Key ideas: Published in 1991. “Ayn Rand’s philosophy has changed thousands of lives, including my own, and has the power to change the course of history. Her views, however, are spread across more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles and speeches. The present book is the first comprehensive statement of her philosophy.” (L. Peikoff)
In order to approach philosophy systematically, one must begin with its basic branches. Philosophy, according to Objectivism, consists of five branches.
We begin as philosophers where we began as babies, at the only place there is to begin: by looking at the world. …
We start with the irreducible fact and concept of existence—that which is.
The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn Rand’s words: existence exists. (“Existence” here is a collective noun, denoting the sum of existents.) This axiom does not tell us anything about the nature of existents; it merely underscores the fact that they exist. …
The concept of “existence” is the widest of all concepts. It subsumes everything—every entity, action, attribute, relationship (including every state of consciousness)—everything which is, was, or will be. The concept does not specify that a physical world exists. As the first concept at the base of knowledge, it covers only what is known, implicitly if not explicitly, by the gamut of the human race …
You the reader have now grasped the first axiom of philosophy. This act implies a second axiom: that you exist possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
Consciousness is not inherent in the fact of existence as such; a world without conscious organisms is possible. But consciousness is inherent in your grasp of existence. Inherent in saying “There is something— of which I am aware” is: “There is something—of which I am aware.” …
Consciousness, to repeat, is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. (“Perceiving” is used here in its widest sense, equivalent to “being aware of.”) To be conscious is to be conscious of something.
A third and final basic axiom is implicit in the first two. It is the law of identity: to be is to be something, to have a nature, to possess identity. A thing is itself; or, in the traditional formula, A is A. The “identity” of an existent means that which it is, the sum of its attributes or characteristics.
Like existence and consciousness, identity is also a fundamental starting point of knowledge. Before one can ask what any existent is, it must be something, and one must know this. If not, then there is nothing to investigate—or to exist.
Inherent in a man’s grasp of any object is the recognition, in some form, that: there is something I am aware of. There is—existence; something—identity; I am aware of— consciousness. These three are the basic axiomatic concepts recognized by the philosophy of Objectivism.
An axiomatic concept, writes Ayn Rand, is
Being implicit from the beginning, existence, consciousness, and identity are outside the province of proof. Proof is the derivation of a conclusion from antecedent knowledge, and nothing is antecedent to axioms. Axioms are the starting points of cognition, on which all proofs depend.
One knows that the axioms are true not by inference of any kind, but by sense perception. When one perceives a tomato, for example, there is no evidence that it exists, beyond the fact that one perceives it; there is no evidence that it is something, beyond the fact that one perceives it; and there is no evidence that one is aware, beyond the fact that one is perceiving it. Axioms are perceptual self-evidencies. There is nothing to be said in their behalf except: look at reality.
What is true of tomatoes applies equally to oranges, buildings, people, music, and stars. What philosophy does is to give an abstract statement of such self-evident facts. Philosophy states these facts in universal form. Whatever exists, exists. Whatever exists is what it is. In whatever form one is aware, one is aware.
The concept of “entity” is an axiomatic concept, which is presupposed by all subsequent human cognition, although it is not a basic axiom. In particular, the grasp of “entity,” in conjunction with the closely following grasp of “identity,” makes possible the discovery of the next important principle of metaphysics, the one that is the main subject of the present section: the law of causality.
First, however, I must offer some clarification in regard to the concept of “entity.” Since it is axiomatic, the referents of this concept can be specified only ostensively, by pointing to the things given to men in sense perception. In this case, one points to solid things with a perceivable shape, such as a rock, a person, or a table. ….
Entities constitute the content of the world men perceive; there is nothing else to observe. In the act of observing entities, of course, the child, like the adult, observes (some of) their attributes, actions, and relationships. …
When a child has reached the stage of (implicitly) grasping “entity,” “identity,” and “action,” he has the knowledge required to reach (implicitly) the law of causality. To take this step, he needs to observe an omnipresent fact: that an entity of a certain kind acts in a certain way. …
Things, he [child] soon discovers, act in definite ways and only in these ways. This represents the implicit knowledge of causality; it is the child’s form of grasping the relationship between the nature of an entity and its mode of action.
Every entity has a nature; it is specific, noncontradictory, limited; it has certain attributes and no others. Such an entity must act in accordance with its nature. … In any given set of circumstances, therefore, there is only one action possible to an entity, the action expressive of its identity. This is the action it will take, the action that is caused and necessitated by its nature.
Thus, under ordinary circumstances, if a child releases a balloon filled with helium, only one outcome is possible: the balloon will rise. If he releases a second balloon filled with sand, the nature of the entity is different, and so is its action; the only possible outcome now is that it will fall. If, under the same circumstances, several actions were possible—e.g., a balloon could rise or fall (or start to emit music like a radio, or turn into a pumpkin), everything else remaining the same— such incompatible outcomes would have to derive from incompatible (contradictory) aspects of the entity’s nature. But there are no contradictory aspects. A is A.
Cause and effect, therefore, is a universal law of reality.
Cause and effect, therefore, is a universal law of reality. Every action has a cause (the cause is the nature of the entity which acts); and the same cause leads to the same effect (the same entity, under the same circumstances, will perform the same action).
Here again, as in regard to axioms, implicit knowledge must not be confused with explicit. The explicit identification of causality (by the Greeks) was an enormous intellectual achievement; it represented the beginning of a scientific outlook on existence, as against the prescientific view of the world as a realm of miracles or of chance. (And here again the worst offenders philosophically are not the primitives who implicitly count on causality yet never discover it, but the modern sophisticates, such as David Hume, who count on it while explicitly rejecting it.)
Causality is best classified as a corollary of identity. A “corollary” is a self-evident implication of already established knowledge. … It is, in effect, a new angle on an established principle, which follows immediately once one grasps its meaning and the principle on which it depends. … In fact, the essence of metaphysics, according to Objectivism, is the step-by-step development of the corollaries of the existence axiom. …
The law of causality states that entities are the cause of actions—not that every entity, of whatever sort, has a cause, but that every action does; and not that the cause of action is action, but that the cause of action is entities. …
The law of causality is an abstract principle; it does not by itself enable us to predict specific occurrences; it does not provide us with a knowledge of particular causes or measurements. Our ignorance of certain measurements, how- ever, does not affect their reality or the consequent operation of nature.
In adult, philosophic terms, we refer to this fact as the “primacy of existence,” a principle that is fundamental to the metaphysics of Objectivism.
Existence, this principle declares, comes first. Things are what they are independent of consciousness—of anyone’s perceptions, images, ideas, feelings.
Consciousness, by contrast, is a dependent. Its function is not to create or control existence, but to be a spectator: to look out, to perceive, to grasp that which is. …
Consciousness, therefore, is only a faculty of awareness. It is the power to grasp, to find out, to discover that which is. It is not a power to alter or control the nature of its objects. ..
If existence is independent of consciousness, then knowledge of existence can be gained only by extrospection. In other words, nothing is relevant to cognition of the world except data drawn from the world, i.e., sense data or conceptual integrations of such data. Introspection, of course, is nec- essary and proper as a means of grasping the contents or processes of consciousness; but it is not a means of external cognition. There can be no appeal to the knower’s feelings as an avenue to truth; there can be no reliance on any mental contents alleged to have a source or validity independent of sense perception. Every step and method of cognition must proceed in accordance with facts—and every fact must be established, directly or indirectly, by observation. To follow this policy, according to Objectivism, is to follow reason
If a man accepts the primacy of consciousness, by contrast, he will be drawn to an opposite theory of knowledge. If consciousness controls existence, it is not necessary to confine oneself to studying the facts of existence. On the contrary, introspection becomes a means of external cognition; at critical points, one should bypass the world in the very quest to know it and instead look inward, searching out elements in one’s mind that are detached from perception, such as “intuitions,” “revelations,” “innate ideas,” “innate structures.” In relying on such elements, the knower is not, he feels, cavalierly ignoring reality; he is merely going over the head of existence to its master, whether human or divine; he is seeking knowledge of fact directly from the source of facts, from the consciousness that creates them. This kind of metaphysics implicitly underlies every form of unreason.
With rare exceptions, Western philosophy has accepted the opposite; it is dominated by attempts to construe existence as a subordinate realm. Three versions of the primacy of consciousness have been prevalent. They are distinguished by their answer to the question: upon whose consciousness is existence dependent?
Dominating philosophy from Plato to Hume was the supematuralistic version. In this view, existence is a product of a cosmic consciousness, God…. Epistemologically, this variant leads to mysticism: knowledge is said to rest on communications from the Supreme Mind to the human.
In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant secularized the religious viewpoint. According to his philosophy, the human mind—specifically, the cognitive structures common to all men, their innate forms of perception and conception—is what creates existence (which he called the “phenomenal” world)… According to the social version, no one individual is potent enough to create a universe or abrogate the law of identity, but a group—mankind as a whole, a particular society, a nation, a state, a race, a sex, an economic class—can do the trick…. Epistemologically, this variant leads to collective surveys—a kind of group introspection—as the means to truth; knowledge is said to rest on a consensus among thinkers, a consensus that results not from each individual’s perception of external reality, but from subjective mental structures or contents that happen to be shared by the group’s members. Today, the social variant is at the height of its popularity.
A third version of the primacy of consciousness has appeared throughout history among skeptics and is well represented today: the personal version, as we may call it, according to which each man’s own consciousness controls existence—for him…. Epistemologically, therefore, there are no standards or data of any kind to which a person must conform. There is only truth “for me” vs. truth “for you”—which truth is, for any individual, whatever he arbitrarily decrees it to be.
In regard to fundamentals, it makes no difference whether one construes existence as subservient to the consciousness of God, of men, or of oneself. All these represent the same essential metaphysics containing the same essential error. Objectivism rejects them all on the same ground: that existence exists.
If existence exists, then it has metaphysical primacy. It is not a derivative or “manifestation” or “appearance” of some true reality at its root, such as God or society or one’s urges. It is reality. As such, its elements are uncreated and eternal, and its laws, immutable.
There were once Western philosophers who upheld the primacy of existence; notably, such ancient Greek giants as Parmenides and Aristotle. But even they were not consistent in this regard. (Aristotle, for example, describes his Prime Mover as a consciousness conscious only of itself, which serves as the cause of the world’s motion.) There has never yet been a thinker who states the principle explicitly, then applies it methodically in every branch of philosophy, with no concession to any version of its antithesis. This is precisely what Ayn Rand does. Her philosophy is the primacy of existence come to full, systematic expression in Western thought for the first time. …
Consciousness is an attribute of perceived entities here on earth. It is a faculty possessed under definite conditions by a certain group of living organisms. It is directly observable (by introspection). It has a specific nature, including specific physical organs, and acts accordingly, i.e., law- fully. It has a life-sustaining function: to perceive the facts of nature and thereby enable the organisms that possess it to act successfully. In all this, there is nothing unnatural or supernatural. There is no basis for the suggestion that consciousness is separable from matter, let alone opposed to it, no hint of immortality, no kinship to any alleged transcendent realm.
Like the faculty of vision (which is one of its aspects), and like the body, the faculty of awareness is wholly this-worldly. The soul, as Aristotle was the first (and so far one of the few) to understand, is not man’s ticket to another reality; it is a development of and within nature. It is a biological datum open to observation, conceptualization, and scientific study. …
Metaphysics, in the Objectivist viewpoint, is a highly delimited subject. In essence, it identifies only the fact of existence (along with the corollaries of this fact). The subject does not study particular existents or undertake to guide men in the achievement of a goal.
The case is different with regard to the other, much more complex branch at the base of philosophy: epistemology, which does study a particular subject matter, and does offer men practical guidance. Epistemology is the science that studies the nature and means of human knowledge.
Epistemology is based on the premise that man can acquire knowledge only if he performs certain definite processes. This premise means that a man cannot accept ideas at random and count them as knowledge merely because he feels like it. Why not?
The Objectivist answer has two parts.
The first is that knowledge is knowledge of reality, and existence has primacy over consciousness. If the mind wishes to know existence, therefore, it must conform to existence. On the opposite metaphysics, Ayn Rand holds, epistemology would be neither necessary nor possible. If thought created reality, no science offering guidance to thought would be applicable; consciousness could assert whatever it wished, and reality would obey.
The second part of the answer pertains to the nature of human consciousness. Existence has primacy for animals, too, but they do not need cognitive guidance, because their knowledge is sensory or perceptual in nature. Human knowledge, however, though based on sensory perception, is conceptual in nature, and on the conceptual level consciousness displays a new feature: it is not automatic or infallible; it can err, distort, depart from reality (whether through ignorance or evasion). Man, therefore, unlike the animals, needs to discover a method of cognition. He needs to learn how to use his mind, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to validate the conclusions he reaches.
Epistemology is the science that tells a fallible, conceptual consciousness what rules to follow in order to gain knowledge of an independent reality. Without such a science, none of man’s conclusions, on any subject, could be regarded as fully validated. There would be no answer to the question: how do you know? …
The validity of the senses is an axiom. Like the fact of consciousness, the axiom is outside the province of proof because it is a precondition of any proof.
Proof consists in reducing an idea back to the data provided by the senses. These data themselves, the foundation of all subsequent knowledge, precede any process of inference. They are the primaries of cognition, the unchallengeable, the self-evident. …
It is only in regard to the “what”— only on the conceptual level of consciousness—that the possibility of error arises. If a boy sees a jolly bearded man in a red suit and infers that Santa Claus has come down from the North Pole, his senses have made no error; it is his conclusion that is mistaken. …
Every existent is bound by the laws of identity and causality. This applies not only to the physical world, but also to consciousness. Consciousness—any consciousness, of any species—is what it is. It is limited, finite, lawful. It is a faculty with a nature, which includes specific instrumentalities that enable it to achieve awareness. It is a something that has to grasp its objects somehow. …
Every process of knowledge involves two crucial elements: the object of cognition and the means of cognition— or: What do I know? and How do I know it? The object (which is studied by the special sciences) is always some aspect of reality; there is nothing else to know. The means (which is studied by epistemology) pertains to the kind of consciousness and determines the form of cognition. …
Such an ability exemplifies the second stage of consciousness: the perceptual level. A “perception/’ in Ayn Rand’s definition,”is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things.”
The important philosophic point of this discussion can be stated simply: “direct experience,” according to Objectivism, means the perceptual level of consciousness. As adults, as thinkers, and even as children beyond the infant stage, what we are given when we use our senses, leaving aside all conceptual knowledge, is the awareness of entities—nothing more, but nothing less. …
If an individual accepts a philosophy of reason, and if he characteristically chooses to be in focus, he will gradually gain knowledge, confidence, and a sense of intellectual control. This will make it easier for him to be in focus. After he practices the policy for a time, focussing will come to seem natural, his thought processes will gain in speed and efficiency, he will enjoy using his mind, and he will experience little temptation to drop the mental reins.
