The Romantic Manifesto_ A Philosophy of Literature - Ayn Rand [2]
Renunciation is not one of my premises. If I see that the good is possible to men, yet it vanishes, I do not take “Such is the trend of the world” as a sufficient explanation. I ask such questions as: Why?—What caused it?—What or who determines the trends of the world? (The answer is: philosophy.)
The course of mankind’s progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements men had reached—and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example: he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance, spanning the infamous detour of the Dark and Middle Ages.
Speaking only of the pattern, with no presumptuous comparison of stature intended, I am a bridge of that kind—between the esthetic achievements of the nineteenth century and the minds that choose to discover them, wherever and whenever such minds might exist.
It is impossible for the young people of today to grasp the reality of man’s higher potential and what scale of achievement it had reached in a rational (or semi-rational) culture. But I have seen it. I know that it was real, that it existed, that it is possible. It is that knowledge that I want to hold up to the sight of men—over the brief span of less than a century—before the barbarian curtain descends altogether (if it does) and the last memory of man’s greatness vanishes in another Dark Ages.
I made it my task to learn what made Romanticism, the greatest achievement in art history, possible and what destroyed it. I learned—as in other, similar cases involving philosophy—that Romanticism was defeated by its own spokesmen, that even in its own time it had never been properly recognized or identified. It is Romanticism’s identity that I want to transmit to the future.
As for the present, I am not willing to surrender the world to the jerky contortions of self-inducedly brainless bodies with empty eye sockets, who perform, in stinking basements, the immemorial rituals of staving off terror, which are a dime a dozen in any jungle—and to the quavering witch doctors who call it “art.”
Our day has no art and no future. The future, in the context of progress, is a door open only to those who do not renounce their conceptual faculty; it is not open to mystics, hippies, drug addicts, tribal ritualists—or to anyone who reduces himself to a subanimal, subperceptual, sensory level of awareness.
Will we see an esthetic Renaissance in our time? I do not know. What I do know is this: anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today.
All the essays in this book, with one exception, appeared originally in my magazine The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter). The date at the end of each essay indicates the specific issue. The exception is “Introduction to Ninety-Three,” which is a condensed version of the introduction I wrote for a new edition of Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, translated by Lowell Bair, published by Bantam Books, Inc., in 1962.
The Objectivist is a magazine that deals with the application of my philosophy to the problems and issues of today’s culture. For further information, those interested may write to OBJECTIVISM, PO Box 51808, Irvine, California 92619.
AYN RAND
New York City
June 1969
1.
The Psycho-Epistemology of Art
THE position of art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent