A (Obviously Fictional) Dialogue Between Ayn Rand, Bonhoeffer, Aquinas, and Slavoj Zizek
Setting: It is dusk, and two figures emerge from around a corner, looking from building to building and talking. We begin to hear them as they approach closer, looking for a way to navigate out of the Occupy Wallstreet multitude that now crowds every niche of this part of the city. They stop in front of an inn, open the door, enter, and begin to talk again inside the entrance.
B: “All things considered, we are making good time!”
R: “Its just that we do not have much time to make good with. Where are we?”
B: “The Spouter’s Inn. Have you not listened?”
R: “A bar is a bar. Are we late?”
B: “Kant is not yet here, so no, we are still quite early I believe. One needs no watches when he is about.”
R: “Fine then. Caught in that plague of humanity outside no doubt. And your physician of angels?”
B: “Angels are but spirit; not carapace and bone and weight. Do not be so crass already. He is the angelic Doctor; a title of one who peers into mysteries, not one who repairs bulkless things. And knowing him he was lost in thought, and now I’m sure is actually lost!
R: “All the same. All the same. I would assume all fictions are weightless and that none need medicine, not just angels. That Dumb Ox better not keep us waiting. He can peer into the so –called mysteries on his own time.”
B: “He will be here. And perhaps he does contemplate a bit much, but the Nazarene shatters us all differently.”
R: “Ha! Christ. I knew his name would have to pass among us at some point, just not so soon. And what fantasy can that ghost of yours conjure for the madness outside? Now is not the time for such opiates, but for Objectivism’s clear conclusion that the freedom each one claims to want is theirs if they only used their minds and wills, and seized upon it!”
B: “Ah so it appears we are both at our core people of Faith! But you simply call Christ: ‘Myself!’ Each ‘Myself’ must be Christ! But my Jesus is no ghost, no opiate, he is the concrete, flesh and blood. And it is by him that I know you are not even half an Objectivist.”
R: “I have no faith, just conviction! This is surely a jest, coming from one who believes in fairytales? I am the inventor of Objectivism. Many called it Randism at first just so—though I hated this title.”
B: “No jest, I assure, but there is a fairytale—yours namely. And perhaps you hated the title Randism because it revealed the secret inner core of truth, that ‘Objectivism’ is merely Ayn Rand’s subjectivity writ large, unfolded outward, so as to lay like your outward-turned soul draped upon the world as a veil to affect all other’s eyes. And so didn’t you yourself suggest you have been influenced by no philosopher save Aristotle? Almost as if ‘Objectivism’ was Athena, sprung full-grown from the head of Zeus! Strange then that if ‘Objectivism’ is so truly “Objective” that no one—save you of course—in the stretches of history bothered to point it out. But in fact your ‘Objectivism’ divines truth from the world but with one eye shut—and perhaps the other squinting! And so you gain an object but lose the phenomenon—you have ‘objectified’ the world and so killed it! You are like a physician who halts inquiry at the carcass, and no so longer bothers to investigate life.”
R: “And what could you possibly mean by this. My system is about life, the very heart of life! Freedom! I am a liberator of humankind’s truest disposition. Rational self-interest is no carcass but the very elan of life-itself. My conclusions are formed empirically; by the strictest logic. They are reproducible, testable.”
A large seated figure, tall and broad shouldered with a wide face hidden, buried behind a book, reading this whole time by the waiting area near the maitre-d’ station, drops the book to reveal his face and look at Rand. He begins to speak.
A: “The elan of life itself is God, Ayn; he is Superordinate to all subordinate order, gives them their place. It is only within the horizon and space in the Triune God that Christ has given us, that creation is free to be itself. Without God life gets too close to itself, as it were, gnaws upon itself, begins to cannibalize itself to make room as things slip from their proper place and begin to collide. What you describe as elan is actually life devouring itself because the brim of the world has shrunk.”
R: “Oh so it’s to be two on one now, then? Hello Thomas. We thought you to be lost, in your own mind or wandering somewhere.”
A: “I have been here for some time, reading. There are so many new books. It makes one even more thankful for eternity, I suppose! But you did not answer me.”
R: “Did you ask a question?”
A: “Implicitly, yes. There are many levels to man, Ayn. Bonhoeffer is right here; you create an object only by cutting off that which is not so easy to objectify. Your results seems ‘reproducible’ as you put it only because you have set in advance the terms to be seen as reproduced! But how many things do we as humans do in life that do not fit the terms of ‘rational self-interest’ and yet it seems that far from stupidity or aberration these are precisely what make us human! And more importantly they can only be truly seen and done justice when one views them in the light of God. So, much to the contrary of your modern opinions, one can be truly human only in the radiance of Christ. I admire the thought that passions must be trained by rationality; indeed I find two of the largest obstacles to virtue are irrationality and habit. You have in your own way identified the former, but are utterly blind to the latter. Thus yours is truly an austere vision, it seems—trimming man down to a ghost, ignoring the manifold interplay of causes and conditions, of the dialectical interplay of motivations and reasoning, of discipleship, craft, and training (or lack thereof) which make us what we are. Morality is not often functional for survival or rational self-interest, yet precisely so this self-giving love, this overbrimming heart that yearns to lose itself in the Other it finds beautiful, is humanity. Man is the animal that prays precisely because he yearns to find himself outside himself, as Great Augustine used to write. To you, however, man is only the animal that preys. Certainly, you say no one can force another to do anything; and so far as this, it is good. Yet each action for you is none other than the jostling of egoistic opportunity, each interaction only ever some rationalist calculus within an inwardly agonistic world with no real value, only perceived ones. Each action is somehow the ‘pure’ action of a rational individual shorn of tradition or community precisely by the apparatus of ‘rationality.’ Yet just so your Atlas is no man, it seems to me, just the memory of one; a shadow lingering now under the weight of his own symbol of living ‘freely.’ A cardboard figure, flitting through a thin world as its king. All hail the Cardboard King! But what of true love? Of the highest virtue which is charity? Of fellowship? Of sacrifice?”
R: “These virtues, or this “true love,” they are figments you conjure against me; I do not believe in them the way you define. Love is merely rational self-interest expressing itself through persons. None of this nonsense of finding oneself through another. You stretch fictions like a digital surface over and across the true underlying reality of will, and then call these feints “love” or “charity” as if they were something other than the mere legerdemain of a Metaphysician conjuring solid surfaces from the play of light and shadow. But here alone is the bone of truth: which is to say the truth of bones and flesh, of man whose highest good is for the self to thrive through rationality. This is the basic principle of life itself. So go on then, cast your ghosts at me, but they will only pass like small breezes, by which no rock is disturbed. And you know how I feel of charity—of altruism. Chiefest of all vices, destroyer of freedom, corruptor of hearts. That crutch; that great lie wandering about the entire Western tradition looking to devour!”
A: “And you feel this way of your husband? It is like a business arrangement?”
R: “Yes, but like all businesses, all contracts, it invents its own terms. Do not suppose that I see him as I do a bank.”
A: “How romantic! Though romance, I suppose, is yet another fiction for you; or better!—an epiphenomenon, a superstructural term again built, like all things are for you, upon the hard ground floor of rational self-interest. Decorative but not descriptive—love, romance, virtue, beauty, all useless adornment words hung upon, dependent upon, rational self-interest for their true meaning. Yet what a game it is you play! One that is unfalsifiable! It is the highest irony that the very fountainhead of your Objectivist system, rational self-interest, is itself totally subjective to the individual making the decision. Again truly your men are ghosts that simply slip by eachother without affect; they may think they speak with one another and tabulate criterion of self-interest, but these are pure equivocations, or arbitrary tabula of symbols decided upon by some fiat or another. Objectivist indeed!”
B: “It seems both sides are accusing the other of turning man into a ghost? And so here we seem to depart precisely on differing concepts of life?”
R: “Yes, truly.”
A: “I believe you are correct. And so what could the good life be for you, Ayn?”
R: “I tell you what it is not! Look upon that shiftless crowd outside, tell me that you have never seen something so absurd-- that they are all using the freedom afforded to them to assert self-interest, and yet they wish to defraud that freedom of those mighty men and women who simply used it better than they? Witless. Cowardly. Parasitic. Evil. They are contradictions unto themselves, and my system diagnosis it thoroughly. They who defy corporations because of their profits do so by those company’s products; while wearing their symbols. Is this not the very truth of the matter: they want to take with the left from others what they have been given with the right hand. That—that is not life, but its bastardization. They talk of freedom, but they merely give it up, absorbed into the ‘they’ of the crowd instead of the ‘I’ of each. Animals. They have become animals.”
B: “There are many absurdities outside, this is certain. But you see what you want to see—see only what you can see by your system, and then call it ‘Objective!’ ‘Testable!’ If you would only see the world and God reconciled in Christ you would see that the truest dimension of the person-before-God is that it is precisely not testable like this. General principles reduce ethical behavior precisely because they constrain us. Outside you look and see those people only as potential islands of heroic loneliness, you do not see them truly, and so you misdiagnose.”
R: “And what pray tell do you see, then; what is this secret truth Christ hides from we who are uninitiated into his mystery?”
B: “No mysteries; you miss the truly obvious. They are an amorphous mass with no overarching purpose, true. But for this you dismiss them as irrational. But your calculus cannot handle all the variables. The truest root of this mass is not irrationality, not the miscalculation of rational self-interest. It is a manifestation—however inchoate—of Christ’s truth that the highest value man can find is in aid of his neighbor. And precisely here their one purpose within the cacophony—however imperfect, however ignorant some of them are. They scream a thousandfold different demands but in their core they are together because they sense the need to be with their neighbor and have their neighbor be with them. They are all holding onto one end of a severed love—severed precisely by an alienating and oppressive system!—now their hearts are desperately lashing out like live-wires hoping to be healed.”
R: “And how has the system severed them? Each of them is free! Each of them should think upon the matter and see that those by whom they view themselves ill-used are doing nothing that they cannot themselves do. They shy away from the free market and so become trampled by its ever-moving wheel instead of riding along the power of its wave by harnessing their own rationality!”
The Maitre-d’ comes in and informs the three that a member of their party has been waiting for them for quite some time. They momentarily pause and enter into the dining area, only to see a very animated Zizek flagging them down.
Z: “Ah! Arrived! Here then you three, sit, sit!”
B: “Zizek, you were early!”
Z: “You still set your watches by Kant; I am afraid from where I come from Newton has been deposed. I am neither early nor late, but I arrive exactly on time—if you catch my meaning.”
B: “Your meaning?”
Z: “Exactly! My meaning. When time is relative can the standard of time keeping not but be the subject who desires to be somewhere sometime? I am here—so must you be!”
B: “And so you say, your time is the time we should arrive?”
Z: “If you came otherwise, I shouldn’t care. Which practically means there is no other time to arrive! I raise my glass to you!”
R: “That seems a philosophy destined for rudeness, since we scheduled this meet in advance.”
Z: “Oh so you are Objectivist with money, but Communist with time, I see! Very good, very good perhaps we shall find hope for you yet!”
R: “A bit early for jokes, isn’t it? Or have you been thinking that one up at my expense this whole time?”
Z: “You see right through me! I had a lot of time. I was, as you say, early! But please, I must have interrupted you before you came in. What were you discussing?”
R: “These two were calling me naïve in my assessment of that morass of humanity outside causing all the ruckus.”
Z: “Indeed?”
B: “Yes. She is blind to how theory and system are the very cause of many of the problems outside. And her ‘Objectivism’ merely blinds here to the roots of the problem.”
Z: “And what do you mean?”
B: “Her own system leads here to merely see individuals in a sort of extrinisic aggregate; the cumulative sum of so many misbegotten individual lives forsaking the free market, and handing their freedom over when the solution lay in their total acceptance of freedom as rational self-interest.”
Z: “And you say otherwise?”