On the other hand, if an individual accepts an anti-reason philosophy, and if he characteristically remains out of focus, he will increasingly feel blind, uncertain, and anxious. This will make the choice to focus harder. After a while, he will experience focus as an unnatural strain, his thought processes will become relatively tortured and unproductive, and he will be tempted more than ever to escape into a state of passive drift.
Both these patterns, however (and all the mixtures in between), are self-made. Human volition produced each condition, and the opposite choices remain possible. The first kind of man still has to throw the switch the next time, which takes an expenditure of effort. The second still has the capacity to focus, as long as he is sane. He has the capacity gradually (and painfully) to work his way out of his inner chaos and establish a better relationship to reality.
“Evasion,” in Ayn Rand’s words, is
The process of evasion, as we will see, is profoundly destructive. Epistemologically, it invalidates a mental process. Morally, it is the essence of evil. According to Objectivism, evasion is the vice that underlies all other vices. In the present era, it is leading to the collapse of the world. …
In regard to action, a man’s choice—one he must make in every issue—is: to act in accordance with his values or not.
To act in accordance with one’s values (in the sense relevant here) is a complex responsibility. It requires that one know what he is doing and why. He has to assume the discipline of purpose and of a long-range course, selecting a goal and then pursuing it across time in the face of obstacles and/ or distractions.
It requires that one need the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values. This means: he keeps in mind the fact that some of his values are primary or immediately urgent, while others are subordinate or less imperative— and he determines the time and effort to be spent on a given pursuit accordingly.
Thus he integrates the activity of the moment into the full context of his other goals, weighing alternative courses and selecting appropriately. And it requires that one choose the means to his ends conscientiously, making full use of the knowledge available to him. All this is involved in “acting in accordance with one’s values.” Yet all this is precisely what is not automatic.
A man can accept a set of values, yet betray them in action…. What moves him, however, is not the full context of his knowledge and values, but chance bits of content; the cause of his actions is a flow of disintegrated ideas and value-judgments that he allows to become decisive out of context, without identification or purpose.
Like the mental drifter, the physical drifter, too, turns himself over to his subconscious, abdicating his power of conscious decision. The result is that he turns himself into the puppet of the determinists’ theory, dangling on strings he does not know or control. But the fact remains that he chose this state. …
If man’s consciousness were automatic, if it did react deterministically to outer or inner forces acting upon it, then, by definition, a man would have no choice in regard to his mental content; he would accept whatever he had to accept, whatever ideas the determining forces engendered in him. In such a case, one could not prescribe methods to guide a man’s thought or ask him to justify his ideas; the subject of epistemology would be inapplicable. One cannot ask a person to alter or justify the mentally inescapable, any more than, in physical terms, one can ask him to alter or justify his patellar reflex. In regard to the involuntary, there is no alternative but to submit—to do what one must, whatever it is.
The concept of “volition” is one of the roots of the concept of “validation” (and of its subdivisions, such as “proof”). A validation of ideas is necessary and possible only because man’s consciousness is volitional. This applies to any idea, including the advocacy of free will, to ask for its proof is to presuppose the reality of free will.
Once again, we have reached a principle at the foundation of human knowledge, a principle that antecedes all argument and proof. How, then, do we know that man has volition? It is a self-evident fact, available to any act of intro- spection.…
The principle of volition is a philosophic axiom, with all the features this involves. It is a primary—a starting point of conceptual cognition and of the subject of epistemology; to direct one’s consciousness, one must be free and one must know, at least implicitly, that one is.
It is a fundamental: every item of conceptual knowledge requires some form of validation, the need of which rests on the fact of volition. It is selfevident. And it is inescapable. Even its enemies have to accept and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it….
Like any rejection of a philosophic axiom, determinism is self-refuting. Just as one must accept existence or consciousness in order to deny it, so one must accept volition in order to deny it. A philosophic axiom cannot be proved, because it is one of the bases of proof. But for the same reason it cannot be escaped, either. By its nature, it is impregnable.
For man, sensory material is only the first step of knowledge, the basic source of information. Until he has conceptualized this information, man cannot do anything with it cognitively, nor can he act on it. Human knowledge and human action are conceptual phenomena.
Although concepts are built on percepts, they represent a profound development, a new scale of consciousness. An animal knows only a handful of concretes: the relatively few trees, ponds, men, and the like it observes in its lifetime. It has no power to go beyond its observations—to generalize, to identify natural laws, to hypothesize causal factors, or, therefore, to understand what it observes.
A man, by contrast, may observe no more (or even less) than an animal, but he can come to know and understand facts that far outstrip his limited observations. He can know facts pertaining to all trees, every pond and drop of water, the universal nature of man. To man, as a result, the object of knowledge is not a narrow corner of a single planet, but the universe in all its immensity, from the remote past to the distant future, and from the most minuscule (unperceivable) particles of physics to the farthest (unperceivable) galaxies of astronomy.
A similar contrast applies in the realm of action. An animal acts automatically on its perceptual data; it has no power to project alternative courses of behavior or long-range consequences. Man chooses his values and actions by a process of thought, based ultimately on a philosophical view of existence; he needs the guidance of abstract principles both to select his goals and to achieve them. Because of its form of knowledge, an animal can do nothing but adapt itself to nature. Man (if he adheres to the metaphysically given) adapts nature to his own requirements. …
To understand man—and any human concern—one must understand concepts. One must discover what they are, how they are formed, and how they are used, and often misused, in the quest for knowledge.
“The (implicit) concept existent,’” she writes, “undergoes three stages of development in man’s mind.” The first stage is a child’s awareness of things or objects. This represents the (implicit) concept “entity.” The second stage occurs when the child, although still on the perceptual level, distinguishes specific entities from one another; seeing the same object at different times, he now recognizes that it is the same one. This represents the implicit concept “identity.” …
Having grasped the identities of particular entities, human beings can go on to a new step. In Ayn Rand’s words, they can grasp “relationships among these entities by grasping the similarities and differences of their identities.” A child can grasp that certain objects (e.g., two tables) resemble one an- other but differ from other objects (such as chairs or beds), and he can decide to consider the similar ones together, as a separate group. At this point, he no longer views the objects as animals do: merely as distinct existents, each different from the others. Now he also regards objects as related by their resemblances….
The implicit concept represented by this stage of development is: “unit.” “A unit,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, “is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members.”
“This is the key, the entrance to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness. The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow.”
When studying the unit-perspective, it is essential to grasp that in the world apart from man there are no units; there are only existents—separate, individual things with their properties and actions. To view things as units is to adopt a human perspective on things—which does not mean a “subjective” perspective.
Without the implicit concept of “unit,” man could not reach the conceptual method of knowledge. Without the same implicit concept, there is something else he could not do: he could not count, measure, identify quantitative relationships; he could not enter the field of mathematics. Thus the same (implicit) concept is the base and start of two fields: the conceptual and the mathematical. This points to an essential connection between the two fields. It suggests that conceptformation is in some way a mathematical process.
Before pursuing this lead, however, I want to give an orderly description of the conscious processes men must perform in order to be able to regard entities as units. I want to systematize the aspects of concept-formation to which we have already alluded.
Two main processes are involved, the two that are also essential to consciousness on the perceptual level: taking apart and putting together, or analysis and synthesis, or differentiation and integration.
“Differentiation” is the process of grasping differences, i.e., of distinguishing one or more objects of awareness from the others.
“Integration” is the process of uniting elements into an inseparable whole. …
We begin the formation of a concept by isolating a group of concretes. We do this on the basis of observed similarities that distinguish these concretes from the rest of our perceptual field. The similarities that make possible our first differentiations, let me repeat, are observed; they are available to our senses without the need of conceptual knowledge. At a higher stage of development, concepts are often necessary to identify similarities—e.g., between two philosophies or two political systems. But the early similarities are perceptually given, both to (certain) animals and to men.
The distinctively human element in the above is our ability to abstract such similarities from the differences in which they are embedded. An example is our ability to take out and consider separately the similar shape of a number of tables, setting aside their many differences in size, color, weight, and so on. “Abstraction” is the power of selective focus and treatment; it is the power to separate mentally and make cognitive use of an aspect of reality that cannot exist separately. This is a power animals do not possess. An animal perceives the whole object, including some similarities to other things and some differences from them; it may even, in certain instances, be capable of a rudimentary selective focus. But it cannot isolate or unite any group of concretes accordingly; it cannot do anything cognitively with the relationships it perceives. To its consciousness, the noting of similarities is a dead end. Man can do something: he makes such data the basis of a method of cognitive organization. The first step of the method is the mental isolation of a group of similars.
But an isolated perceptual group is not yet a concept. If we merely isolated, we could do little or nothing cognitively with the group, nor could we keep the group isolated. To achieve a cognitive result, we must proceed to integrate. “Integrating” percepts is the process of blending all the relevant ones (e.g., our percepts of tables) into an inseparable whole. Such a whole is a new entity, a mental entity (the concept “table”), which functions in our consciousness thereafter as a single, enduring unit. This entity stands for an unlimited number of concretes, including countless unobserved cases. It subsumes all instances belonging to the group, past, present, and future. Here is another parallel to mathematics.
The tool that makes this kind of integration possible is language. A word is the only form in which man’s mind is able to retain such a sum of concretes. …
Only concretes exist. If a concept is to exist, therefore, it must exist in some way as a concrete. That is the function of language. “Language,” writes Ayn Rand, “is a code of visual-auditory symbols that serves the . . . function of converting concepts into the mental equivalent of concretes.” …
“Words transform concepts into (mental) entities,” writes Miss Rand; “definitions provide them with identity.”
Ayn Rand s solution to the problem lies in her discovery that here is an essential connection between concept-formation and mathematics. Since mathematics is the science of measurement, let us start by considering the nature and purpose of measurement.
The process of measurement involves two concretes: the existent being measured and the existent that is the standard of measurement. Entities and their actions are measured by means of their attributes, such as length, weight, velocity. In every case, the primary standard is some easily perceivable concrete that functions as a unit. One measures length in units, say, of feet; weight in pounds; velocity in feet per second.
The unit must be appropriate to the attribute being measured; one cannot measure length in pounds or weight in seconds. An appropriate unit is an instance of the attribute being measured. A foot, for example, is itself a length; it is a specified amount of length. Thus it can serve as a unit to measure length. Directly or indirectly, the same principle applies to every type of measurement.
In the process of measurement, we identify the relationship of any instance of a certain attribute to a specific instance of it selected as the unit. The former may range across the entire spectrum of magnitude, from largest to smallest; the latter, the (primary) unit, must be within the range of human perception.
The epistemological purpose of measurement is best approached through an example. Consider the fact that the distance between the earth and the moon is 240,000 miles. No creature can perceive so vast a distance; to an animal, accordingly, it is unknowable and unfathomable. Yet man has no difficulty in grasping (and now even traversing) it. What makes this cognitive feat possible is the human method of establishing relationships to concretes we can directly perceive. We cannot perceive 240,000 miles, but that distance is expressed in miles, and a mile is reducible to a certain number of feet, and a foot is: this (I am pointing to a ruler).
It works in the other direction also. A certain chemical reaction, a scientist reports, takes place in 4.6 milliseconds. A thousandth of a second is too small to be within the range of perceptual awareness. Yet by relating this time interval, as a fraction, to one that we can apprehend directly, we can grasp and deal with it as well. In both directions, Ayn Rand holds, and in regard to countless attributes, the
The process of measurement is a process of integrating an unlimited scale of knowledge to man’s limited perceptual experience—a process of making the universe knowable by bringing it within the range of man’s consciousness, by establishing its relationship to man.
Measurement is an anthropocentric process, because man is at its center. His scale of perception—the concretes he can directly grasp—is the base and the standard, to which everything else is related.
This brings us to Ayn Rand s momentous discovery: the connection between measurement and conceptualization. The two processes, she observes, have the same essential purpose and follow the same essential method.
In both cases, man identifies relationships among concretes. In both cases, he takes perceived concretes as the base, to which he relates everything else, including innumerable existents outside his ability to perceive. In both cases, the result is to bring the whole universe within the range of human knowledge. And now a further, crucial observation: in both cases, man relates concretes by the same method—by quantitative means. Both concept-formation and measurement involve the mind’s discovery of a mathematical relationship among concretes.
Ayn Rand’s seminal observation is that the similar concretes integrated by a concept differ from one another only quantitatively, only in the measurements of their characteristics. When we form a concept, therefore, our mental process consists in retaining the characteristics, but omitting their measurements.
As a simple example, Miss Rand analyzes the process of forming the concept “length.” A child observes that a match, a pencil, and a stick have a common attribute, length. The difference in this respect is only one of magnitude: the pencil is longer than the match and shorter than the stick. The three entities are the same in regard to the attribute, but differ in its measurement. What then does the child’s mind have to do in order to integrate the three instances into a single mental unit? It retains the attribute while omitting the varying measurements.
This is the process—performed by the mind wordlessly— which enables the child not only to integrate the first instances of “length” that he observes, but also to identify future instances, such as the length of a pin, a room, a street. All such instances are <commensurable, i.e., they can be related quantitatively to the same unit. They differ only in their specific measurements.
To omit measurements, Miss Rand stresses, does not mean to deny their existence. “It means that measurements exist, but are not specified. That measurements must exist is an essential part of the process. The principle is: the relevant measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity.” …
Miss Rand proceeds to develop the concept of the Conceptual Common Denominator (for short, the CCD). The CCD is “the characteristic(s) reducible to a unit of measurement, by means of which man differentiates two or more existents from other existents possessing it.” For example, one can differentiate tables from chairs or beds, because all these groups possess a commensurable characteristic, shape.
This CCD, in turn, determines what feature must be chosen as the distinguishing characteristic of the concept ’table”: tables are distinguished by a specific kind of shape, which represents a specific category or set of geometric measurements within the characteristic of shape—as against beds, e.g., whose shapes are encompassed by a different set of measurements. (Once the appropriate category has been specified, one completes the process of forming “table” by omitting the measurements of the individual table shapes within that category.)
The above is merely a passing mention of a complex topic, but it indicates from a new aspect the mathematical basis of concept-formation. Measurement is essential to both parts of the process. We can differentiate groups only by reference to a commensurable characteristic(s); and we can integrate into a unit only concretes whose differences are differences in measurement. No aspect of the process is capricious. In both its parts, concept-formation depends on our mind’s recognition of objective, mathematical relationships.
Ayn Rand’s formal definition of “concept” condenses into a sentence every key idea discussed above. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.” …
I want to turn to another question. Since the mind omits measurements whether a man knows it or not, one may ask, what is the practical purpose of the Objectivist theory of concepts?
In part, the answer is that philosophers have to know the mathematical aspects of concept-formation in order to define the rules to guide the conscious aspects of a thought process, the ones that are within men’s deliberate, volitional control.
In deeper part, however, the answer is that the theory of measurement-omission is essential to the validation of conceptual knowledge and, therefore, to the validation of reason itself. In the long run, a scientific civilization cannot survive without such validation. So long as men remain ignorant of their basic mental process, they have no answer to the charge, leveled by mysticism and skepticism alike, that their mental content is some form of revelation or invention detached from reality.
This kind of viewpoint can go into remission for a while, thanks to the remnants of a better past. Ultimately, however, if it is not burned out of men’s souls completely by an explicit philosophic theory, it becomes the most virulent of cancers; it metastasizes to every branch of philosophy and every department of a culture, as is now evident throughout the world. Then the best among men become paralyzed by doubt, while the others turn into the mindless hordes that march in any irrationalist era looking for someone to rule them.
What the Objectivist theory of concepts accomplishes practically is the defense of man’s mind on the level of fundamentals, along with the philosophic disarmament of its worst enemies. The key to this historic achievement lies in Ayn Rand’s demonstration that concepts are based on and do refer to the facts of reality.
A concept is not a product of arbitrary choice, whether personal or social; it has a basis in reality. But the basis is not a supernatural entity transcending concretes or a secret ingredient lurking within them. “Manness,” to keep to the same example, is men, the real men who exist, past, present, and future; it is men viewed from a certain perspective. …
The answer to the “problem of universals” lies in Ayn Rand’s discovery of the relationship between universals and mathematics. Specifically, the answer lies in the brilliant comparison she draws between concept-formation and algebra.
This is more than a mere comparison, as she shows, since the underlying method in both fields is the same.
The relationship of concepts to their constituent particulars is the same as the relationship of algebraic symbols to numbers. In the equation 2a = a + a, any number may be substituted for the symbol “a” without affecting the truth of the equation. For instance: 2 x 5 = 5 + 5, or: 2 x 5,000,000 = 5,000,000 + 5,000,000. In the same manner, by the same psycho-epistemological method, a concept is used as an algebraic symbol that stands for any of the arithmetical sequence of units it subsumes.
Let those who attempt to invalidate concepts by declaring that they cannot find “manness” in men, try to invalidate algebra by declaring that they cannot find “a-ness” in 5 or in 5,000,000.
The final step in concept-formation is definition. This step is essential to every concept except axiomatic concepts and concepts denoting sensations. …
A concept, however, is an integration that rests on a process of abstraction. Such a mental state is not automatically related to concretes, as is evident from the many obvious cases of “floating abstractions.” This is Ayn Rand’s term for concepts detached from existents, concepts that a person takes over from other men without knowing what specific units the concepts denote. A floating abstraction is not an integration of factual data; it is a memorized linguistic custom representing in the person’s mind a hash made of random concretes, habits, and feelings that blend imperceptibly into other hashes which are the content of other, similarly floating abstractions. The “concepts” of such a mind are not cognitive devices. They are parrotlike imitations of language backed in essence by patches of fog.
If a concept is to be a device of cognition, it must be tied to reality. It must denote units that one has methodically isolated from all others. This, in Ayn Rand’s words, is the basic function of a definition: “to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents.”
A proper definition is made of two parts, each of which follows from the nature of concept-formation. When we form a concept, we isolate its units by grasping a distinguishing characteristic. In the definition, this becomes what the medi- eval Aristotelians called the differentia.
Further, we can differentiate only on the basis of a wider characteristic, the CCD, which is shared both by the concretes we are isolating and by the concretes from which we are isolating them. In the definition, this gives rise to the genus. …
To give the standard example: if we conceptualize man by differentiating men from dogs, cats, and horses, then “animal” would be the genus—“rational,” the differentia.
Since definitions are a step in the process of conceptformation, all their features reflect the nature of that process. Another such feature is the fact that definitions, like concepts, are contextual. …
At any stage of development, from child to sage and from savage to scientist, man can make conceptual differentiations and integrations only on the basis of prior knowledge, the specific, limited knowledge available to him at that stage. Man’s mind functions on the basis of a certain context. The context, states Miss Rand, “is the entire field of a mind’s awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.” …
Definitions are contextual. Their purpose is to differentiate certain units from all other existents in a given context of knowledge. At an early stage, when one has made relatively few discriminations, a simple, obvious characteristic may achieve this purpose. Later, when one discovers new aspects of reality, that same characteristic may no longer serve to differentiate the units; the initial definition must then be revised. Our knowledge grows in stages, and we organize at each stage only the facts that are available….
When a definition is contextually revised, the new definition does not contradict the old one. …
Definitions are determined by the facts of reality—within the context of one’s knowledge. Both aspects of this statement are crucial: reality and the context of knowledge; existence and consciousness.
A further rule of definition is necessary to clarify fully the concept of an “essential” characteristic: the rule of fundamentally. This rule applies when the units of a concept are observed to have more than one distinctive characteristic. The definition must then state the feature that most significantly distinguishes the units; it must state the fundamental. “Fun- damental” here means the characteristic responsible for all the rest of the units’ distinctive characteristics, or at least for a greater number of these than any other characteristic is. The definitional principle is: wherever possible, an essential characteristic must be a fundamental.
For example, one could not define “man” as an entity possessing a thumb, even if this feature were distinctive to man. If men had no thumbs but were otherwise the same as they are now, the species would still have to be conceptualized and defined; there would still be profound differences between man and other creatures. When one defines by fundamentals, however—e.g., when one defines “man” by reference to “rationality”—the definition identifies the root of the largest set of man’s distinctive characteristics. It thus names that which most significantly sets man apart. It names that which “makes” man man, i.e., that which underlies and carries with it the greatest number of distinctively human characteristics.
For a consciousness to extend its grasp beyond a mere handful of concretes, therefore—for it to be able to deal with an enormous totality, like all tables, or all men, or the universe as a whole—one capacity is indispensable. It must have the capacity to compress its content, i.e., to economize the units required to convey that content. This is the basic function of concepts. Their function, in Ayn Rand’s words, is “to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units. . . .”
A concept integrates and thus condenses a group of percepts into a single mental whole. It reduces an unlimited number of perceptual units to one new unit, which subsumes them all. It thereby expands profoundly the amount of material that a person can retain and deal with cognitively….
Philosophers often say that concepts are time savers. It is much more instructive to say that concepts are space savers. …
The remark that “A picture is worth a thousand words” has many valid applications. Ayn Rand’s epistemology, however, offers us a different perspective. Her theory of concepts teaches, in effect, that “A word is worth a thousand pictures.”
Conceptualization, she sums up, “is a method of expanding man’s consciousness by reducing the number of its content’s units—a systematic means to an unlimited integration of cognitive data.”
The principle of unit-economy is essential not only to the field of concepts, but also, as one might expect, to the field of mathematics.
Numbers have a function similar to that of concepts. When you the reader count a group of entities, each step of the count reduces the amount of material you need to hold in the focus of your consciousness. You grasp the total at each step in the form of a single mental unit: “one,” then 44two,” then “three,” and so on. Without counting, a quantity such as “ten” could be held in mind only in the form of ten units, like this: //////////—which you could hardly distinguish from IIIllllll or ///////////….
The same principle is evident in higher mathematics. An algebraic equation, for example, condenses pages of numerical calculations, reducing them to a single brief formula…
According to Objectivism, epistemology is necessary for practical purposes, as a guide to man in the proper use of his conceptual faculty. We are ready to concretize this claim. We can now begin to identify the rules men must follow in their thinking if knowledge, rather than error or delusion, is their goal.
These rules can be condensed into one general principle: thinking, to be valid, must adhere to reality …
Conceptformation and use is precisely the realm that is not automatic or infallible, but volitional. In order to conceptualize, a man must expend effort; he must engage in the kind of mental work that no stimulus can necessitate. He must struggle to relate, connect, process an ever-growing range of data—and he must learn to do it correctly. …
Different views of the nature of concepts lead to different views of the nature of cognition. They lead to different answers to the central question of epistemology: what is knowledge and how does man acquire it?
The objective approach to concepts leads to the view that, beyond the perceptual level, knowledge is the grasp of an object through an active, reality-based process chosen by the subject. …
The method of measurement-omission, being inherent in the conceptual faculty, is utilized by man whether he knows it or not. What we are seeking to identify here is a method to guide the conscious, volitional aspects of concept-formation and use. …
For a volitional, conceptual consciousness, a method of knowing reality is both necessary and possible. To define such a method, Ayn Rand holds, is the purpose of epistemology.
The method must reflect two factors: the facts of external reality and the nature of man’s consciousness. It must reflect the first, because consciousness is not a self-contained entity; it is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. The method must reflect the second factor, because consciousness has identity; the mind is not blank receptivity; it is a certain kind of integrating mechanism, and it must act accordingly.
Now we must proceed to the next question: if objectivity requires a method of cognition, what is it? The answer in a word is: logic. Logic is a volitional consciousness’s method of conforming to reality. It is the method of reason.
Ayn Rand did not discover logic; Aristotle did. But Ayn Rand’s definition covers the essence of the subject: “Logic is the art of noncontradictory identification.” The two key terms are “identification” and “noncontradictory.”
Knowledge, we have said, is the “grasp” of an object. To grasp, we must now add, is to identify, i.e., to discover in some form the identity of that which exists. On the perceptual level, one learns only that an entity is, not what it is. Even so, perception is a form of apprehending identity : to perceive an entity is to perceive that it is something.
The ability to define that identity in explicit terms is the next stage; this is the task of conceptual cognition, expressed in every question the mind can ask. Every type of question reduces to: “What is it?”
For example, “Why did a certain event occur?” means: “What is the nature of the cause?” “How?” means “What is the process?” “Where?” means “What is the place?” Consciousness is a faculty of discovering identity.
This is so because existence has primacy; it sets the terms and consciousness obeys. To be is to have a nature; that is the law of existence—which defines thereby the function of consciousness: to discover the nature of that which is. Thus Ayn Rand’s historic formulation, which brings together in six words the fundamental principle of being and its expression in the field of cognition: “Existence is Identity; Consciousness is Identification.”
By thus setting the task of consciousness, the law of identity acts as a bridge linking existence and consciousness, or metaphysics and epistemology… the law tells man: identifications must be noncontradictory….
There is, Aristotle observed, one fundamental kind of error possible to man, which invalidates any thought process committing it: the error of holding that a thing is A and non-A, that it is and is not; the error of holding a contradiction. A contradiction is a negation of identity and therefore of re- ality; to be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect is to be nothing. “To arrive at a contradiction,” writes Ayn Rand, “is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”
Aristotle’s law of contradiction states the above as a formal principle of thought: nothing can be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect. This is not a different fact from the law of identity. It is a corollary of the latter, a restatement of it for the purpose of guiding human cognition.
Here is a real-life example, taken from A Theory of Justice, the well-known book by Harvard philosopher John Rawls.
It is perfectly just, Rawls maintains, for society to sacrifice the men of intelligence and creative ability—to seize their products and redistribute them to the world s losers—because, he says, nobody worked to achieve his own gray matter; nobody earned his brain, which is a mere gift from nature.
This monstrous theory drops the context of the concept “earn.”
This concept was formed initially to distinguish between two groups of concretes. It was formed to identify men who, having been born with a healthy brain, choose in due course to use it and satisfy their desires by their own effort (they “earn” what they get), as against men who, though in many instances born with an equally healthy brain, stagnate mentally and then live as parasites on the effort of others. For this distinction, there is ample basis in reality; there is none for any alleged distinction between men who “work to achieve” their brain and men who do not. There is no such thing as “working to achieve one’s brain.” Who is working and by what means? If this sort of action were included in the concept “earning,” it would not be a valid concept at all, but a fantasy.
Rawls’s illogic is evident. He takes a concept formed to organize a certain field of concretes, then drops the field and applies the term, as though it were a self-sufficient, non-relational entity, to a situation in which it has no application. The result is the destruction of the concept, its dissociation from reality. …
nce an essential rule of contextual cognition: always hold the context. Or, to put the point negatively: context must never be dropped. Out-of-context claims or proposals, like out-of-context quotations or concepts, are by their nature invalidated. Whenever one treats a conclusion as an atom unrelated to the rest of cognition, one thereby detaches the conclusion, along with the thought process involving it, from reality. If one drops context, one drops the means of distinguishing between truth and fantasy; anyone can then claim to prove anything, however absurd—just as, out of context, anyone can. g anybody to mean anything.
As an example, consider Neville Chamberlain’s argument in favor of appeasing Hitler after the Munich conference of 1938.
Mr. Chamberlain treated Hitler’s demand as an isolated fact to be dealt with by an isolated response; to do this, he had to drop an immense amount of knowledge. He did not relate Hitler’s demand to the knowledge already gained about the nature of Nazism; he did not ask for causes. He did not relate the demand to his knowledge of similar demands voiced by aggressor nations and even local bullies throughout history; he did not ask for principles. He did not relate his own policy to mankind’s knowledge of the results of appeasement; despite ample indications, he did not ask whether his capitulation, besides satisfying Hitler, would also embolden him, increase his resources, hearten his allies, undermine his opponents, and thus achieve the opposite of its stated purpose. Chamberlain was not concerned with any aspect of a complex situation beyond the single point he chose to consider in isolation: that he would be removing Hitler’s immediate frustration.
Deeper issues are involved in this example. Chamberlain was proposing a course of action while ignoring the field that defines the principles of proper action, ethics. He did not ask whether his course comported with the virtues of honor, courage, integrity—and, if not, what consequences this por- tended. He dropped the fact that foreign-policy decisions, like all human actions, fall within a wider context defined by moral philosophy (and by several other subjects as well). The prime minister wanted “peace at any price.” The price included the evasion of political philosophy, history, psychology, ethics, and more. The result was war.
A context-dropper believes that he can understand and alter one element (such as Hitler’s dissatisfaction of the moment) within a network of interrelated factors, while leaving everything else unseen and unaffected. In fact, however, a change in one element redounds throughout the network. Every proposal and every idea, therefore, must be judged in the light of the total picture, i.e., of the full context…
What is the full context of an idea? All knowledge is interrelated; every element of it is potentially relevant to the rest. The context one must hold, therefore, is not a mere fragment or subdivision of one’s knowledge, however extensive, but: everything known at that stage of development, the sum of available knowledge. This is the only way to ensure that one’s knowledge is a sum, i.e., a consistent whole. Such consistency is not a given, but an achievement, which requires a methodical, effort-demanding process. …
Since consciousness is finite and limited (the crow epistemology), his mind cannot compare old contents and new in a flash of synoptic insight; it cannot hold in a single frame of awareness all of his relevant former ideas and the new item being considered. There is only one alternative: a man must work to integrate a new idea. Since a conceptual consciousness is an integrating mechanism, it demands the integration of all its contents.
