To Set a Soul on Fire

The Self-Actualization of Ayn Rand

Feb 08, 2025

The following is a choice excerpt from my sixth (upcoming) book, To Set a Soul on Fire: The Self-Actualization of Ayn Rand. The Amazon Kindle version can be preordered here.

Self-Actualization in Fiction

“Nobody ever wondered whether Francisco d‘Anconia was good-looking or not; it seemed irrelevant; when he entered a room, it was impossible to look at anyone else. His tall, slender figure had an air of distinction, too authentic to be modern, and he moved as if he had a cape floating behind him in the wind. People explained him by saying that he had the vitality of a healthy animal, but they knew dimly that that was not correct. He had the vitality of a healthy human being, a thing so rare that no one could identify it. He had the power of certainty.”
–Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was one of the most popular novelists and possibly the greatest philosopher of the mid-twentieth century. Her final two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are literary masterpieces; they are—as stories—enthralling, riveting page-turners on the one hand, and—as presentations of ideas—explosively insightful, brilliant and penetrating expositions on the other. As her erstwhile intellectual champion Nathaniel Branden noted of Atlas Shrugged: “it moves effortlessly and ingeniously from economics to epistemology to morality to metaphysics to psychology to the theory of sex,” while at the same time “it has a chapter that ends with the heroine hurtling toward the earth in an airplane with a dead motor, it has a playboy crusader who blows up a multi-billion-dollar industry, a philosopher-turned-pirate who attacks government relief ships, and a climax that involves the rescue of the hero from a torture chamber.”1 In due appreciation of their power and quality, a 1998 reader’s poll by Modern Library ranked Atlas Shrugged number one and The Fountainhead number two on its list of the twentieth century’s best one hundred novels. And, as an apt illustration of the non-acceptance of her ideas by the intellectual mainstream, the corresponding list of critics’ choices failed to include a single one of her novels among its top hundred.2

The two books, however, are also the best and most accurate fictional portrayals of the self-actualizing person in all of literature: Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, and a whole cast of self-actualizing heroes and one heroine in Atlas Shrugged. “The motive and purpose of my writing,” Ayn Rand explained in a later essay, “is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself.”3 That these characters turned out self-actualized was no coincidence, so was Ayn Rand; and she modeled her fictional characters primarily on herself and her own psychology.

One common criticism of Ayn’s last two novels is that her self-actualizing heroes are unrealistic, that they are inhuman (or superhuman), that they are psychologically impossible, that such people do not and cannot exist. It is a false allegation—to which Ayn gave her answer in the Afterword to Atlas Shrugged: “I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don’t exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.”4 Indeed, her fictional descriptions of the self-actualizing person (although she herself never used the term) are entirely unmatched in any other work—fiction or non-fiction—in the vividness and accuracy with which they depict the self-actualizer’s psychological constitution, his motivations, his abilities, and his overall approach to the world and to other people. There is, however, one sense in which her characters are unrealistic.

As Nathaniel Branden put it, in a fortuitous turn of phrase, “Ayn Rand is not the first writer to project a hero . . . who fights courageously to achieve his chosen goals. But she is the first to project a hero who is a hero all of the time.”5 By “all of the time,” Branden promptly clarifies, he means “in every aspect” of his life—which is, of course, a defining characteristic of the self-actualizing person.6 But Ayn Rand’s self-actualizing hero (which in The Fountainhead she termed the “egoist”) is also a hero all of the time in a different sense: not merely in every aspect of his life, but also in every minute of every day. The Randian hero has no moments of weakness, no lapses of judgment, no temporary regression or falling out of psychological health; he never involuntarily or absentmindedly strays from his chosen goals or moral code—as every real self-actualizing person inevitably does, at least once in a while, and as Ayn herself most certainly did.

