistic characterization of egoism. But she too rejected “creation” questions as vestiges of a cosmological perspective. Rand would have greatly appreciated Marx’s reaffirmation of the primacy of existence through denial. Indeed, Rand argued vociferously against those who attempted to disprove the existence of something for which there was no evidence. As Peikoff explains: “The onus of proof is on him who asserts the positive.”²⁵ Objectivists rely heavily on this polemical style of argumentation, utilizing variations of the “boomerang” principle.²⁶ This is apparent in Rand’s critique of the “stolen concept fallacy” and the “reification of the zero.”

It was Aristotle who first employed the technique of reaffirmation through denial when he asserted that nobody could reject the laws of logic without relying on them in the process. Aristotle viewed these laws at the base of all human activity, reasoning, and language. For Aristotle, such principles were both ontological and logical, grasped intuitively and without need of proof.

Rand’s teacher, Lossky ([1917] 1928, 8), had used a similar argument in his clash with the atomistic materialists. He claimed that even those who denied the organic structure of the world, implicitly accepted it in their every pronouncement. Since every utterance and action depends on the wholeness and predictability of reality, such organicism could not be escaped. Even though the world is composed of many different elements, each of these elements belongs to the same reality. The organic structure of reality is a metaphysical given which makes the world knowable. Knowledge is never constructed out of wholly independent elements. Rather, these elements are part of an all-embracing network of relations that can be analyzed on different levels of generality.

Although Rand would not have seen the organic structure of reality as strictly axiomatic, she did reproduce the form of Lossky’s argument. Just as it is a logical error to use what you are trying to prove, the so-called fallacy of “begging the question,” it is equally an error to use what you’re trying to disprove. Rand calls the latter the fallacy of the stolen concept.²⁷ As Nathaniel Branden explains, all of knowledge has a hierarchical structure. Hence, “When one uses concepts, one must recognize their genetic roots, one must recognize that which they logically depend on and presuppose.” For Branden, as for Rand, one does not have a logical right to use “a concept while ignoring, contradicting, or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends.”²⁸

Rand argued that most philosophers treated higher-level concepts as first-level abstractions, tearing them from their appropriate place in the hierarchy of knowledge, denying their epistemological roots, and ultimately detaching them from reality (Peikoff 1991b, 136). This practice has had far-reaching implications and is one of the symptoms of modern anti-conceptualism.

Rand’s view of hierarchy is purely epistemological. In reality, all facts are simultaneous. Rand explains: “Regardless of what a given man did chronologically, once he has his full conceptual development, a very important test of whether a concept is first-level would be whether, within the context of his own knowledge, he would be able to hold or explain or communicate a certain concept without referring to preceding concepts” (“Appendix,” 214).

Though Rand rejected the vicious circularity of the stolen concept fallacy, she grasps that circularity per se is not necessarily wrong. Many of her own arguments have an element of what Rasmussen has called “just” circularity. This grows out of the starkly dialectical character of Rand’s worldview. For instance, Rand saw the aging process as integral to mortality. Though we may never know what ultimately causes people to age, mortality implies aging, just as aging itself indicates mortality. This is circular and tautological. Aging is internal to mortality, which is internal to aging. But in “just” circularity, the reciprocal relationship between terms does not invalidate the statement. Indeed, it merely underscores the relational unity these facts have with other facts. Each element of the whole must both support and imply the others. There is a necessary interrelationship of the parts within the totality (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 9).

By contrast, Rand rejects what Rasmussen (1980) has called, “vicious” circularity. In the “vicious” case, there is “reasoning from some principle in order to demonstrate that very principle” (68). For Rand, using an arbitrary assertion to confirm itself or a valid principle to deny itself are instances of vicious circularity.

Adopting the language of internal relations, one could say that such circularity is illegitimate because it is based on arbitrary assertions that attempt to circumvent the hierarchically structured totality of knowledge. Those who make such arbitrary assertions are attempting to make themselves external to an epistemological totality that necessarily involves connections between and among concepts. Those who would deny the truthfulness of an axiomatic concept repudiate principles internal to every other concept in their usage. Such axioms are at the base of, and form the context for, all concepts. Those who would deny them by exempting themselves from the totality within which all others think and act, are trying to attain a synoptic perspective on the whole. This is an attack on the metaepistemological principles that make knowledge possible.

In Rand’s view, the “reification of the zero” is one of the most notorious attempts to achieve such an internal contradiction. In this fallacy, the speaker regards “‘nothing’ as a thing, as a special, different kind of existent.” But for Rand, existence and nonexistence are not metaphysically equal. Nonexistence can only be defined in relation to existence. The concept “nothing” cannot be removed from the context that gives it meaning; it cannot be reified as a separate thing. Apart from its relational usage, “nothing” is a concept without validity (Introduction, 60–61). There is no such thing as “pure” negation apart from that which it negates. Those who attempt to prove the existence of a negative, or to deny an axiom, step outside the bounds of logic and ontologic, and are defeated by their own denials.

ONTOLOGY AND LOGIC

Having articulated the two basic axioms, Rand distinguishes a third, which is a corollary of existence and internal to all elements of reality and knowledge. It is the principle of identity, “A is A,” a variation on Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction.²⁹

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that permanent negation is not possible. There is an ultimate principle at the base of reason which is both ontological and epistemological. It is not a hypothesis, but a principle that is “true of being qua being.” It is a principle that is “the most certain of all.… It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.… it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be.”³⁰

Like Aristotle, Rand believes that logic is inseparable from reality and knowledge. She states: “If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality” (Philosophy, 17). But, as Peikoff (1985) explains: “The Law of Contradiction … is a necessary and ontological truth which can be learned empirically” (185). Aristotle believed that people learned this principle by intuitive induction (198).³¹ Peikoff (1985) maintains that, for Aristotle, “the Law of Contradiction has … a twofold epistemological character: it is at once an experiential-inductive principle and an intuitive first principle. This characteristic Aristotelian union of the ‘empirical’ and the ‘rational’ is, in one or another form, fundamental to the whole subsequent Aristotelian tradition” (196).