One step at a time, a man must relate a new item to his previous ideas…
Context-keeping is what Rawls and Chamberlain, in different ways, conspicuously did not try to do. But you the reader must do it, if knowledge is your goal—and, if the method is new to you, you should start now. Every new idea you read in these pages should represent the beginning, not the end, of a thought process; if the idea sounds reasonable, you should give it not merely a nod of approval, but hours of assiduous mental work.
For example: suppose that, having accepted the altruist ethics, you then hear Ayn Rand’s theory of egoism and find it appealing. You must then ask:
“What arguments, if any, did I have for my previous view? Can I answer them? What arguments are offered for the Objectivist view? Do they stand up?” If you decide for egoism, you must then explicitly reject altruism, along with all the premises that led you to it and all the conclusions to which it leads, as far as you can pursue the trails. If you accepted altruism as the word of God, for instance, ask yourself: “What does my new ethics do to my view of the basis of ethics? What does it do to other ideas I have accepted as God’s word—for example in regard to abortion, sex, evolution? What does all this imply for the belief in divine revelation or in God? Which philosophy has the better case—theism or atheism?” And, in the other direction: “How should I vote hereafter? What political system is consistent with an ethics of egoism? How does it relate to my present political views? Is it practicable?” And so on.
The opposite of the policy of integration is exemplified by the concrete-bound mentality, to use Ayn Rand’s term. This is the man who, as far as possible to a conceptual being, establishes no connections among his mental contents. To him, every issue is simply a new concrete, unrelated to what came before, to abstract principles, or to any context.
On Monday, such a man may decide that taxes are too high; on Tuesday, that the government should provide more welfare services; on Wednesday, that inflation must be stopped—never thinking that these points are connected and that he is daily contradicting himself. (More government services, for exam- ple, mean higher taxes and/or inflation.) This kind of man is ripe for any demagogic proposal, however absurd, because to him the context that would reveal the absurdity is unreal.
A somewhat better case is the man who does integrate his mental contents, but only within an arbitrarily delimited square or compartment. An economist, for instance, may eagerly relate a new economic idea to other ideas within his field, but refuse to consider its implications for related fields (such as politics, ethics, history) or their implications for his own. “That’s not my concern,” such a man characteristically says about anything but his own specialty; “that’s somebody else’s domain.” Ayn Rand calls this type of nonintegration compartmentalization.
Compartmentalization is an improper form of specialization. It consists not merely in specializing, but in regarding one’s specialty as a dissociated fiefdom, unrelated to the rest of human knowledge. In fact, however, all knowledge is interconnected. To cut off a single field—any field—from the rest of cognition is to drop the vast context which makes that field possible and which anchors it to reality. The ultimate result, as with any failure of integration, is floating abstractions and self-contradiction. A simple example is the conservative economists who scornfully dismiss philosophy, then advocate the profit motive in economics and the Sermon on the Mount in church.
In today’s chaos, every advance of knowledge is also a threat; it raises the possibility, even the likelihood, of some unforeseeable contradiction erupting somewhere. Hence the widespread bromide, which otherwise would be inexplicable, that the more you learn, the more confused you become and the less you know.
If you avail yourself of the power of a rational epistemology, you do not have to fear new data or new ideas. Every new item you integrate into the fabric of your knowledge will mean that much more fact on your side, that much more weight to your conclusions, that much more conviction to the total of your cognition. By this method, you will soon discover what, in logic, should have been the popular wisdom: that the more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.
Knowledge, therefore, has a hierarchical structure. … A hierarchy of knowledge means a body of concepts and conclusions ranked in order of logical dependence, one upon another, according to each item’s distance from the base of the structure. The base is the perceptual data with which cognition begins. …
The epistemological responsibility imposed on man by the fact that knowledge is contextual is the need of integration. The responsibility imposed by the fact that knowledge is hierarchical is: the need of reduction. …
Men, however, can and often do try to move to higher levels of cognition without properly understanding the intermediate material. They do so through several causes, such as impatience, anti-effort, or simple error. The most common cause is intellectual dependence; many men are content to take over the concepts and conclusions of other people without understanding the steps that led to them.
Such men attempt to function on the higher levels of a complex structure without having established the requisite base; their mental activity consists in building confusion on confusion, instead of knowledge on knowledge. In such minds, the chain relating higher-level content to perceptual reality is broken; these individuals’ conceptual structure, or semblance of one, has no grounding; it is detached from facts and from cognition.
Context-keeping, as we know, is required if men’s ideas are to be connected to reality. When the context is itself hierarchical, the successive levels of its structure are the connecting links. To keep the context in such a case is to identify and retain these links. This is where the process of reduction is necessary.
Reduction is the means of connecting an advanced knowledge to reality by traveling backward through the hierarchical structure involved, i.e., in the reverse order of that required to reach the knowledge.
“Reduction” is the process of identifying in logical sequence the intermediate steps that relate a cognitive item to perceptual data. Since there are options in the detail of a learning process, one need not always retrace the steps one initially happened to take. What one must retrace is the essential logical structure.
Such retracing is a requirement of objectivity. Man’s only direct contact with reality is the data of sense. These, therefore, are the standard of objectivity, to which all other cognitive material must be brought back.
As an example of reduction, let me take the concept “friend”
As an example of reduction, let me take the concept “friend,” mentioned in the last chapter, and identify some of the intermediate concepts linking it to perceptual reality. The method consists in asking repeatedly: what does one have to know in order to reach and understand a given step?
A baby or an animal can perceive two friends, can watch them talking, laughing, going out together, yet not reach the least idea of their “friendship.” Something more than perceptual data is necessary in this case. What?
We must begin with a definition. A “friend” designates a person in a certain kind of human relationship, as against an acquaintance, a stranger, an enemy. In essence, the relationship involves mutual knowledge, esteem, and affection; as a result, the individuals take pleasure in each other’s company, communicate with a high degree of intimacy, and display mutual benevolence, each sincerely wishing the other well. To identify so complex a relationship, one must have formed many earlier concepts, including “man,” “knowledge,” and “pleasure.” Let us focus here on a central element, “esteem.”
Again we ask: on what does this concept depend? “Esteem” designates a certain kind of favorable appraisal; one man “esteems” another when he recognizes in him qualities that he estimates as being of significant (moral) value. To grasp such a concept, therefore, one must first know many concepts that come earlier, including, above all, the concept “value.” (One need not know the abstraction “value” as such. Some specification relevant to the concept “esteem,” i.e., some identification of moral value, such as the concepts of “good” and “evil,” would be sufficient here. But for simplicity we may neglect this point.)
The same root is presupposed by the concept “affection.” “Affection” is an emotional response that derives from esteem, i.e., from the recognition of one’s values in the character of another. If one had not yet reached the concept “value” in any terms, he might well feel something positive for another person, but he would be unable to identify the feeling as “affection.”
Now we must ask: how does one reduce the concept “value”? “Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. What earlier concepts does this presuppose? Among other things, an individual must first learn that man pursues objects, i.e., he must grasp the concept “purpose”; and he must learn that man has the power to select his actions and purposes, i.e., he must grasp the concept “choice.” Without these concepts, a child cannot form any normative abstractions, such as “good” and “evil,” “desirable” and “undesirable,” “value” and “disvalue.” He cannot form or understand abstractions intended to guide his faculty of choice before grasping that he has such a faculty.
We have still not reached the perceptual level, but we are approaching it now. One can observe men pursuing objects— moving to a table in order to eat a meal, lying down on a bed in order to sleep, and so on—although one cannot conceptu- alize “purpose” until the elementary entities and actions involved (including certain processes of consciousness) have been conceptualized. And one can identify the act of choice introspectively, once one has processed enough existential data to have reached the stage of forming and distinguishing introspective concepts. The final steps backward, therefore, which I will not rehearse, do bring us eventually to first-level concepts, such as “table,” “bed,” “man.” At this point, the reduction has been completed. It ends when we say: “And by this term—e.g., ‘man’—I mean this,” as we directly point to the entity.
Here are the elements of the logical chain we have been identifying, this time in ascending order: “Men have to choose among purposes by means of their values, which fact generates certain kinds of mutual estimates and emotions, including esteem and affection, which make possible a certain kind of human relation, friendship.” …
Or if a man tells you: 41 disagree with your ideas, I object to your actions, I disapprove of your associates, but we’re still friends, because I’m criticizing you for your own good and I like you just the same”—a claim that is all too common, especially among relatives—you would immediately reply: “If you reject everything important about me, how can you like me? For what attributes? What meaning does friendship’ have once it is detached from the concept of ‘values’?” Again, if you know the reduction, you can easily spot the error.
Errors of this kind are widespread. The fallacy involved was identified for the first time by Ayn Rand. She called it the fallacy of the ’stolen concept.” The fallacy consists in using a higher-level concept while denying or ignoring its hierarchical roots, i.e., one or more of the earlier concepts on which it logically depends. This is the intellectual equivalent of standing on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper while dynamiting the first thirty-nine. The higherlevel concept—’friendship,” in the above examples—is termed ’stolen,” because the individual involved has no logical right to use it. He is an epistemological parasite; he seizes, without understanding, a term created by other men who did observe the necessary hierarchical structure. The parallel to a parasite in matter, who seizes wealth created by others, is obvious.
The reason stolen concepts are so prevalent is that most people (and most philosophers) have no idea of the “roots” of a concept. In practice, they treat every concept as a primary, i.e., as a first-level abstraction; thus they tear the concept from any place in a hierarchy and thereby detach it from reality. Thereafter, its use is governed by caprice or unthinking habit, with no objective guidelines for the mind to follow. The result is confusion, contradiction, and the conversion of language into verbiage.
The antidote is the process of reduction. In regard to higher-level concepts, reduction completes the job of definition. … Reduction is what takes a person from the initial definition through the definitions of the next lower level and then of the next, until he reaches the direct perception of reality. This is the only means by which the initial definition can be made fully clear. …
Proof is a form of reduction. The conclusion to be proved is a higher-level cognition, whose link to reality lies in the premises, these in turn eventually lead back to the perceptual level. Proof is thus a form of retracing the hierarchical steps of the learning process. (As with conceptual reduction, so with proof: the process identifies not the optional variants, but the essential links in the chain, the necessary logical structure relating a mental content to observational data.)
Proof is not a process of deriving a conclusion from arbitrary premises or even from arbitrarily selected true premises. Proof is the process of establishing a conclusion by identifying the proper hierarchy of premises. In proving a conclusion, one traces backward the order of logical dependence, terminating with the perceptually given. It is only because of this requirement that logic is the means of validating a conclusion objectively.
For example: if someone were to infer a given man’s mortality from the fact that there is a huge funeral industry in every country, this would not be a proper proof. The funeral industry is a consequence of our knowledge of human mortality, not a precondition of such knowledge. The standard Socrates syllogism, by contrast, does validate its conclusion. It derives Socrates’ mortality from a truly antecedent generalization (which in turn integrates countless observations of men and of other living organisms). …
Let me caution you to apply the method in essential terms only. Trying to work backward through every intermediate cognition involved would be excruciating and pointless. Instead, seek at first to reach an overview of the major connecting links, on the pattern of our treatment of “friend.” Thereafter, should it prove necessary, you can fill in further nuances.
A “razor” is a principle that slashes off a whole category of false and/or useless ideas. Rand’s Razor is addressed to anyone who enters the field of philosophy. It states: name your primaries. Identify your starting points, including the concepts you take to be irreducible, and then establish that these are objective axioms. Put negatively: do not begin to philosophize in midstream. Do not begin with some derivative concept or issue, while ignoring its roots, however much such issue interests you. Philosophical knowledge, too, is hierarchical….
It is as futile to uphold true ideas while ignoring hierarchy as to uphold false ones. Contrary to today’s conservatives, for example, it is not an axiom that man has the right to property. The right to property is a consequence of man’s right to life; which right we can establish only if we know the nature and value of man’s life; which conclusion presupposes, among other things, that objective value-judgments are possible; which presupposes that objective knowledge is possible; which depends on a certain relationship between man’s mind and reality, i.e., between consciousness and existence. If a thinker does not know and count on this kind of structure, he can neither defend property rights nor define the concept nor apply it correctly. This is one of the reasons why today’s conservatives are ineffectual. …
This notion is impossible to an Objectivist.24 A theory is an identification of the facts of reality and/or of guidelines for human action. A good theory is a true theory, one that recognizes all the relevant facts, including the facts of human nature, and integrates them into a noncontradictory whole. Such a theory has to work in practice. If a man’s course of action, thanks to his scrupulous use of logic, derives from a study of reality, then that course must be in harmony with reality. If so, what would prevent it from succeeding?
The theory-practice dichotomy is itself a theory; its source is a breach between concepts and percepts. Given such a breach, thought comes to be viewed as pertaining to one world (the world of Platonic Forms, or of Kantian “phenom- ena,” or of linguistic constructs), while action is viewed as pertaining to an opposite world (the world of concretes, or of things-in-themselves, or of empirical data). In this set-up, one expects an idea to be schizophrenic. One expects it to be good in one world, but not in the other, good in theory, but not in practice. …
The axioms of philosophy, however, cannot be sundered. There is no consciousness without existence and no knowledge of existence without consciousness. The advocate of objectivity grasps this fundamental fact. He recognizes that a volitional relationship between consciousness and existence is the essence of conceptual cognition. He alone, therefore, is able to uphold the primacy of existence, the efficacy of human consciousness, and the harmony of mind and body. The practical result of this kind of approach, though it was suggested briefly by the Renaissance, lies largely in the future.
I shall conclude by quoting from the final paragraphs of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:
No one would argue (at least, not yet) that since man’s body has to process the food he eats, no objective rules of proper nutrition can ever be discovered—that 4 4 true nutrition” has to consist of absorbing some ineffable substance without the participation of a digestive system, but since man is incapable of 4’true feeding,” nutrition is a subjective matter open to his whim, and it is merely a social convention that forbids him to eat poisonous mushrooms.
No one would argue that since nature does not tell man automatically what to eat—as it does not tell him automatically how to form concepts—he should abandon the illusion that there is a right or wrong way of eating (or he should revert to the safety of the time when he did not have to trust” objective evidence, but could rely on dietary laws prescribed by a supernatural power). . . .
No one would argue that man eats bread rather than stones purely as a matter of convenience.”
