Ayn Rand was an immensely popular novelist (
The Fountainhead,
Atlas Shrugged) whose work was based on a philosophy she called
Objectivism.
Rand was fiercely critical of academic philosophers, especially John Rawls, and some of the greatest philosophers in history, notably
David Hume,
Immanuel Kant, and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Academic philosophy by and large returned the negative compliments and ignored her work.
Our main interest is that Rand was a great defender of human freedom and claimed that she had proven the existence of free will and even described its operation.
It is widely thought (and among many of her followers) that her existence proof for free will is the following:
- Determinism and free will are incompatible.
- A determined being, like a machine, cannot have knowledge.
- Knowledge is possible to man, because we cannot logically deny some axioms.
- Specifically, we cannot logically claim to know nothing.
- Therefore, we know something.
- Since we know something, we are not determined.
- Therefore, free will exists.
Step 1 in Rand's argument is denied by most philosophers. They call themselves
compatibilists.
Step 2 would deny knowledge to computers, and perhaps to animals, if Rand thinks animals do not have free will. But animals clearly can learn many things. And computer expert systems appear to contain a lot of knowledge.
Step 4 bears a passing resemblance to
René Descartes existence proof, condensed into the form, "I know, because I cannot logically deny I know, therefore my free will exists."
The Academic Skeptic Arcesilaus, founder of the Middle Academy in the 3rd century (BCE), pointed out that the Pyrhhonic claim to know nothing was actually a knowledge claim, and "that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance."
Rand described free will as the mind choosing to think or not to think, to focus or not to focus one's thoughts. This seems similar to
William James's focusing attention to one thing in his "stream of consciousness,"
Richard Franklins's "
selective directing of attention" model for free will and to recent models of consciousness such as
Bernard Baars' "
Theater of Consciousness."
Rand equates freedom with the choice to think or not to think in
For the New Intellectual, 1957 (p.127, pb. ed.)
That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call "free will" is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
Rand describes how focus is required for freedom in her essay "Objectivist Ethics," in
The Virtue of Selfishness, 1961 (p.20, pb. ed.). Interestingly, Rand sees the unfocused mind as full of chance stimuli and random associations.
Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function.
In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality — or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.
When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man — in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being — an unfocused mind is not conscious.
Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.
Consciousness — for those living organisms which possess it — is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as "hunger"), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available — but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no "instincts" will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.
But man's responsibility goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor "instinctive" nor involuntary — nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him — by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every "is" implies an "ought." Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer —and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others — and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.