B: “She does not see many things, yes. She does not see the ennui of the crowd might itself be the result of a system; and her counter system will thus hold no sway. She sees only a useless multitude of discordant opinions, and does not see this at itself a certain rebellion of life against system—indeed the very abundance of life is denied with the essence of the ethical itself. Here the innumerable opinions and voices are not the lack of ethical cohesion but the true emergence of the ethical itself, if I may still use the term ‘ethics’ here, and is perhaps directly related to the temporary depressurization of system—however halting, however fleeting. For moral choices are always the made in the uttermost concrete situation, like Christ before Pilate. On both sides of past motivation and future consequence, there are no fixed frontiers and nothing justifies us in calling a halt at some point which we ourselves have arbitrarily determined so that we may at last form a definite judgment. The manifold concrete opinions are then, it seems to me, the first refracted flickering of Christ’s face across the crowd, emerging from the mass. It is the system of ‘rational self-interest’ that has driven them here in the first place. And here is a deep irony! Rand drowns the individual in the system precisely because every ‘individual’ is to be bound within the precepts of ‘rational self-interest’ and so ironically homogenized at the root!’
R: “Because they do not understand it, and so do not live it fully! That is why they fail.”
B: “Nein! It is precisely because of the instability of your system that they fail—which is to say ‘rational’ self-interest is an indefinable, and so unusable term. What is rational? What is self-interest? Here you merely use slight of hand to equate these things with the free market itself. But this purely formal definition does not give any content of what people should do. And that content is then filled by marketing, those manipulators of men, who design all sorts of material purposes to fill out your purely ‘formal’ self-interest, and your secretly subjective ‘rationalism.’ You cannot on your own principle even choose between creating a pension or not! Let alone the much more difficult, more daunting questions of ethics. For what is of more ultimate rational self-interest, the immediate benefit of using money, or the long term benefit of deferred pleasure for retirement funds? But of course neither is truly rational in any neutral sense, yes? For one could, in a sense, be equally justified in saying that it is more rational to spend the money now, as one has no idea the time span of their life; or, to the converse, that one does not want to work into old age, and so to avoid this must start a sort of fiscal asceticism for later pleasure. But what ‘rationality’ decides between them except the preference of the individual? Self-interest? Certainly! But it is only a farce to call it ‘rational’ in any purely technical sense. Or, we might say, only as rational as the fiat of Randian subjectivity masquerading as Objective value!”
Z: “Yes, forgive me Ayn, for I know we atheists must sometimes stick together, but here I think I see his point! If I may be permitted, I am reminded of a story. The recent scandal of Bernard Madoff. Here I think, we see the very highest notion of what Dietrich is getting at: On your reading of it, Ayn, which is, if I may say so, the way it was generally represented in the media, was that Madoff was a bad person, a manipulator who fundamentally misused the system to gain illicit advantage through his ponzi scheme. Perhaps you would say in the end, Madoff was irrationally self-interested? Yes?
R: “If he were rationally self-interested, he would still be a part of the system. A system of rational self-interest cannot cease because it has no boundaries.”
Z: “Yes but here precisely I think is Dietrich’s excellent point. Madoff was not a marginal eccentric, but a figure from the very heart of the US financial establishment, Nasdaq, involved in numerous charitable activities. One should thus resist the numerous attempts—forgive me, but yours included—to pathologize Madoff, representing him as corrupt, a scoundrel, a rotten worm in the healthy green apple. Is it not rather that the Madoff case presents us with an extreme but therefore pure example of what caused the financial breakdown itself? Which is to say, it is precisely the purity of a highly calculated rational self-interest which led to the market’s own imbalance and implosion? Not Madoff’s own personal vice, or irrationality, but rather a pressure, an inner drive to go on, to expand the sphere of circulation in order to keep the machinery running inscribed into the very system of capitalism’s relations. In other words, the temptation to ‘morph’ a legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation’s logic. It is—forgive me for one more story—much like a sign I saw at my stay in a New York hotel. I recently read: ‘Dear guest, to guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke free. For any infringement, the fine is two-hundred dollars.’ The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay. Thus a reversal of Kant’s imperative “You can because you must!” It is now, “You must, because you can!’”