It is time to grant to man’s consciousness the same cognitive respect one grants to his body—i.e., the same objectivity. …
Ayn Rand is the first thinker to identify explicitly the fact that logic, including the recognition of context and hierarchy, is the method of achieving objectivity. This is the knowledge that is necessary to convert objectivity from elusive ideal to normal actuality. It is this knowledge that enables a man not only to base his conclusions on reality, but to do it consciously and methodically—to know that he is doing it and by what means—i.e., to be in control of the process of cognition.
“Reason,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, is “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.” Or, as we may now expand it: reason is the faculty that enables man to discover the nature of existents—by virtue of its power to condense sensory information in accor- dance with the requirements of an objective mode of cognition. Or: reason is the faculty that organizes perceptual units in conceptual terms by following the principles of logic. This formulation highlights the three elements essential to the faculty: its data, percepts; its form, concepts; its method, logic. …
“Why should I accept reason?” means: “Why should I accept reality?” The answer is that existence exists, and only existence exists. Man’s choice is either to accept reason or to consign his consciousness and life to a void.
One cannot seek a proof that reason is reliable, because reason is the faculty of proof; one must accept and use reason in any attempt to prove anything. But, using reason, one can identify its relationship to the facts of reality and thereby validate the faculty.
A feeling or emotion is a response to an object one perceives (or imagines), such as a man, an animal, an event. The object by itself, however, has no power to invoke a feeling in the observer. It can do so only if he supplies two intellectual elements, which are necessary conditions of any emotion.
First, the person must know in some terms what the object is. He must have some understanding or identification of it (whether true or false, specific or generalized, explicit or implicit). Otherwise, to him, the object is nothing; it is a mere cognitive blank, to which no one can respond.
Second, the person must evaluate the object. He must conclude that it is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, for his values or against them. …
When, as a college teacher, I would reach the topic of emotions in class, my standard procedure was to open the desk, take out a stack of examination booklets, and, without any explanations, start distributing them. Consternation invariably broke loose, with cries such as “You never said we were having a test today!” and “It isn’t fair!” Whereupon I would take back the booklets and ask: “How many can explain the emotion that just swept over you? Is it an inexplicable primary, a quirk of your glands, a message from God or the id?” The answer was obvious. The booklets, to most of them, meant failure on an exam, a lower grade in the course, a blot on their transcript, i.e., bad news. On this one example, even the dullest students grasped with alacrity that emotions do have causes and that their causes are the things men think.
There are four steps in the generation of an emotion:
perccption (or imagination), identification, evaluation, response.
Normally, only the first and last of these are conscious. The two intellectual steps, identification and evaluation, occur as a rule without the need of conscious awareness and with lightninglike rapidity….
What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are not only largely subconscious, but also inconsistent. Men have the ability to accept contradictions without knowing it. This leads to the appearance of a conflict between thought and feelings.
Reason is a faculty of awareness; its function is to perceive that which exists by organizing observational data. And reason is a volitional faculty; it has the power to direct its own actions and check its conclusions, the power to maintain a certain relationship to the facts of reality.
Emotion, by contrast, is a faculty not of perception, but of reaction to one’s perceptions. This kind of faculty has no power of observation and no volition; it has no means of independent access to reality, no means to guide its own course, and no capacity to monitor its own relationship to facts.
Emotions are automatic consequences of a mind’s past conclusions, however that mind has been used or misused in the process of reaching them. … It has no power to question its course or to check its roots against reality. Only man’s volitional, existence-oriented faculty has such power. …
Even if its intellectual root happens to be true, a feeling cannot know this fact; it cannot judge cognitive status. Only the mind can decide questions of truth. …
Now we can answer the question: is reason man’s only means of knowledge? The answer requires one to grasp that the only other means of knowledge ever proposed is feeling or emotion….
If a man seeks to think rationally, he must grasp the distinction between reason and emotion. He must learn, then methodically observe, the difference between thought and feeling—between logic and desire—between percepts and concepts on the one hand, and hopes, wishes, hates, loves, fears on the other. By continuous self-monitoring, he must ensure that during any cognitive activity, feeling is set to the side—that it is not allowed to direct the course of the inquiry or affect its outcome. A rational inquiry is one directed not by emotion, but by thought, one that accepts as evidence not any species of passion, but only provable, objective fact.
The concept of “truth” identifies a type of relationship between a proposition and the facts of reality. “Truth,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, is “the recognition of reality.” In essence, this is the traditional correspondence theory of truth: there is a reality independent of man, and there are certain conceptual products, propositions, formulated by human consciousness. When one of these products corresponds to reality, when it constitutes a recognition of fact, then it is true. Conversely, when the mentar content does not thus correspond, when it constitutes not a recognition of reality but a contradiction of it, then it is false. …
The true is identified by reference to a body of evidence; it is pronounced “true” because it can be integrated without contradiction into a total context. The false is identified by the same means; it is pronounced “false” because it contradicts the evidence and/or some aspect of the wider context. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence or context; neither term, therefore—“true” or “false”—can be applied to it.
I want to elaborate here on a venerable rule of logic: the rule that the onus of proof is on him who asserts the positive, and that one must not attempt to prove a negative.
The onus of proof rule states the following. If a person asserts that a certain entity exists (such as God, gremlins, a disembodied soul), he is required to adduce evidence supporting his claim. If he does so, one must either accept his conclusion, or disqualify his evidence by showing that he has misinterpreted certain data. But if he offers no supporting evidence, one must dismiss his claim without argumentation, because in this situation argument would be futile. It is impossible to “prove a negative,” meaning by the term: prove the nonexistence of an entity for which there is no evidence.
The reason that Objectivism rejects agnosticism should now be clear. This term applies not only to the question of God, but also to many other issues, such as ESP, reincarnation, demonic possession, astrology, the Arab claim of an in- ternational Zionist conspiracy, and the Marxist claim that the state will wither away. In regard to all such issues and claims, of which there are an unlimited number today, the agnostic is the man who says: “We can’t prove that the claim is true. But we can’t prove that it is false, either. So the only proper conclusion is: we don’t know; no one knows; perhaps no one ever can know.”
Agnosticism is not simply the pleading of ignorance. It is the enshrinement of ignorance. It is the philosophic viewpoint that demands such pleading—in regard to effusions that are disconnected from evidence. The viewpoint poses as being fair, balanced, impartial. As should now be obvious, however, it is rife with fallacies and with prejudice.
The agnostic treats arbitrary claims as matters properly open to consideration, discussion, evaluation. He allows that it is “possible” that these claims are “true,” thereby applying cognitive descriptions to verbiage that is at war with cognition. He demands proof of a negative: it’s up to you, he declares, to show that there are no demons, or that your sex life is not a result of your previous incarnation as a pharaoh of ancient Egypt. …
In considering any issue, never permit yourself one minute in the quicksands of a baseless “I don’t know.” Instead, establish first that the issue is related to the realm of evidence and thus deserves consideration. Then study the evidence, weighing the possibilities in accordance with the principles of logic. Then make up your mind and take a stand. …
In this inquiry, one is not concerned to discover what is right for man or wrong, desirable or undesirable, good or evil. A view of man is a step on the road to ethics, but the view itself does not include value-judgments. The concern here is a purely factual question: what is the essence of human nature? …
The starting point in the present inquiry, therefore, is the fact that man is a certain kind of living organism. What is an organism? More specifically, what is its essential, distinctive mode of action?
The actions of a living organism are self-generated and goal-directed. They are actions initiated by the organism for the sake of achieving an end. … An animal, for example, pursues food, water, shelter; a desk or a pebble pursues nothing. …
Living action is goal-directed action; it consists in an entity’s taking in raw material from the environment, then (through the activities of metabolism) in using the material for the sake of growth to maturity, self-maintenance, and selfrepair. …
Most living entities have no power of choice. This kind of organism functions only as its nature requires, without any volition or even any awareness of its behavior (e.g., the actions of a plant or the internal bodily processes of an animal). But what its nature requires is that, within the limit of its capacities, it act to sustain itself. …
Living organisms can (and must) act to pursue goals because an organism, unlike an inanimate object, faces the alternative of life or death.
“The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional,” Ayn Rand writes in a crucial passage,
As Ayn Rand puts this point, life is motion, a definite course of motion; if the motion is defaulted on or fails, what ensues is the antithesis of life: stillness, which is the essence of death.5 Death is the irreversible cessation of vital processes. Leaving aside the disintegration that follows it, death is a state that does not involve or require action. To achieve it, you need simply refrain from doing anything: lie down, do not move, do not eat, call a halt to the vital activities within your control (and, if you are in a hurry, to the pumping of your lungs and the beating of your heart); nothing else is required.
The fact of life—of conditional, goal-directed entities— has profound philosophic significance. It is a key to the nature of man and, as we will see in the next chapter, a necessary and sufficient condition of the existence of values. I must, therefore, stress the reality of the fact. For Objectivism, the distinction between the animate and the inanimate is fundamental. …
In this profound sense, Ayn Rand is unanswerably right when she says that a living organism, but not matter as such, is destructible. The one can become inanimate; the other already is.
It is with this difference—I am tempted to say this “life-and-death” difference—that the study of human nature begins.
Every living organism has a means of survival.
Plants survive by means of purely physical functions. They acquire the objects they seek, such as food, water, and sunlight, from the soil and air in which they grow, without the need of awareness. For every form of life above this level, however, consciousness is the basic means of survival.
The lower conscious species (e.g., jellyfish or flatworms) appear to have only the faculty of sensation and act by responding to isolated, momentary stimuli; their guide to sustaining their life is the pleasure-pain mechanism built into their bodies.
The higher animals grasp and deal with the world of entities (and are able to form automatic perceptual associations). …
Man, too, experiences the sensations of pleasure and pain, but he is a conceptual being. The range of actions required for his survival is therefore the widest of all. His kind of consciousness makes possible and necessary a vast new repertoire of vital skills. Unlike sensations and percepts, however, concepts and their products are not automatic or infallible. …
Man cannot function or survive by the guidance of mere sensations or percepts. A conceptual being cannot initiate action unless he knows the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot pursue a goal unless he identifies what his goal is and how to achieve it.
No species can survive by regressing to the methods of more primitive organisms.… A sensation of hunger,” Ayn Rand observes,
The goods we need, paraphrasing a line from Atlas Shrugged, are not here. They must be created by human action. They must be produced.
In order to produce, man must discover the types of materials available in nature, the potentialities they possess, the laws of their behavior, the techniques by which they can be reshaped into the sustenance of human survival. All this involves a special kind of knowledge—the kind that integrates past data with present observations in a form enabling its possessor to plan long-range and shape the course of his future.
The conclusion is evident. Epistemology tells us that reason is man’s faculty of knowing reality. When conjoined with the observed fact that man is an organism who survives by means of his knowledge (and consequent action), the inference must be that reason is man’s basic tool of survival.
In the Objectivist view, the proposition that man is the rational animal does not mean that men always follow reason; many do not. Nor does it mean merely that man alone possesses the faculty of reason. It means that this faculty is a fundamental of human nature, because man is the organism who survives by its use. …
Most people know about the backbreaking labor, the rampant superstition, the poverty, the sweeping plagues of that era of faith called the Dark and Middle Ages. Even in the seventeenth century, life expectancy in many Western Euro- pean areas was still under twenty-five years. As late as the eighteenth century, nine out of ten working Americans were working full-time on the production and distribution of food.
Today, an enormously greater quantity and higher quality of food is made available by only one out of five working Americans, leaving 80 percent of the labor force free to create the previously unimaginable wealth of our era. Today, you can see the prosperity, the safety, the lifespan that America and the entire West enjoys, thanks to a cause that everyone has the means to know, but few choose to acknowledge.
You can also see how men elsewhere endure, suffer, and die in their youth. They die not only in war, but in peacetime, from starvation and disease. They die this way as the norm, the expected, the accepted—throughout the nonindustrial- ized, nonscientific, nonrational rest of the world.
Reason is man s tool of survival. From the simplest necessity to the highest abstraction, summarizes The Fountainhead, “from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.”
Reason is an attribute of the individual, There is no such thing as a collective mind or brain. Thought is a process that must be initiated and directed at each step by the choice of one man, the thinker. Only an individual qua individual can perceive, abstract, define, connect. The same observations which reveal that consciousness is an attribute of certain living organisms reveal that it belongs to separate organisms. And, in regard to man’s consciousness, observation is what reveals that it is volitional.
Entity, as we have seen, is the primary “category.” Only entities can act— and to be an entity is to be an individual. A group of men is a derivative phenomenon; it is not an entity, but a collection of them, an aggregate of individuals. “All the functions of body and spirit,” writes Ayn Rand, “are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.” One cannot think for or through another person any more than one can breathe or digest food for him. Each man’s brain, like his lungs and stomach, is his alone to use.
Men can learn from other men, an ability that is invaluable in the struggle for survival. But learning is an active process; others do not implant their knowledge in a newcomer by surgery or sorcery. …
The present discussion, let me repeat, is not concerned with value-judgments. The point here is not that men should be independent or individualistic. The point is that the collectivists from Plato to Dewey are wrong, wrong on the deepest level, wrong metaphysically. The fragment or cell about which they write does not exist. Only man exists, man the rational being. And a rational being’s tool of survival is—not “should be,” but “is”—an individual process, one that occurs only in a private mind and brain.
This brings us to a final conclusion about man. If reason is an attribute of the individual; and if the choice to think or not controls all of a man’s other choices and their products, including the emotions he feels and the actions he takes; then the individual is sovereign. His own cognitive faculty determines not only his conclusions, but also his character and life. In this sense, man is self-created, self-directed, and self-responsible.
Since he is responsible for what he thinks (or evades), he is responsible for all the psychological and existential consequences that follow therefrom. If we use the term “sour’ to mean the essence of a person, which is his mind and its basic values, then, in Ayn Rand’s crucial formulation:”[A]s man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul.” …
Man controls the products of thought; he does it directly or indirectly; either way, however, he does it. The conclusion is that man—each man as an individual—is the master of his own destiny.
This conclusion does not mean that man is omnipotent or that he is immune to the actions of other men. It means that the individual chooses his own ends and the methods of attaining them (or chooses to default on this responsibility). It means that by his metaphysical nature man is not a pawn of forces beyond his control. He is not a product of conditioned reflexes or id instincts or the tools of production (thought determines action). He is not a puppet dancing on the strings of power lust, jealousy, anger, or any other “tragic flaw” (thought determines emotion). He is not a cipher ruled by fate or by any supernatural power (the arbitrary is inadmissible).
Metaphysics and epistemology, like the natural sciences, are factual subjects. Their concern is to describe the universe and man’s means of knowledge. Ethics or morality—I use the terms as synonyms here—is an evaluative subject. Its concern is not only to describe, but also to prescribe for man. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that, in Ayn Rand’s words, provides “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.”
