COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

To the critics, this is unfathomable because they dismiss Rand's work on the face of it. To the true believers, however, Rand remains a modern-day Minerva who emerged from the head of Zeus with no historical antecedents. These believers do as much damage to Rand's legacy as the critics, because they wish to isolate Rand's work from any approaches or other traditions that might provide shifting vantage points from which to comprehend the principles of Objectivism and their relevance to current philosophic and social problems. Those who seal off Objectivism from academia ghettoize themselves - and the rest of the academy. They afford no opportunity for Objectivism to penetrate the academy, to influence, and perhaps, dramatically transform, the alternative approaches with which it can be engaged. And they limit their own ability to critically assess Rand's writings.

In Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, Mimi Gladstein and I provide a forum for the engagement of Objectivism and feminism, and what emerges first is a challenge to collectivist feminism to reexamine its premises. That feminism evolved historically from a classical liberal and individualist base is often forgotten by those on the left who would dismiss Rand as a "fascist." But the engagement with feminism also allows those within Objectivism to analyze critically many of Rand's observations on such topics as sexuality, femininity, masculinity, a Woman President, and so forth.

I would like, finally, to answer some of the scores of questions I have seen posed here in this colloquy, and in e-mail sent to me privately, since the appearance of Jeff Sharlet's important article in The Chronicle:

1. George Barker says I've "misunderstood" Rand's philosophy because I "claim to admire the philosophy but not the fiction." I never said anything of the sort. The article reported correctly that I read all of Rand's non-fiction before reading her fiction. That was only because I was introduced to her work in the context of a high school Advanced Placement social studies class in American History, where reading the many worthwhile essays on "Capitalism: the unknown ideal" provided me with an alternative understanding of the history and morality of free markets than that which was being offered in traditional history textbooks.

2. With regard to fiction vs. non-fiction, I do not wish to give the impression that everyone who "devours" Rand's fiction first is doomed to become a "true believer." The "true believer" mentality is one that approaches Rand's work "rationalistically," rather than objectively. It tends to reify the abstractions in her fiction and to rip the characters out of their context. I learned from Rand's work that I didn't have to be Howard Roark (hence, my comment, "I never wanted to be Howard Roark"). Being Chris Matthew Sciabarra and applying the principles of Objectivism to the context of my own life is good enough.

3. With regard to my book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, let me say this: The book is part of a trilogy of works that began with Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (State University of New York Press, 1995) and that will culminate in my forthcoming volume, Total Freedom. The trilogy is my attempt to reclaim dialectical method - an orientation toward contextual analysis - in the service of freedom. I believe that a thinker such as Rand was a master at understanding philosophic and social problems within their wider context. She traced the many relations among disparate factors and emerged with an alternative that was neither dualist nor monist in its implications. (The claim in the article that I see Rand's rejection of dualism as rooted in Marx's "dialectical materialism" - an UNdialectical historicism that Rand repudiated unequivocally and correctly - is not quite right; I actually trace the antecedents of Rand's approach more directly to Russian Silver Age literary and philosophic writers, including N.O. Lossky, one of her philosophy professors. Rand's rejection of the conventional good-evil, mind-body, theory-practice, moral-practical, fact-value dichotomies is one that can be found deep in Russian intellectual history.) My approach is not "Hegelian" - contrary to the claims of Tym Parsons - but Aristotelian, because it seeks to contextualize Rand's thought. It was Aristotle who was the father of dialectical inquiry. And, in my view, Rand is, indeed, as she claimed, fundamentally Aristotelian.

Those interested in checking out my work are invited to take a look at my website (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra), which features an ongoing dialogue between my interlocutors (who have published critiques of my work) and me.

I once wrote in a Reason Papers article, "Reply to Critics of Russian Radical" (see http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/essays/rprtc.htm), that I wanted to drag Objectivism and the academy, kicking and screaming if necessary, into engagement with one another. I stand by my belief that the engagement can be constructive. I would like to state, in conclusion, that I am deeply encouraged by the response to The Chronicle article, and that I remain an eternal optimist on the long-run penetration of Rand's work into academe. The Chronicle is to be applauded for showing sensitivity to this emerging scholarship.

-- Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Visiting Scholar, NYU Department of Politics (posted 4/12, 2:10 p.m., E.D.T.)

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