Why Ayn Rand is Always Right

Ayn Rand wasn't always right, it just seems that way because she had an extraordinary method of thinking which she used relentlessly: reason. Reason is simply logic applied to the facts of reality to form abstractions or conceptions. The genius of Ayn Rand was that she did this consistently with all of her knowledge all the way down to the fundamentals. So whenever she made a pronouncement, she knew exactly what facts supported it and the chain of reasoning that led all the way back to basic axioms such as "existence exists."

Because she knew that man is not omniscient nor infallible, she was careful to only say and write publicly what she could demonstrate all the way back to fundamentals, which leads to the impression that she is always right. However, by reading her journals we can see her thought processes in action and see that she's just like the rest of us in that she made mistakes. The best example I can think of is her brutally honest grappling of the mistake of having an affair with Nathaniel Branden (which, amazingly, was with the permission of both of their spouses) as recorded in The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics:

I think and feel strongly that our relationship was a mistake from the start--that there was and is no way to implement it in practice. [...] We were right to attempt it originally. But we should have broken it about 8 years ago. [p. 254]

And later she is struggling to understand Nathaniel Branden's odd and irrational behavior, wanting to find an explanation that might excuse his bad behavior:

The evidence, so far, is still evenly divided between an evil explanation and a (perverted) good one—as it has been all during our last 5 months. [...Here she summarized for herself the two possible explanations as she sees them.]

Actually, does it matter to me which is the true explanation? I seem to feel that the second one is good (and, by implication, hopeful), but that is probably my greatest mistake at present.

The results, in reality, on earth, are the same. In fact, morally, the second explanation is worse than the first. The first is merely a mind-body split, which is bad enough, but it is less horrible—monstrously, uselessly, wastefully horrible—than the second. [p.372-373]

These quotes are by no means intended to give Ayn Rand "feet of clay." Rather, they show her incredible dedication to rationality and honesty in dealing with every aspect of her life. To read her journal entries, written for herself, is to see a great mind at work dealing with an incredibly emotional subject—being rejected by a man she once loved. They are a lesson on how to think about one's life with complete rationality and honesty.

I believe the key to Ayn Rand's genius was identified by her early on in this journal entry from May 15, 1934 when she was 29 (from Journals of Ayn Rand):

Some day I'll find out whether I'm an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts.  Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy?  Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence. [italics are mine]

Here we see that Ayn Rand was committed to understanding all of her instincts and feelings in a rational manner, understanding their causes in terms of fundamentals, and that this requires an unerring commitment to honesty.

Why am I saying all this? In the next post I will be defending a paragraph from Ayn Rand's essay For the New Intellectual which has been misinterpreted by Objectivists and is central to Tracinski's What Went Right series. I have already addressed this in a previous post, but my argument there seems to let Rand off on a technicality so I'm going to revisit it.

Even though I am a great admirer of Ayn Rand, I have no need to see that she is always right. Rather, I want to know what in her philosophy is useful to me in living my life and in helping put America (and the world) on a better course. I am a big fan of hers because most of what she has written has been useful to me once I understood it. In the passage that I will discuss in the next post, I only want to know: What did she mean? What was the context? Is it true?