According to Objectivism, such a code must deal with three basic, interrelated questions. For what end should a man live? By what fundamental principle should he act in order to achieve this end? Who should profit from his actions? The answers to these questions define the ultimate value, the primary virtue, and the particular beneficiary upheld by an ethical code and reveal thereby its essence.
The Objectivist position can be indicated in three words. The ultimate value is life. The primary virtue is rationality. The proper beneficiary is oneself. ..
The key to an understanding of ethics lies in its central concept, “value.” Specifically, the key lies in the concept’s existential basis and cognitive context. …
Like every concept, ’value” is reached and defined on the basis of observation. One must isolate a group of similar concretes, then integrate them into a new mental unit. The crucial datum here is the fact of goal-directed action.
Ayn Rand defines “value” as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.” “Value” denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity’s action is directed to acquiring or preserving.
As this account suggests, the concept of “value” implies specific preconditions. In Ayn Rand’s words, “value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.” This last point requires elaboration.
Goal-directed behavior is possible only because an entity’s action, its pursuit of a certain end, can make a difference to the outcome. “Alternative” does not necessarily imply choice; it means that the entity is confronted by two possible results: either it acts successfully, gaining the object it seeks, or it does not (and thus fails to gain the object). …
The concept of “value” presupposes an entity capable of generating action toward an object—an object that requires action if it is to be attained. These two presuppositions of “value”—the need of a valuer and of an alternative—are not independent factors. They are corollary aspects of a single condition.
The very observations that lead to the concept of “value” entail the next step in Ayn Rand’s analysis. One does not observe desks or pebbles pursuing goals; one does observe men, animals, and plants doing so. Living organisms are the entities that make “value” possible. They are the entities capable of self-generated, goal-directed action—because they are the conditional entities, which face the alternative of life or death. They are thus the only kind of entities that can (and must) pursue values. …
Goal-directed entities do not exist in order to pursue values. They pursue values in order to exist.
Only self-preservation can be an ultimate goal, which serves no end beyond itself. This follows from the unique nature of the goal. Philosophically speaking, the essence of self-preservation is: accepting the realm of reality.
Thus we reach the climax of Ayn Rand’s argument. Only the alternative of life vs. death creates the context for value-oriented action, and it does so only if the entity’s end is to preserve its life. By the very nature of “value,” therefore, any code of values must hold life as the ultimate value. All of the Objectivist ethics and politics rests on this principle.
An ultimate value, Ayn Rand observes, is the end-in-itself ’which sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evalugated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.”
Without an ultimate goal or end,” she continues,
Or, as she puts this last point in Atlas Shrugged, in her most important summarizing formulation: “It is only the concept of Life’ that makes the concept of Value’ possible.” ..
Objectivism says that remaining alive is the goal of values and of all proper action.
Man, however, is the living being with a volitional, conceptual consciousness. As such, leaving aside his internal bodily processes, he has no inbuilt goal or standard of value; he follows no automatic course of action. In particular, he does not automatically value or pursue self-preservation. The evidence of this fact is overwhelming; it includes not only deliberate suicides, but also people’s frequent hostility to the most elementary life-sustaining practices. As examples, one may consider the Middle Ages, or the more mystical countries of the Near and Far East, or even the leaders of the modern West. For a human being, the desire to live and the knowledge of what life requires are an achievement, not a biological gift. ….
Man, writes Ayn Rand, “has to hold his life as a value—by choice, he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice.”
How is he to discover all this? That is the purpose of morality. “Morality,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, is “a code of values accepted by choice”10—and man needs it for one reason only: he needs it in order to survive. Moral laws, in this view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life; they are no more than this and no less.
Morality is the instruction manual in regard to proper care and use that did not come with man. It is the science of human self-preservation. …
Consistency, in regard to any goal beyond the perceptual level or the routine, cannot be achieved by sense perception, subconscious habit, or luck. It can be achieved only by the aid of explicit values and knowledge. …
Here, then, is the problem. Man must be long-range. He must know the survival significance of every action he takes. And he must know it in relation to the timespan of an entire human life. The problem is: what can make such a cognitive feat possible?
The answer is: the same kind of consciousness that makes it necessary.
Man can retain and deal with so vast a quantity of data only by the method of unit-reduction. He can gain knowledge of decades still ahead of him only by means of the faculty that integrates perceived concretes to an unlimited number of unperceived but similar ones, past, present, and future. He can achieve the long-range outlook he needs only by the use of concepts.
If man is to sustain and protect his life, he must conceptualize the requirements of human survival. …
He must ask: what are the fundamental choices, the ones which shape all the others? And what abstractions integrate all the instances of such choices from the aspect of their relationship to self-preservation? In other words, what generalizations identify—in condensed, retainable form—the effect on man’s life of different kinds of choices? …
He decides not by feeling or by polls and not by trying to assess each new situation without context, as though he were an infant, but by the application of his earlier formed moral concepts.
The common name of this latter form of cognition (which extends far beyond moral issues) is “principle.” A “principle” is a general truth on which other truths depend. …
A moral principle, accordingly^ is not something sui generis. Properly speaking, it is a type of scientific principle, identifying the relationship to man’s survival of the various basic human choices. A man who acts “on moral principle” in this sense is neither a martyr, a zealot, nor a prig; he is a person guided by man’s distinctive faculty of cognition. For a rational being, principled action is the only effective kind of action. To be principled is the only way to achieve a longrange goal. …
The only alternative to action governed by moral principle is action expressing short-range impulse. But for man, as we know, the short-range, viewed long-range, is self-destructive. This is the practical point missed by pragmatism, which tells people to judge each choice not by reference to abstract theory, but only by its results after it has been tried; which insists that today’s results need not recur tomorrow; and which urges that each situation be approached “experimentally,” “on its own terms.” Such a philosophy amounts to the declaration: drop your mind, discard your capacity for thought, decide each case perceptually. THis is precisely what man cannot do; not for long.
The Objectivist morality, I have said, defines a code of values. By “code” here Ayn Rand means an integrated, hierarchically structured, noncontradictory system of principles, which enables a man to choose, plan, and act long-range….
What then is the standard of moral value? A valid code of morality, Ayn Rand concludes, a code based on reason and proper to man, must hold man’s life as its standard of value. “All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”
According to Ayn Rand, there are three basic values “which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value. . . .”
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues . . .
The last two of these I will defer until the next chapter. The greatest of them, however, which makes the others possible, is the first. Epistemology tells us that reason is valid; it is man’s means of knowledge. Ethics draws the practical conclusion: if one chooses to live, one must hold reason as a value. …
Every moral value entails a lifelong course of virtue. “Virtue,” in the Objectivist definition, is “the action by which one gains and keeps [a value].” The action in this instance—the virtue that develops, preserves, and applies the faculty of reason, thereby making possible every other human value—is rationality.
“Rationality,” according to Ayn Rand, is “the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action.” This means the application of reason to every aspect of one’s life and concerns. … Put negatively, the virtue means never placing any consideration above one’s perception of reality. This includes never attempting to get away with a contradiction, a mystic fantasy, or an indulgence in context-dropping.
Rationality means the acceptance of reason as a principle of human survival and as an absolute …
By the same token, there is only one primary vice, which is the root of all other human evils: irrationality. This is the deliberate suspension of consciousness, the refusal to see, to think. to know—either as a general policy, because one regards awareness as too demanding, or in regard to some specific point, because the facts conflict with one’s feelings
To begin with, one cannot follow reason unless one exercises it. Rationality demands continual mental activity, a regular, daily process of functioning on the conceptual level of consciousness. This involves much more than merely forming enough concepts to be able to speak or read a book. In Ayn Rand’s description, it involves.
an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an evergrowing sum.
Ayn Rand’s novels abound in instructive examples of this aspect of virtue. Consider, for instance, Howard Roark’s encounter with the Dean at the beginning of The Fountainbead. The Dean tells him that men must always revere tradition. Roark regards this viewpoint as senseless, but he does not ignore it. Roark is not a psychologist, nor does the field interest him much; but he does deal with men, he knows that there are many like the Dean, and he is on the premise of understanding what foe deals witfo. So he identifies the meaning of the event in the terms available to him. There is something here opposite to the way I function, he thinks, some form of behavior I do not grasp—“the principle behind the Dean,” he calls it—and he files this observation in his subconscious with the implicit order to himself: be on the lookout for any data relevant to this problem. Thereafter, when such information becomes available (new examples or aspects in new contexts), he recognizes and integrates it. In the end, by a process whose steps the reader has seen, Roark reaches the concept of the “second-hander”—and of the opposite kind of man, whom he represents. At that point, he grasps what the issue is on which his own fate and that of the world depend. …
In citing the Roark example, I do not mean to suggest that rationality has to involve the discovery of new ideas. … The point is not that one must become a genius or even an intellectual. … The moral point here is always to grow mentally, to increase one’s knowledge and expand the power of one’s consciousness to the extent one can, whatever one’s profession or the degree of one’s intelligence. Mental growth is possible on some scale to every person with an intact brain. …
An ethical standard, writes Ayn Rand, means
an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose. “That which is required for the survival of man qua man” is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose—the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being—belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own.
Each individual must choose his values and actions by the standard of man’s life—in order to achieve the purpose of maintaining and enjoying his own life. Thus Objectivism advocates egoism—the pursuit of self-interest—the policy of selfishness.
Egoism states that each man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare, well-being, or self-interest (these terms are synonyms here). It states that each man should be “concerned with his own interests”; he should be “selfish” in the sense of being the beneficiary of his own moral actions. … It simply states: whatever man’s proper self-interest consists of, that is what each individual should seek to achieve.
The alternative is the view that man’s primary moral obligation is to serve some entity other than himself, such as God or society, at the price of subordinating or denying his own welfare. In this view, the essence of morality is unselfishness, which involves some form of self-sacrifice. …
“Egoistic,” in the Objectivist view, means self-sustaining by an act of choice and as a matter of principle. …
A “sacrifice” is the surrender of a value, such as money, career, loved ones, freedom, for the sake of a lesser value or of a nonvalue (if one acquires an equal or a greater value from a transaction, then it is an even trade or a gain, not a sacrifice). A rational man, however, chooses his values and their hierarchical ranking not by whim, but by a process of cognition. To tell such a man to surrender his values is to tell him: surrender your judgment, contradict your knowledge, sacrifice your mind. But this is something a man dare not sacrifice. …
Since thought is an attribute of the individual, each man must be sovereign in regard to the function and product of his own brain. This is impossible if morality demands that a man “place others above self.” …
If a man’s brain, like an industrialist’s factory, is not his to profit from, then it is not his to control. The result in both cases is that the entity viewed as the proper beneficiary— others or society—moves to take over the prerogatives of ownership. In regard to a factory, this takeover is called “socialism” and leads to the destruction of the factory. In regard to a brain, it is called “faith in the leader” and leads to the cessation of thought.
The need to be “concerned with one’s own interests” applies in every realm of endeavor, including, above all, the realm of the intellect. There can be no interest greater to a rational being than the interest in his tool of survival—which can function only as his tool of survival. … Rationality requires that a man be able righteously to say: my mind is my means of achieving my goals in accordance with my judgment of fact and of value. “[T]he most selfish of all things,” as Ayn Rand puts the point, “is the in- dependent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth.”
Every man, according to Objectivism, should live by his own mind and for his own sake; every man should pursue the values and practice the virtues that man’s life requires. Since man survives by thought and production, every man should live and work as an independent, creative being, acquiring goods and services from others only by means of trade, when both parties agree that the trade is profitable. …
Egoism, in the Objectivist interpretation, does not mean the policy of violating the rights, moral or political, of others in order to satisfy one’s own needs or desires. It does not mean the policy of a brute, a con man, or a beggar. It does not mean the policy of turning other men, whether by clubs or tears, into one’s servants. Any such policy, as we will see in due course, is destructive not only to the victim, but also to the perpetrator. It is condemned as immoral, therefore, by the very principle of selfishness.
The best formulation of the Objectivist view in this issue is the oath taken by John Gait, the hero of Atlas Shrugged. “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
The principle embodied in this oath is that human sacrifice is evil no matter who its beneficiary is, whether you sacrifice yourself to others or others to yourself. Man—every man—is an end in himself. …
Those who reject the principle of selfishness will find in the history of ethics two main alternatives. One is the primordial and medieval theory that man should sacrifice himself to the supernatural. The second is the theory that man should sacrifice himself for the sake of other men. The second is known as “altruism,” which is not a synonym for kindness, generosity, or good will, but the doctrine that man should place others above self as the fundamental rule of life. …
I shall confine myself here to one polemical observation. The advocates of self-sacrifice, in either version, have never demanded consistency. They have not asked men to sacrifice their goods, pleasures, goals, values, and ideas as a matter of principle. Even the saints had to eschew such a course, which would be tantamount to instant suicide. The moralists of selflessness expect a man to go on functioning, working, achieving—else he would have no values to give up. They expect him to exercise his mind for his own sake and survival, and then to deny his judgment as the spirit moves them. They expect him to be ruled by whim, the whim of the relevant authority or beneficiary, whenever it injects itself into the process and demands to be paid off.
These moralists expect you to live your life on a part-time basis only, while trying to get away on the side with sundry acts of self-immolation, just as drug addicts pursue some regular nourishment while trying to get away with their periodic fixes. …
The content of 44the good” should now be clear. The good, in Ayn Rand’s view, is man the individual sustaining life by reason, his life, with everything such a goal requires and implies.
For Objectivism, values, like concepts, are not intrinsic or subjective, but objective. …
Value requires a valuer—and moral value, therefore, presupposes a certain kind of estimate made by man; it presupposes an act of evaluation. Such an act, as we know, is possible only because man faces a fundamental alternative. It is possible only if man chooses to pursue a certain goal, which then serves as his standard of value. The good, accordingly, is not good in itself. Objects and actions are good to man and for the sake of reaching a specific goal. …
Moral value does not pertain to reality alone or to consciousness alone. It arises because a certain kind of living organism—a volitional, conceptual organism—sustains a certain relationship to an external world. Both these factors—man and the world, or human consciousness and reality—are essential in this context. The good, accordingly, is neither intrinsic nor subjective, but objective.
Here is Ayn Rand’s statement of the point:
The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.
An evaluation presupposes the capacity to think; it is a type of abstraction, i.e., a product of the process of conceptformation and use. This is why one’s theory of concepts determines one’s theory of values. It is why, in the objective approach, the description italicized by Ayn Rand above applies both to concepts and to values.
Concepts are aspects of reality in relation to man. That is: concepts designate facts—perceived objects with their similarities and differences—as condensed by human consciousness, in accordance with a rational method (logic).
Similarly, the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man. That is: the good designates facts—the requirements of survival—as identified conceptually, and then evaluated by human consciousness in accordance with a rational standard of value (life).