But it was never her intention to make her characters realistic in this sense. Such a demand, she said, can only be made by Naturalists—those who “claim that a writer must reproduce what they call ‘real life.’” Which “is the job of a reporter or of a historian, not of a novelist . . . of nonfiction writing, not of fiction.”7

“Art,” she explained, “is a selective re-creation of reality” based on what the artist considers important.8 She illustrated this perfectly with an example: Imagine a painting of a beautiful woman in an exquisite evening gown and with a cold sore on her lips. Now, in real life, a beautiful woman might very well get a cold sore, and “the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction” of no real significance. Yet this same cold sore “acquires a monstrous metaphysical significance [if it is] included in a painting. It declares that a woman’s beauty and her efforts to achieve glamor (the beautiful evening gown) are a futile illusion undercut by a seed of corruption which can mar and destroy them at any moment.” In this way “everything included in a work of art . . . acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included.”9

The same applies to characterization in literature. “Characterization requires an extreme degree of selectivity. A human being is the most complex entity on earth; [and] a writer’s task is to select the essentials out of that enormous complexity.”10 He does this by selecting “those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically significant,” and then “isolating and stressing them, [while] omitting the insignificant and accidental.” In doing so the writer “does not fake reality—he stylizes it.” And “‘stylized’ means condensed to essential characteristics.”11 The same way one wouldn’t include a cold sore in a painting if one wants to portray the essence of beauty, so Ayn Rand did not include any flaws or departures from the ideal in her self-actualizing heroes, because what she wanted to portray is the essence of egoism—the essence of self-actualization. She succeeded brilliantly in this regard; and the result is magnificent.

When a reader becomes immersed in a work of good fiction, he doesn’t merely process the story he reads: he lives it. And he doesn’t just watch the story’s hero, he becomes him, he empathizes with him, he imagines himself in his skin. His mind aflight on the wings of imagination and empathy, he walks through the fictionalized world and sees the events of the story through its protagonist’s eyes; he temporarily assumes the protagonist’s goals, his desires, his view of the world; he experiences the events of the narrative as if they were happening to him personally; and the hero’s struggles, his conflicts, his defeats and his triumphs evoke the matching emotions in him. In reading Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for example, the reader feels the head-cold Ivan Denisovich wakes up with, he grows afraid that the hero will be put in solitary confinement for not getting out of bed on time, he feels dread at the prospect of a twelve-hour workday in subzero weather with a left boot that lets in snow; at the same time, he feels genuine joy, relief, and contentment, when the hero is able to warm his frozen hands by a furtively built fire, when he avoids being caught by the jailers carrying illegal contraband, when he manages to filch from the camp mess hall an extra bowl of gruel.

What makes Ayn Rand’s novels unique in world literature, however, is that they allow a reader to vicariously experience self-actualization! And in living through her heroes’ triumphs, which are as a rule triumphs achieved through the intellect, a large proportion of her readers—who already rank in the tens of millions—physically have a peak-experience (and most frequently an intellectual one, at that).

A countless number of people have reported that Ayn Rand’s novels have changed their lives. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have sold nine and ten million copies respectively (as of 2022), and continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands every year.12 In a 1991 survey of American readers, the second largest number named Atlas Shrugged as the book that most influenced their lives, with only The Bible receiving a greater number of votes.13

Were her characters presented naturalistically, with the obligatory collection of flaws and occasional blunders, her books wouldn’t have nearly so potent, so exhilarating an effect. Nor would her heroes remain with the reader, as they so often do, long after the book is finished—to serve him from then on as a fictional role model, as a source of moral inspiration, and as an intransigent guidepost to daily living. “Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me,” Ayn Rand would remark on this incredible influence, “that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: ‘What would Roark do in this situation?’—and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do—and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him.” This does not mean that Roark provides an example to be emulated literally—that one must become as unerring, as constant, as flawless as a fictional character—but it does mean that he provides a practicable demonstration, and a moral touchstone, of the principles by which (according to Ayn Rand’s philosophy) one should live. “Such is the . . . function of a [fictionally] personified (concretized) human ideal.”14

As early access for paid subscribers, I’ll be releasing this book as a serial, chapter by chapter, right here on my Substack! Get the exclusive opportunity to read Roman’s work as it comes out, share feedback, questions, and constructive criticism, and help contribute to the final manuscript. All paid subscribers who sign up before the book’s launch date will receive a free first-edition autographed copy when it’s first printed.

SELF-ACTUALIZE

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