My literary education and Ayn Rand

Franco Jose Baroña, 34, is from Bangued, Abra. He has worked as a correspondent for The Manila Times, reporter for Manila Standard, proofreader and office clerk. “I have accepted as a rule of my writing a principle stated by Aristotle: That fiction is of greater philosophical importance than history, because history represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them ‘as they might be and ought to be.’”

The story of my literary education began in 1987 when I was 15 years old. That summer, I was in a constant, indescribable, almost pathological state of agitation. I was restless, aware of my newfangled adolescence, uncertain of my future but somehow I vaguely perceived that I had been singled out for some special fate, a predestined career to be heralded by a mysterious figure. I had no idea what exact form this figure would take. I was filled with despondency; disappointment made me impatient and frustrated with my life as my search for this revelation continued.

This dilemma was an unwelcome intrusion, forcing itself upon me and holding me captive, and I was unable to get on with everyday life until I could dispel it with a satisfactory solution. I was striving to escape the reality of school life through the cozy images in my imagination. Inevitably, I moved in constant conflict with society, courting its censure and inviting its disapprobation through the outrage of received values, not with any intention of revising them, merely for the sake of confrontation itself — at least for the time being.

Indeed, I was an ignorant and confused teenager when I met Ayn Rand — that all-too-crucial and mysterious figure.

It was an event of first-rate importance in my life that would affect everything I would do from that point onwards: for years I was like putty in her hands being shaped into a better human being. She was like a Samaritan who gave and gave to someone who was failing.

Rand wrote several books of fiction and non-fiction, giving reasons why one should care and what disasters are now destroying the world as a result of the general confusion over the meaning of “egoism.”

At the time she wrote her books, the morality she presented was new, unprecedented and radically opposed to all the traditional versions of morality.  She imagined a morality based on integrity, on being true to oneself — a morality that came from inside one’s rational self rather than one imposed from the outside by rules, principles and duties.

Her philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

My encounter with Ayn Rand was a quantum leap. It helped me to open up to possibilities. I was no longer compelled by the constraints of the real world. I suddenly had a flash of insight into the freedom of art, a freedom that makes possible blue roses and maroon clouds, and the importance of philosophy in man and it was the prospects of such thinking that I would continue to actively pursue.

I began to completely reject any feelings of loyalty to either religion or politics, eventually regarding them as paralyzing, constantly threatening to compromise my intellect and freedom. The result was both maturation and an obscure internal prompting.

Rand’s books prepared me for my introduction to philosophy, which would later sustain my aspiration to become a littérateur. This, by first framing the basics of an aesthetic viewpoint.

Through her I discovered that it is in philosophy that the battle for an intellectual renaissance has to start. Before men can reach the stage for practical action, they have to learn the right ideas. The first step of any new movement is the spread of new ideas.

The phenomenon of this encounter with a profound writer-philosopher was indeed a complete intellectual readjustment and an accumulated emotional force for me. It laid down the psycho-epistemology of a person, the development of his mind with the inculcation of independent thinking. The incandescence of the mind engendered by a determined philosophical position as the center of one’s artistic being — for without a commonly understood philosophical base, any discussion of particular ideas is futile because we have no means to understand each other.

Ayn Rand was the kind of person who was able to demonstrate the validity of her estimates to anyone in any field who cared to challenge it. I have yet to find the smallest fault in her reasoning and she made me reconstruct entirely my ideas on critical issues. At first I could not withstand the power of her philosophical onslaughts which undermined my faith in my own judgment. Reading her, I constantly strained my mind to the utmost.

She completely defined a new theory of ethics, which was virtually opposed to every existing one. Hers was a radical departure from any historically accepted approach to morality.

The Fountainhead was the third literary creation of Ayn Rand that I encountered, coming on the heels of The Night of January 16th and Anthem.

It is the story of an innovator, architect Howard Roark, and his battle against the tradition-worshiping establishment. Its theme: “Individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul; the psychological motivations and the basic premises that produce the character of an individualist or a collectivist.”

Ayn Rand presented here for the first time her projection of the ideal man. Roark’s independence, self-esteem, and integrity have inspired millions of readers for more than half a century.

The Fountainhead is presented to the point of being oversimplified in a way that omits essentials and thus distorts the issues. In this respect, the precision of the philosophical abstractions by which she presented the essentials of an issue is sacrificed but she wrote what she knew to be true, as clearly and as rationally as she could, and to leave the rest to the intelligence and the honesty of the reader.

The sort of “I’m right and everyone else is wrong” manner of presentation stresses the integrity of her ideas — it substitutes the “it seems to me” school of thought, the doubting and wavering dogmatists, for the “it is” school of philosophy.

As if challenged to expand the philosophical abstractions she presented in The Fountainhead into full detail she came out with Atlas Shrugged — her masterpiece. It integrates the basic elements of an entire philosophy into a highly complex, yet dramatically compelling plot — set in a near-future USA whose economy is collapsing as a result of the mysterious disappearance of leading innovators and industrialists. The theme is: “The role of the mind in man’s existence — and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.”

Most people cannot grasp an entire philosophical system from one novel so she came out with many books to help them grasp it, to offer further details, elaborations and extensions. They are offered to those who have understood enough of The Fountainhead to agree with its essentials, because those who seek to understand do not disagree until they have understood.

I found extreme pleasure in reading Ayn Rand, the orderly rationality of the way each of her novels works amid the nonsense people proclaim nowadays.

On no occasion did she project any tentativeness or uncertainty. She projected that she was very sure of what she was saying and that she was right... she wrote with such intensity, self-confidence and righteous contempt for the views she was opposing that I wanted to cheer her even if I held those views virtually from birth.

In her novels, through her heroes, she did not merely agree or disagree, she methodically explained her conclusions and offered a patient and often-brilliant analysis. She did not merely accept or reject a practical proposal, she worked to identify its merits and drawbacks dispassionately. She identified the basic problem, often down to its philosophical roots, so the reader could decide for himself.

Her novels are focused, deliberate, logical. They display with clarity the quality extolled as the top virtue of her objectivist philosophy: rationality. Hence, her individualism and integrity.

When I began reading Rand, I realized I was reading something terrific. I suddenly seemed to understand what all I had been reading meant. Her books were written with enormous truth. I felt as if I was reading the Bible. I didn’t understand it all at first but I felt that it was a religion.

After finishing her books, I accepted what I read without thinking, which was ironic since the author was arguably the first person who made thinking the base of morality, probably one of the few in the modern world who fought the absolutism of reason and thought and against any form of subjectivity, of faith or of surrender to intellectual authority.

Enlightened by the works of Ayn Rand, I am inclined not only to consider new ways of thinking, but even new ways of life. When the old is in such transparent decay, the new has to emerge.

What is needed is a consistent political philosophy that can be achieved only by the work of many individuals advocating the right ideas on any scale open to them, large or small, public or private.

History is determined by men’s philosophical convictions. It is philosophy that brought the world to its present state, and it is only philosophy that can save it — a philosophy of reason, individualism and capitalism.

This is an age where politics is the crucial issue, when about one-third of the world’s population has been enslaved by the bloodiest political system in history, which is advancing to take over the rest of the globe. Politics has always been and, logically, has to be a branch of philosophy. Where are the voices of philosophers at a time when they are needed most?

Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, I strongly believe that a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.

This Ayn Rand managed. She wrote books of great importance containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system which, whether or not it is the solution of the problems facing the world, is of extraordinary interest and deserves the attention of all thinkers and philosophers.