Moral knowledge, therefore, follows the basic pattern of all conceptual knowledge. …
Because her philosophy regards objectivity as essential to conceptualization, Ayn Rand rejected from the outset any nonrational view of ethics. Ethics deals with concepts, which, in her system, are forms of integration occurring within a cognitive hierarchy that is based on sense perception. This is the underlying theory that guided her in seeking out the proper, step-by-step reduction of “value.” The result of such reduction was her discovery of a new code of morality. …
“Reality confronts man with a great many ‘musts,’” writes Miss Rand,
but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: “You must, if—” and the “if” stands for man’s choice: “—if you want to achieve a certain goal.” You must eat, if you want to survive. You must work, if you want to eat. You must think, if you want to work. You must look at reality, if you want to think—if you want to know what to do—if you want to know what goals to choose—if you want to know how to achieve them.
The field of ethics itself, including all moral virtues and values, is necessitated by the law of causality.
Morality is no more than a means to an end; it defines the causes we must enact if we are to attain a certain effect. Thus Ayn Rand’s statement that the principle replacing duty in the Objectivist ethics is causality, in the form of the memorable Spanish proverb “God said: Take what you want and pay for it.”
If life is what you want, you must pay for it, by accepting and practicing a code of rational behavior. Morality, too, is a must—if; it is the price of the choice to live. That choice itself, therefore, is not a moral choice; it precedes morality; it is the decision of consciousness that underlies the need of morality.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand defines six major derivatives of the virtue of rationality. That is the account I am following. … The six derivative virtues are independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride.
The virtue of independence, in Ayn Rand’s definition, is “one’s acceptance of the responsibility of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind. . . .”
The classic statement of this virtue appears in The Fountainhead, when Roark contrasts the creator with the secondhander:
Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.
The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.
The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind . . . demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.
The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first.
The independent man who lives in society learns from others and may choose to work jointly with them, but the essence of his learning and his work is the process of thought, which he has to perform alone. He needs others with whom to trade, but the trade is merely an exchange of creations, and his primary concern is the act of creating; his concern is his own work. …
Ayn Rand describes such an individual as the man of “self-sufficient ego.” …
The opposite policy consists in dropping one’s mind and accepting as one’s guide a different primary: people. This type of person is not moved by a concern for logic or truth; he is oriented basically not to reality, but to other men—to what they believe, what they feel, what he can wheedle out of or pump into them, what he can do to, with, or for them.
The man who acquires his beliefs by accepting the consensus of his “significant others”; the man who gains his sense of self-worth from prestige, i.e., from reputation in the mind of others, regardless of their standard of judgment; the man who gets ahead not through work, but through pull; the social worker whose function is not to create, but to redistribute the wealth created by others; the criminal or dictator who lives by initiating force against others—these are some of the “second-handers” described in The Fountainhead.6 They are men who live through or within others, men to whom solitude, in principle, means death.
A parasite, biologically, is a creature that lives on or in an organism of another species. The second-hander, however, is unique. He has no counterpart in the world of biology. He is a parasite on his own species.
The ego or self, Ayn Rand holds, is the mind. The independent man, therefore, is the only genuine egoist. The second-hander—whether he seeks to exploit others and/or to serve them—is an opposite breed. In placing people above reality, he renounces his ego. Whatever his goal or intended beneficiary, such a man is a literal altruist; he “places others above self” in the deepest sense and pays the price. The price is the fact that the selfless is the mindless.
The term “independent thought” is a redundancy. Either a man is struggling to identify facts, to integrate, to understand—this is at once a state of thought and of independence. Or he accepts the conclusions of other men without regard to facts, logic, understanding. This is a state of dependence and of nonthought. Even if the conclusions thus accepted happen to be true, they are of no cognitive value to the parasite. In his consciousness, those conclusions are not truth, but the arbitrary. … One should, therefore, learn as much as he can from others. The moral point is that he actually be learning, i.e., engaged in a process of cognition, not of parroting.
Virtue does not require that one’s mental contents be original. What it requires is a certain method of dealing with one’s mental contents, whoever initially conceived them. The moral issue is not: who was first? but: is one a man of reason or of faith? …
Thought is not an end in itself, but a means to action. If life is the standard, man must think in order to gain knowledge, then use his knowledge to guide him in creating the material values his life requires. This means: he must be a self-supporting entity; he must finance his activities by his own productive effort; he must work for a living. (Even a wealthy heir or lottery winner is morally obliged to work, as we will see in due course.) …
If a man is to be first-handed, he must begin by reaching independent conclusions. Then he must accept the responsibility of implementing his conclusions in practice, i.e., he must pay his own way. He must be self-reliant in the mental world and in the physical world.
In a division-of-labor society, no one produces by himself all the goods and services that his life requires. What he does produce is an economic value he can offer to others in exchange for the things he wants; he produces the value-equivalent of the goods and services he seeks. A man who deals with others by this method is the opposite of a dependent. ….
To avoid any breach between action and thought, a man must learn the proper principles, then follow them methodically, despite any unwarranted pleas or demands from any source, inner or outer. …
Integrity means loyalty not to a whim or delusion, but to one’s knowledge, to the conclusions one can prove logically. Like every other virtue, therefore, integrity presupposes a mind that seeks knowledge, a mind that accepts and follows reason…
When integrity is recognized to be a matter of self-preservation, its practice comes to seem irresistible. Thus Ayn Rand’s eloquent reply, when she was praised for her courage in fighting the Establishment. “I am not brave enough to be a coward,’’ she said.”I see the consequences too clearly.”
If a man makes concessions in regard to concretes within the framework of rational moral principles that both parties accept, then his action may be entirely proper; but not if he compromises moral principles themselves. As an example of the first case, Ayn Rand cites two traders, who agree that the buyer of an article is obliged to pay the seller, but who disagree about a given article’s monetary worth; they resolve the conflict by finding an intermediate price satisfactory to both.
As against: a man dealing with a burglar, who expects to seize goods without payment; the “adjustment” then consisting in the man agreeing—without duress, as his idea of a moral resolution—to give the burglar free of charge only part of the goods he came to steal. This would be compromise in regard to principle, and, as Miss Rand observes, it would mean “a total surrender—the recognition of [the burglar’s] right to one’s property.”
An obvious similarity exists between this case and that of a country able to defend itself which decides nevertheless to “negotiate” with an aggressor, agreeing to some of the latter’s arbitrary demands in the name of being “flexible” and preserving “peace.” Such a country thereby invites more de- mands, to be answered by more “flexibility”; it is doomed from the start (assuming it does not change its policy). By conceding the propriety of “some” aggression, it has dropped the principle of self-defense and of its own sovereignty; which leaves it without moral grounds to object to the next depredation. (The alternative to such capitulation is not necessarily war; on the contrary, a free nation’s strength, moral and military, is the greatest deterrent to war.) …
If, like Faust, you try to make a deal with the devil, then you lose to him completely. In any compromise between food and poison, Ayn Rand writes, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
The reason for this is not that evil is more powerful than good. On the contrary, the reason is that evil is powerless and, therefore, can exist only as a parasite on the good. …
To be evil “only sometimes” is to be evil. To be good is to be good all of the time, i.e., as a matter of consistent, unbreached principle.
The above is the full reason why Objectivism condemns as vicious today’s cult of compromise. These cult is ts would achieve the same end result more honestly by being explicit immoralists, who tell men openly to reject the good and practice the evil. Evil is delighted to compromise—for it, such a deal is total victory, the only kind of victory it can ever achieve, the victory of plundering, subverting, and ultimately destroying the good.
“Honesty” is the refusal to fake reality, i.e., to pretend that facts are other than they are. …
If rationality, as we may say, is the commitment to reality, then honesty is its obverse: it is the rejection of unreality. The exponent of the first acknowledges that existence exists; of the second, that only existence exists.
The man who fakes reality believes that he or others can profit thereby. The honest man does not believe it. He does not seek to obtain any value by means of deception, whether of himself or of others. In Ayn Rand’s words, he recognizes “that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud. . . .”
Value is objective. It is an evaluation made by reference to a standard (man’s life) that is itself derived from reality. Value is thus a form of truth; it is a type of identification, which, to be warranted, must correspond to reality….
The man who seeks to obtain a value through faking is confronted by one fundamental obstacle: that which exists, i.e., the particular facts he is struggling to erase or rewrite. In the nature of the case, his policy creates a dichotomy between fact and desire; implicitly, it raises “value” above that which exists and thus represents a breach with reality. This is why dishonesty cannot be a means of attaining values. …
We are often told that someone’s “noble ideal” can be attained only by evil actions, which we are then urged to perform (“the end justifies the means”). Objectivism rejects this license to immorality. The end does not justify the means. The truth is the exact opposite: an immoral means invalidates the end.
The full statement of Ayn Rand’s view is that the end-in-itself, man’s life, determines the fundamental means of human action (the proper principles); and these in turn delimit the concretes one can validly pursue in a given context.
Justice is the virtue of judging men’s character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves….
Moral judgment distinguishes the men who choose to recognize reality from the men who choose to evade it. Such knowledge is necessary on practical grounds, in order to plan one’s actions and protect one’s interests. If a man is good by the Objectivist standard, if he is rational, honest, productive, then, other things being equal, one can expect to gain values in dealing with him. If a man is evil, however, if he is irrational, dishonest, parasitical, one can expect from such dealing not value, but loss….
The refusal to judge, like any kind of agnosticism, is itself the taking of a stand, in this case a profoundly immoral stand:
When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you— whom do you betray and whom do you encourage? [asks Ayn Rand]
. . . so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
“Only the good,” Ayn Rand writes elsewhere, “can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit. . . .”
The Objectivist position is the opposite of the injunction “Judge not that ye be not judged.” Our policy, in Ayn Rand’s words, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.” If man’s life is one’s standard, one must identify the moral status of every person, issue, and event within the field of his concerns; then, within the limits of his power, he must guide his actions accordingly, dealing with and/or sanctioning only men who are virtuous (in mixed cases, sanctioning only the virtuous element within a man), while shunning and condemning men who are vicious. This is the mandate of the virtue of justice.
There is no greater obstacle to such a process than the theory of altruism. First, altruism inverts moral judgment, teaching people to admire self-sacrifice and to belittle selfpreservation as amoral or worse. Then, since the theory cannot be practiced consistently, it leads people to hate the very fact of moral judgment. Moral estimates, such people explain, are cruel; a good man is really not good, but lucky, while an evil man or group is really not evil (“He couldn’t help it!” “They don’t mean it!”). At the same time, since morality cannot be avoided and since consistent altruism is impossible, the theory prompts people, when they do judge, to condemn everybody indiscriminately. …
To “deserve,” states the Oxford English Dictionary, is to “become worthy of recompense (i.e., reward or punishment), according to the good or ill of character or conduct.”
A reward is a value given to a man in payment for his virtue or achievement; it is a positive such as praise, friendship, a sum of money, or a special prerogative.
A punishment is a disvalue inflicted in payment for vice or fault; it is a negative such as condemnation, the withholding of friendship or even outright ostracism, or the loss of money or prerogative, including (in criminal cases) the loss of freedom or of life itself. …
The principle, however, is the same in all cases: justice in action consists in requiting the positive (the good) in men with a positive and the negative with a negative.
The trader principle states that, if a man seeks something from another, he must gain title to it, i.e., come to deserve it, by offering the appropriate payment. The two men, accordingly, must be traders, exchanging value for value by mutual consent to mutual benefit. “A trader,” writes Ayn Rand, “is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved.” …
… no person by the mere fact of his existence or needs has a claim on the assets of others. To “deserve” a positive, material or spiritual, is not a primary condition; it is an effect, to be achieved by enacting its cause. The cause is a certain course of thought and action, a course in which one creates and/or offers values. …
A man deserves from others that and only that which he earns. Such is the approach to human relationships derived from the Objectivist base and expressed in the trader principle. …
Since there is no value without virtue, there is, in Ayn Rand’s words, “no escape from justice.” “Nothing,” she explains, “can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.”
Productiveness” is the process of creating material values, whether goods or services. Such creation is a necessity of human survival in any age, whether the values take the form of bearskins, clubs, a pot full of meat, and paintings on the walls of caves; or of skyscrapers, ballet, brain surgery, and a gourmet meal aboard a computerized spaceship; or of the unimaginable luxuries and splendors yet to come. …
From bearskins on up, however, the values required by man’s survival must be conceived and then created. For a conceptual being, the only alternative to creativity is parasitism.
The other species survive in essence by adjusting themselves to their background, assuming they have the good fortune to find in nature the things they need. Man survives by adjusting his background to himself.
Intellectually, pride requires that one work to grasp the truth in moral issues rather than settle for unvalidated bromides or feelings. The proud man deals with moral issues explicitly and objectively, using the method of logic. Only a code of objective principles—a code based on the facts of nature and of human nature—can be adhered to consistently, without opposition from reality.
Having covered the major virtues, I want to complete the present discussion by turning to a widespread vice: the initiation of physical force against other men. This vice represents the antithesis and destruction of the virtue of rationality—and therefore of every other virtue and every (nonautomatic) value as well. …
“Initiation” means starting the use of force against an innocent individual(s), one who has not himself started its use against others. …
The man of force, however, in attacking a person’s body (or seizing his property), thereby negates and paralyzes his victim’s mind…
To order a man to accept a conclusion against his own judgment is to order him to accept as true something that, according to everything he knows, is not true (is either arbitrary or false). This amounts to ordering him to believe a contradiction; it is like demanding his agreement that red is green or that 2 plus 2 equals 5.
When reality is decreed, at gunpoint, to be out of bounds, a rational mind has no way to proceed. …
Thus Ayn Rand’s formal conclusion: “Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying man’s capacity to live.” Or, as she states the principle in her next paragraph: “Force and mind are opposites. . . .”
Here is the crucial passage from Ayn Rand:
. . . an attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying a man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.
There is only one way to attempt to force a man’s mind: by directing the force to his body (or property). By purely intellectual means, no one—neither an individual nor a society nor any part thereof, such as TV advertisers—can coerce a man.
The only kind of “social pressure” that cannot be resisted by intellectual means is the kind that does not rely on intellectual means. If some group, governmental or private, tells a man: “Either you agree with us or we will clean out your bank account, break your legs, kill you,” then a cognitive process on his part is ineffective; no such process avails in counteracting the threat. This, this category of threat or harm—physical force and nothing else—is what constitutes coercion. This is what sweeps into the discard the victim s mind. …
Turning to another point, we often hear denunciations not of force, but of violence. “Violence” names a particular form of force, force that is swift, intense, rough, and/or accompanied by fury. The moral issue we have been identifying, however, is not a matter of form. The evil is coercion and anyone who initiates it, whether he is a wild-eyed hit man brandishing a machine gun or a prim little bureaucrat with his weapons on call but discreetly out of sight. To denounce “violence”: but not the initiation of force as such is to imply that only the first of these men is evil.