R: “I find the examples crass and ridiculous. Hard cases make terrible law, you know this.”
A: “But as he said this is not, so to say, a hard case? Madoff was a central figure, a keystone of the market. Not a hard case, but a natural conclusion! Yes truly, despite our differences on how system comes into play—and here our differences may in a sense be exaggerated by a certain equivocation on system, as my Summa made no pretense to a final system, but was a manual for students summarizing the best arguments up to my own time—this is a very important point of agreement between Dietrich and I as well, if you can forgive our ganging up on you for a moment. You pretend your Objectivism sees the clear sky and the pure stone; but the world is a book and everything for everyone is in one way or another a sign pointing to something else. You are no different, you merely stubbornly refuse to see every word-riven thing for what it is: a joint of thought and bulk soldered together in some way. It is only with this denial that you can speak simultaneously of ‘Objectivism” and the Free market, as if men and women were truly spontaneous points of rational calculus playing weightless in decision making before an unlimited array of choices. But things are words—concepts—and concepts are things. This is precisely where your Objectivism is Idealism of the crassest sort, and we who believe in the power of ideas are the true Realists. This I think is what Dietrich means, Ayn. We do not ‘merely’ see choices of consumption as objects, but they are all laced in narrative worlds which we are all, implicitly or explicitly, disciples of in one way or another. And what system enchants its tenants more than Capitalism and provides the symbolic texture which orients the values of the world? The flaw here is not merely your subjectivism as Bonhoeffer pointed out, but that any purported ‘rationality’ is here secretly dependent upon a narrative that invisibly yet incorrigibly underpins the logic of its reason.”
B: “Here we are close to one another, but I fear there is also a distance between us, Thomas. I fear here too, despite your protests, I may remain too uncomfortable with your overall synthesis however similar some of our formulations might be on their own. I find it so often that stories—perhaps just as often codes for system—especially the stories we tell about ourselves serve to obfuscate the ethical dimension of our acts. Though I am unhappy, as you know, with they very term ‘ethical’ as usually employed. I would say in a sense we sin in becoming too fascinated with moral purity, or the ‘richness of our inner life’ so to speak because such things are fundamentally false, a screen or false distance in which I repose within myself as a symbol and nothing more. It is rather what we do in the concrete situation that makes us, for lack of a better word, ethical.”
R: “Words! Words! Empty words! Stones are not books; nor books stones. What doubletalk! Man’s chief end is to achieve happiness, and since man is a rational animal, as you yourself say Thomas, it must be he achieve happiness through rationality.”
A: “Ah but here we depart, yes? For we do not both speak of rationality in the same way. Yours is very specifically subjective, ordered only to the immediately discernable desires of the individual subject, while my own use of rationality and rationally ordered goods is dependent on their concordance with the ends of Christ and of God.”
R: “Again, your words are just wind. Ordered to God? Who is this phantom? If only Kant had arrived already, he would help me! He would say that even if true, your Trinity has no practical bearing upon morality.”
A: “Nonsense. The Trinity is the practical bearing of morality.”
R: “And how can one derive any meaning from such paradoxes, if I allow that chimera a moment of existence for the sake of argument?”
A: “Has it not already provided a context which gives more clarity than your own position to read the crowd outside? If the Trinity created the world, then the inner condition for creation was a harmony of love; and so man himself is nothing but the fluid movement of ordered loves, now run amok from the fall. Our loves can now only be ordered around Christ, and not just around Christ, but in and through him, by the Spirit, to the Father.”
B: “On this I agree with you.”
A: “And further, by the auspices of your own system, Ayn, we briefly discussed how consumer excess is the natural outcome. The market implodes under the weight of its geniuses, those who can so perfectly articulate, and so manipulate, the system itself. Not just Madoff I mean—but, if you’ll excuse me, your very diagnoses of society’s collapse unless it allows the elite and the genius room in the free market to create and expand, unburdened by the weight of the commoner, has been proven to be exactly the opposite. For it was not the commoner, but precisely your deregulated Titans, your Atlases, which brought about collapse. It is not the creative genius helping the ordinary person, but in fact the ordinary taxpayer now supports the bailout of your so-called geniuses.”
