Ayn Rand On Innate Ideas

 On Page 71 of her book, The Virtue Of Selfishness, main follower of Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, while they were still close and collaborating, wrote this about innate ideas: "Jut as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body works as a barometer of health or injury, so the pleasure-pain mechanism of his consciousness works on the same principle, acting as a barometer of what is for him or against him, what is beneficial to his life, or inimical. But man is a being of volitional consciousness, he has no innate ideas, no automatic or infallible knowledge of what his survival depends on. He must choose the values that guide his actions. His emotional mechanism will work according to the kind of values he chooses. It is his values that determine what a man feels for him to be for him or against him. It is his values that determine what a man seeks for pleasure."

 

My Response: There is no doubt that pleasure-pain mechanism can aid in keeping us bodily healthy and free from injury. Branden, and by extension, Ayn Rand, are arguing that on a rational level of consciousness, based upon life-preserving or rationally chosen values, or based upon life-degrading or irrationally or whimsically selected values, the identical pleasure-pain mechanism there also kicks in, to help the moral, free agent live well and avoid injury or death. Overall, I am not opposed to this description of human nature.

What I cannot wholly agree with is Branden's claim that humans have no innate ideas. We have Kantian categories of the understanding  shaping perceived experience at the minimum, and some sense of herd-instinct, or collectivism, or the possession of consciousness, the metaphysical existence of incipient conscience in most people, their inherent craving for a God-concept and for meaning, purpose, responsibility, work, love, the need for a partner to procreate with and order in their lives--these are some of the potential innate ideas welling up into consciousness in all of us.

I believe I understand what Rand and Branden are seeking to protect here: they want to bracket out innate ideas, likely to make room for free, pure freedom of the will so that the moral, rational individual will have and utilize his liberty to select and live in accordance with the values that he has picked out for himself, and his emotional well-being will come into compliance with his selected values.

We have all have controlling innate ideas overwhelming us as children, especially as non-individuating adults, as mostly slumbering group-livers and herd-dwellers, and there these ideas dominate the individual, determined by social, natural and environmental forces that rule the majority that are sheep.

As we maverize, and grow and develop the individual self, our innate ideas are ever present and ineradicable, are uniquely sublimated and transformed by each individuator asserting his rational will over his self, over his upbringing, over his genetic predispositions. 

Branden and Rand seek the right end by the wrong means. They want rational doers and thinkers with pure free will doing their own thing, running their own lives in perfect liberty. That goal is a bit to rarefied and ideal to be realized, but individuators, imperfect as they are as God made them, can think enough, be creative enough, and willful enough as activists designing and then redesigning their own personal theory and practice of how they should live in near-perfect liberty.