The Self is a problematic word and my use of it in my "Subjects and Objects" post the other day needs more elaboration. As RP asks, how is what I'm saying different from what Ayn Rand is saying? And it's a good question.
There are a couple of angles I want to take in an attempt to try to answer this question. First, Ayn Rand and her philosophy has had an enormous impact on certain person, espcially in America particularly among business libertarian types. It's the 20th Century's version of Social Darwinism. Rand was a third rate Nietzschean. She's like a clever undergraduate who took some of the ideas of her teacher and yet had no understanding of the spiritual struggle from which those ideas arose.
In my view, Nietzsche was a great but failed soul; Rand was a small, smug, calculating soul who made a name for herself celebrating her own egoism. "Of course I'm a selfish bitch, Dahling. But at least I'm honest about it." She did not succeed where Nietzsche failed; she wasn't even in the same game. She's Donald Trump with a PhD. (She didn't have one, but you know what I mean.) But at least she accepted the challenge of being a modern Self.
In my post the other day, I talk about the exuberance of the Romantics who were intoxicated by the idea of the unlimited possibilities of a free Self liberated from the shackles of the objective world. Emerson through Thomas Carlyle mediated this German Romanticism to the American continent in the first part of the century, but by the end of the century the exuberance had died, and you had people like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche all struggling with the dark side of this Liberation.
This newly discovered experience of profound estrangement, isolation, unbearable responsibility for one's own destiny and for creating one's own meaning. This profound sense of having been abandoned by God, that the God who was always out there as familiar a fixture as the rising sun was not there, at least in any way that offered support from outside oneself, as a cultural prop, as a value that lives and animates the culture. That structure imploded during the nineteenth century, and no such culture-God existed, and if a God existed at all, he had to be found elsewhere. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were able to find him. Nietzsche was not.
All three of these men were great souls, and all three were awake to the significance of what had happened in a way that most others were not. Their greatness lies not so much in their doctrines but in their struggle to grapple with a new reality at a level of awareness that few others of their time possessed. And yet what they struggled with remains a central theme for us today. They were pioneers, so to speak. It's up to us to pick up from where they left off. Someone like Ayn Rand probably saw herself doing the same kind of thing. I've already said what I think of her effort, but the question remains: How is what I'm saying about the Self any different from what she's saying about it?
Another digression before I come back to this question. Paul Riesman in his 1950s book The Lonely Crowd talks about three different human values orientations or dispositions for operating in the world: tradition-directed, other-directed, and inner directed. (I'm using these terms somewhat differently than he did, but he gets the nod for coining the terms.) As I've pointed out repeatedly elsewhere, modernity is the story of the destruction of traditional cultures and the consciousness that came with them. The three writers that I was talking about above were acutely aware of what this loss meant for the West, and all three in their different ways hated what modernity was doing to the human soul.
Tradition had been a fertile soil for the growing of full-souled human beings. Modernity caused the removal of the soil. The human being appears now like a Giacometti statue standing in a bleak, empty parking lot. There is very little to nurture him from a larger, richer, coherent culture world, which is open to transcendence and which gives his life meaning and purpose. There was only the individual left to his own inner resources--or not. The individual in such a situation has two choices: In Riesman's nomenclature he becomes either inner-directed or outer-directed.
The outer-directed person, as I want to use the phrase, is the one who cannot bear the responsibility for his own individuality and freedom and abdicates it by surrendering himself to mass political movements, corporate conformism, religious fundamentalism, religious cults, cults of personality, gangs, substance abuse, etc. This surrender is what existentialist philosophy calls "bad faith"--the refusal to accept responsibility for one's own freedom. My argument over the last years of my writing this blog is that what we see on the religious right is a prodigious example of bad faith masquerading as true faith. Religion is one of the greatest promoters of bad faith available to human beings. Dostoevsky's parable of "The Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov is of the most succinct descriptions in modern literature of how it works.
There are left-wing styles of bad faith just as there are right-wing styles. Call it Patty-Hearst Syndrome. You didn't have to be kidnapped in the sixties or seventies to succumb to it. Bad faith, when it manifests on the right, is fascistic; when it manifests on the left, it's Maoistic. Both are horrific, but which one is the greater threat to us at this point in our history?
So the point I'm making here is that whether the threat comes from the left or the right, the character of the threat is in its pathological other-directedness, its refusal to take responsibility for one's Self, its surrender to the conventional wisdom promoted by the powers that be. The only antidote is to be inner-directed, which brings us back to the Ayn Rand problem, because clearly she was a promoter of inner-directedness, and in that she is superior to the bovine mentality that characterizes the other-directed.
So, I'd much rather deal with an Ayn Rand than a Jerry Fallwell or a Reverend Moon, who live parasitically off of the the other-directedness of their followers. She at least has accepted the challenge of being a Modern Self whereas those who live in the world of other-directedness have refused that challenge. Nevertheless, once the challenge is accepted, there are a whole set of new problems.
Because the inner-directed have a choice to become citizens of two metaphorical cities: Babylon or Jerusalem. Babylon is the world without grace. Think of the kind of world lived in by Quentin Tarantino characters. It is the city built by the Trumps and Rands of the world, a city of smooth well-mannered predators driven by sex, money, and power; Jerusalem is the city built by those who have some sense of what the Gospels mean when they say the Kingdom is found within, which is where one discovers the movement of grace in one's life. And those who have made this discovery have some sense, even if only a very frail sense, of the subversive power of Love, Hope, and Faith. For the sex drive, money drive, and power drive that are the only Law in Babylon are turned upside down and transformed by grace.
The problem is that Babylonians are running the show, and the Jerusalemites are at best a disorganized, ragtag guerrilla operation with a few sympathizers, and they are at this point unclear about their goals and strategy. I think there are lots of people who would prefer to work toward the building of Jerusalem, but accept that Babylon is the world as it exists, and it defines what we want, and insofar as our desire life is dominated by the sex, money, and power drives, Babylon remains the dominant law of the land. It's what we call "natural," and it is natural, but is "natural" all there is? Or is "natural" what needs to be redeemed?
If nothing else, it's important to recognize that there is another possibility if we can find it and choose it. For many finding it is a first big step. But next comes the difficult task of learning to live according to its inner-directed laws, which is the activity of conscience. And the free, inner-directed, conscience-driven activity of the Subject in this sense is what defines us as most truly and deeply human, and our becoming the humans we were created to be is our way of laying the bricks out of which will be built Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not something that will be "given." It must be chosen and built brick by brick.
There are lots of people making bricks in their different ways, and probably most of them aren't Christians. I believe, but cannot prove, that the Christian mystery is at the center of it all, but I don't think that one has to =consciously recognize it as such to participate in it. Obviously, there are deep and superficial levels of participation. But at the end of the day, all that matters is that grace works in your life and that you choose to work with it. That's how free Selves are grown and how Jerusalem is built.