R: “And even if I were to grant you this, which I do not, what does this have to do with your three-headed God?”
A: “Everything! Your entire system in essence runs upon a certain calculated desire; a desire that is perpetual and unceasing, rationally calculated self-seeking interest. But in this sense you created we have found the very designs of the disasters outside. For in a very real way you have made desire its own end, and here the adjective ‘rational’ merely becomes a cipher for the calculation of means. This, despite your protests, does not lead to an unending and potentially harmonious system, but to the necessary creation of extremes, of Madoff, of monopolies—“
R: “No, no monopolies could ever exist in a purely deregulated market.”
A: “So you say, yet here we are. Multi-national corporations in global capitalism have in a sense utterly escaped regulation, and yet precisely in the press for expansion predicated on your calculations of rational self-interest, companies have merged in order to provide homogenous formats and highly regulated processes of production through what is often termed ‘synergy’; which is to say, to use a photographic metaphor, a monopoly ‘in the negative.’ Not an old fashioned monolith, but an entity that exists only in the outlines of the very particular companies it associates with each other and implicitly so implicitly regulates.”
R: “And again, what of your God, or are you stalling?”
A: “No, you interrupted. In Christ desire is no longer the end in itself but is directed at other people insofar as it allows and enables them to be directed toward Christ. Our relationships to others are thus not dictated by the logic of rational self-interest, but just the reverse. Death is no longer a limit concept fueling all of our calculations of distribution, nor can relationship to God and to fellow man through Christ be reduced in some formal economic equivalence. The question is thus not about whether we want or need a free market, but about when a market is truly free. Not about whether capitalism ‘works’ but about ‘what work’ it is that capitalism does. And the only true freedom, and the only true work, is the evangel of Christ. And Christ has told us that he is there before us where we offer water to drink to the thirsty; and his disciples only recognized him after his resurrection when he broke bread with them. The economy of God thus becomes and includes the economy of man by reorienting man’s economy to God’s economy. And the manner in which this recapitulation happens is precisely communion; money is to be used to spread the joy of Christ.”
B: “I would agree in the main, but would put it different, I think. Or perhaps, with different emphasis. You speak of rational self-interest, Ayn. But here the blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, speaks of an entirely different order of logic. Your rational self-interest is an attempt to calculate the purity of an act to the extent that it benefits the actor without explicit coercion of any other party. Here the entire market is thus regulated by this idea: namely the individual’s responsibility for himself over against all others. And so our economy runs on credit scores—our taxonomy of economic purity. Yet Christ shows us, not just what Thomas so elegantly said, that we see Christ in others, and so should enable others to see Christ; but more: Christ came down and did not remain ‘pure’ but took on himself our sin, for us. Thus the Trinitarian ethics here finds its key joint: we are not calculating ethics by purity, but by involvement and taking the burden from others. What is nearest to God are the needs of one’s neighbors. Any attempt to avoid personal ‘guilt’ or economic burden in the troubles of the world, or of the market, is morally irresponsible. The purity of one’s credit score, the sanctity of one’s bank account, are limits transgressed in the name of action for Christ. One of course should not irrationally just go bankrupt for the Gospel without thought, or ruin one’s credit taking loans for the church; but here the crux of the logic backing any financial decision is how it benefits action for Christ and for the Church and for the other precisely in relation to Christ and Church.”
R: “I’ve had enough of this, I am going to go look for Kant.”
Rand exits, obviously agitated.
Z: “Ironic! One always, ‘looks for Kant,’ in ethics, but no one truly dialogues with him anymore, it seems. But of course, here, what purpose could there be? The categorical imperative is of little use—and Rand could claim it as her own. To will only that which can be universalized; a purely formal principle which ‘rational self-interest’ clearly, and all too easily, falls under.
A: “Perhaps the dialogue for today has progressed as far as it can?”
Z: “Perhaps. But now for the true theology, as you theologians might say! Communion: another round of drinks!”
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