2021-07-07
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JENNY A. HEYL
Few, if any, women philosophers have garnered both the adulation and scorn that Ayn Rand received during her lifetime and even since her death. This, perhaps, is how she would have chosen it as she intended to be a revolutionary and to create a system that would allow man to rescue himself from moral bankruptcy.1 Her intention at the age of nine was to become a writer. She would write four novels, two of which, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have become classics. Her philo-sophic movement, Objectivism, was often to be called a cult, she abhorred this term because it implied a religious connotation and Rand was staunchly atheistic. Rand also eschewed academic philosophy, believing that the true test of the value in philosophy is its ability to affect the lives of the common man. In her view, “If all philosophers were required to present their ideas in novels, to dramatize the exact meaning and consequences of their philosophies in human life, there would be far fewer philosophers - and far better ones.”2
It was not until the completion in 1957 of her novel Atlas Shrugged, which she felt best exemplified Objectivist philosophy written for non-academicians, that she was encouraged to systematize her philosophy. During that same period, Objectivism was being studied at the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI) in New York and popularized through audio tapes of the lectures given at NBI and broadcast around the world. By the mid 1960’s the Objectivist movement was in full swing and was to have far-reaching effects. The two strongest drives in Rand’s early life were her desire to write novels and her desire to escape communist Russia and show the world its evils. She was able to accomplish both of these with her fiction. Later, with the encouragement and synergistic effect of her relationship with Nathaniel Branden she was able to systematize the philosophy inherent in her fiction.
As the characters and plots in her novels were both praised and
A History of Women Philosophers/Volume 4, ed. by Mary Ellen Waithe, 207-224.
© 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
criticized for their idiosyncratic natures, by all accounts it appears that for Ayn Rand her art imitated her life and her life imitated her art. Very few who met Ayn Rand or who have read her works remain ambivalent; neither did Rand remain ambivalent on any topic or person.