This would mean that the rule of brutality is moral if carried out decorously, with the niceties of the electoral process observed, the right documents filled in, and the agony of the victims kept out of the newspapers. Such is what today’s intellectuals do believe and what they are trying to insinuate into the public mind.
Ayn Rand holds that to initiate force against others is evil. But to use force in retaliation, against the individual(s) or nation(s) that started its use, is completely proper. Using force in retaliation means using it not against the innocent, but to stop criminals or aggressors. The ethical difference is the same as that between murder and self-defense. As with lying, so with the use of force: the moral rule is not a sweeping commandment, but an absolute prohibition within a context.
Contrary to the claims of pacifists, forcible retaliation does not mean “sinking” to the brute’s view of morality. One does not reason with a jungle beast; one cannot; but this does not mean “sinking” to an animal’s viewpoint. It means recognizing the facts of reality and acting accordingly
Altruism demands the initiation of physical force. When the representatives of the needy use coercion, they regularly explain that it is obligatory: it is their only means of ensuring that some recalcitrant individual, whose duty is self-sacrifice, carries out his moral obligations—of ensuring that he gives to the poor the unearned funds he is born owing them, but is trying wrongfully to withhold.
At the same time and with complete consistency, altruism (in its commonest forms) rejects the retaliatory use of force. …
Happiness is man’s—the good man’s—experience of life. The achievement of this experience, writes Ayn Rand, is “the only moral purpose” of one’s life.’ …
Today, when men associate morality with pain, it is advisable to begin by analyzing the relationship between virtue and the trait men call “practicality” or “realism.”…
If the conquest of typhoid is the goal, immunization is practical, the beating of torn toms is not. If human efficacy is the goal, the wheel or the computer is a practical invention, a perpetual motion machine is not.
The “practical” is that which reaches or fosters a desired result. Since the concept denotes a type of positive evaluation, it presupposes a standard of value. The standard is set by the result being pursued.
Moral codes, too, qualify as practical or impractical. Most of those that have been offered to the human race are impractical. These codes prescribe ends and/or means which clash with the requirements of man’s life. To the extent that men obey such codes, they are led to contradiction, frustration, failure; the essence of their failure is their inability to eat their life and have it, too.
The most blatant example is the theory of altruism. If the principle guiding one’s actions is sacrifice— first to esteem an object, then to give it up—one’s approach to the realm of choice enshrines the antithesis of practicality; it praises and guarantees the loss of values. Such a life seeks out defeat.
The moral man’s concept of the good, we hold, is his fundamental standard of practicality. Such a man experiences no conflict between what he thinks he ought to pursue (self-preservation) and what he wants to pursue. He defines all of his goals, fundamental and derivative alike, by reference to reality. As a result, he pursues only objects that are attainable by man, consistent with one another, and possible to him; …
Rationality is a virtue because action demands knowledge. If one does not acquire the necessary knowledge, then he cannot avoid suffering the consequences, even if he is in no way morally deficient.
The evil man taken pure, i.e., deprived of any assistance from the principle of virtue, is not the flamboyant value-achiever of our cultural mythology. He is a nonachiever, ignorant, impoverished, frustrated, resentful, and helpless, helpless to do anything about his condition. He is helpless by his own choice.
If the conventional ethics were correct, then so would be the conventional view of the rewards of evil. In that case, the religious symbolism of a powerful, glamorous devil wreaking havoc with the humble forces of virtue would be appropriate. From the Objectivist perspective, however, this symbolism is a travesty.
Men, as Dominique Francon thinks in The Fountainhead, “had been so mistaken about the shapes of their Devil—he was not single and big, he was many and smutty and small.”
Or, as Stepan Timoshenko puts it in We the Living, the forces of evil are “not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant.” The proper symbol of evil, he says, is not “a tall warrior in a steel helmet, a human dragon spitting fire,” but “a louse. A big, fat, slow, blond louse.” [“Ever seen lice? The blond ones are the fattest. . . .:]
“The other [poster] bore a huge white louse on a black background with red letters: LICE SPREAD DISEASE! CITIZENS, UNITE ON THE ANTI-TYPHUS FRONT!” (We the Living)
“Listen, I’ll give you advice. If you want to keep this land in your tentacles, tell the world that you’re chopping heads off for breakfast and shooting men by the regiment. Let the world think that you’re a huge monster to be feared and respected and fought honorably. But don’t let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who’ve learned to be arrogant. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don’t let them know that you’re not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!” (We the Living)Evil does have one power. It has not the power to create, to set positive goals and achieve them, but the power to destroy: to destroy itself and its victims. …
To sculpt the David, one needs the genius of Michelangelo; to smash it, only some rampaging barbarians. To create the United States required the intellect and the painstaking debates of the Founding Fathers; to run it into the ground, only the crew of anti-intellectuals now ensconced in Washington. …
Evil men, though impotent, can disappoint, deceive, and betray the innocent; if they turn to crime, they can rob, enslave, and kill. This is one reason that man needs to practice the virtue of justice (to distinguish between the good and the evil). It is also a reason why man needs to live in a proper society, one designed to protect individual rights. … When men live by rational principles, the evil, so far as men can identify its presence, is ostracized and stopped. Under these conditions, even its power to destroy is largely nullified—except in regard to the evildoer himself.
Unfortunately, men have not dominantly lived by rational principles. One way or another throughout the centuries, the men who embody the good, or who represent it in a given issue, have aided, not stopped, the evil. They have paved the road for it, letting (or helplessly watching) it profit from the achievements of virtue.
The “sanction of the victim” means the moral man’s approval of his own martyrdom, his agreement to accept—in return for his achievements—curses, robbery, and enslavement. It means a man’s willingness to embrace his exploiters, to pay them ransom for his virtues, to condone and help perpetuate the ethical code which feeds off those virtues, which expects them and counts on them at the very moment it is damning them as sin and condemning their exponents to hellfire (supernatural or secular).
This is the moral issue in John Gait’s strike: to say no to this code for the first time. Gait refuses to sanction the immolation of the creators. He withdraws the power of the good from the hands of the evil. He quits the world and lets the evil confront the full reality of its own impotence.
Ayn Rand demands of men unbreached integrity, justice, and selfishness. This demand is not “too extreme.” Nothing less will put an end to the obscene blood transfusion that has wrecked most of human history. …
Morality, she says, is practical because consciousness is practical. And consciousness is practical because it is “the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”
The basic principle of politics, according to Objectivism, is the principle endorsed by America’s Founding Fathers: individual rights.
“Rights,” states Ayn Rand,
are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights ore the means of subordinating society to moral law.
A “right,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, “is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” A right is a sanction to independent action; the opposite of acting by right is acting by permission. If someone borrows your pen, you set the terms of its use. When he returns it, no one can set the terms for you; you use it by right.
In content, as the Founding Fathers recognized, there is one fundamental right, which has several major derivatives. The fundamental right is the right to life. Its major derivatives are the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
The right to life means the right to sustain and protect one’s life. It means the right to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the preservation of his life.
To sustain his life, man needs a method of survival—he must use his rational faculty to gain knowledge and choose values, then act to achieve his values.
The right to liberty is the right to this method; it is the right to think and choose, then to act in accordance with one’s judgment.
To sustain his life, man needs to create the material means of his survival. The right to property is the right to this process; in Ayn Rand’s definition, it is “the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.”
To sustain his life, man needs to be governed by a certain motive—his purpose must be his own welfare. The right to the pursuit of happiness is the right to this motive; it is the right to live for one’s own sake and fulfillment.
The right to property, however, is regularly opposed; private property, the intellectuals claim, clashes with the very principle of human rights. Ayn Rand answers this claim eloquently:
Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property. The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights,” as if one could exist without the other, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property; only a slave can work with no right to the product of his effort. The doctrine that “human rights” are superior to “property rights” simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of “human.”
Man is a certain kind of living organism—which leads to his need of morality and to man’s life being the moral standard—which leads to the right to act by the guidance of this standard, i.e., the right to life.
Reason is man’s basic means of survival—which leads to rationality being the primary virtue—which leads to the right to act according to one s judgment, i.e., the right to liberty.
Unlike animals, mandoes not survive by adjusting to the given—which leads to productiveness being a cardinal virtue—which leads to the right to keep, use, and dispose of the things one has produced, i.e., the right to property.
Reason is an attribute of the individual, one that demands, as a condition of its function, unbreached allegiance to reality—which leads to the ethics of egoism—which leads to the right to the pursuit of happiness. …
All rights rest on the fact that man’s life is the moral standard. Rights are rights to the kinds of actions necessary for the preservation of human life. Just as “it is only the concept of life’ that makes the concept of ‘value’ possible,” so it is only the requirements of man’s life that make morality, and thus the concept of “rights,” possible. …
All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant. …
Rights are objective principles; they are objective in regard both to content and to validation. “[T]he source of man’s rights,” states Ayn Rand,
is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival
If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.
Ayn Rand is more realistic than the panicky anticommunists of the Cold War era, who trembled before the alleged practicality of dictatorship. The best symbol of this issue is the contrast between two projections of a collectivist future: George Orwell’s 1984 vs. Ayn Rand’s Anthem (which was published more than a decade earlier, in 1938)
Orwell regards freedom as a luxury; he believes that one can wipe out every vestige of free thought, yet still maintain an industrial civilization. Whose mind is maintaining it? Blank out.
Anthem, by contrast, shows us “social cogs” who have retrogressed, both spiritually and materially, to the condition of primitives. When men lose the freedom to think, Ayn Rand understands, they lose the products of thought as well.
In a proper society, the citizens have rights, but the government does not. The government acts by permission, as expressed in a written constitution that limits public officials to defined functions and procedures.
The first and best example of this approach was the original American system, with its brilliantly ingenious mechanism of checks and balances. There are some contradictions in the Constitution; in essence, however, its purpose was to protect the individual from two potential tyrants: the government and the mob. The system was designed to thwart both the power lust of any aspiring dictator and any momentary, corrupt passion on the part of the general public.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the greatest achievements in political history, and they dazzled the world for well over a century, until they were scuttled by an alien ideology. No political system, whatever its built-in safeguards, can survive the atrophy in the mind of the intellectuals of its basic philosophy.
The American system, as has often been stated by conservatives, was not a democracy, whether representative or direct, but a republic. (I use these terms as the Founding Fathers did.) “Democracy” means a system of unlimited ma- jority rule; “unlimited” means unrestricted by individual rights. Such an approach is not a form of freedom, but of collectivism. A “republic,” by contrast, is a system restricted to the protection of rights. In a republic, majority rule applies only to some details, like the selection of certain personnel. Rights, however, remain an absolute; i.e., the principles governing the government are not subject to vote.
“Statism” means any system that concentrates power in the state at the expense of individual freedom. Among other variants, the term subsumes theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and plain, unadorned dictatorship. …
Whatever the point of entry of such governments, the essence of their policy is the same: war against man—against his mind, body, and property alike. The result of such war has always been the manufacture of corpses. The corpses are an expression, in negative terms, of the principle that freedom is the social requirement of man’s tool of survival.
Just as individualism is the politics demanded by reason, so statism is the politics of unreason. …
Forty years ago, the identification of statism with unreason would have been hotly contested, especially by the political left. Not any more, as the heirs and admirers of the New Left of the 1960s make eloquently clear….
The Old Left transmuted in this fashion because it was a solid philosophic contradiction, which could not be sustained. When confronted by this contradiction in inescapable terms in the 1960s, its members—those who did not retreat into a mumbling “moderation” or an embarrassed “neocon- servatism”—chose according to their deepest premises. Being statists, they chose according to the actual philosophic meaning of statism. In Ayn Rand’s summary:
Confronted with the choice of an industrial civilization or collectivism, it is an industrial civilization that the liberals discarded. Confronted with the choice of technology or dictatorship, it is technology that they discarded. Confronted with the choice of reason or whims, it is reason that they discarded
Whoever, at this stage of the twentieth century, having seen the history of Russia, Germany, China, Iran, and America, still does not understand the philosophy, the cause, or the effect of statism will never do so. Such an individual does not choose to understand.
Anarchism is the idea that there should be no government. In Objectivist terms, this amounts to the view that every man should defend himself by using physical force against others whenever he feels like it, with no objective standards of justice, crime, or proof.
“What if an individual does not want to delegate his right of self-defense?” the anarchist frequently asks. “Isn’t that a legitimate aspect of ‘freedom’?” The question implies that a “free man” is one with the right to enact his desire, any desire, simply because it is his desire, including the desire to use force. This means the equation of “freedom” with whimworship. Philosophically, the underlying premise is subjectivism (of the personal variety).
The citizens of a proper society should reply to such a subjectivist as follows. “Don’t delegate your right of selfdefense, if that is your choice. But if you act on your viewpoint—if you resort to the use of force against any of us—we will answer you by force. Our government will answer you, in the only terms you yourself make possible.” …
Anarchists in America pretend to be individualists. Philosophically, however, anarchism is the opposite of individualism; as its main modern popularizer, Karl Marx, makes clear, anarchism is an expression of Utopian collectivism.…
The theory of anarchism does not recognize that honest disagreement and deliberate evil will always be possible to men; it does not grasp the need of any mechanism to enable real human beings to live together in harmony. The reason is that the theory has no place for real human beings, i.e., for individuals.
Anarchy, the breakdown of law and order, is possible for a brief time, but not anarchism as a guiding philosophy. The immediate result of anarchy, assuming a society has no rational leadership, has to be men’s establishment of some semblance of order by means of gang rule and/or the rule of a strongman. Even savages on the perceptual level understand that lawless chaos is incompatible with survival.
If words have to stand for objects in reality, then the only referent of “anarchism”-—the only possible political system it designates—is some variant of statism. This is why Objectivism dismisses as foolish the notion that republican government is a “middle of the road” between statism and anarchism. Statism is one extreme; individualism is the other. Anarchism is merely an unusually senseless form of statism; it is not an extreme of “freedom,” but the negation of the concept.
There are flaws in classical economics, to be sure, and even in its best modern heir, the Austrian school as represented by Ludwig von Mises. But capitalism is not perishing from such flaws. It is perishing from the absence of a rational philosophy. This absence alpne explains why the abundance of economic answers offered to our century by a better past has been ignored by the world and will go on being ignored.
Economics is invaluable as a supplement to philosophy. Like a body without a mind, however, it is worthless and impossible apart from philosophy.
“Capitalism,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, “is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.” …
Under capitalism, state and economics are separated just as state and church are separated and for the same reasons. … the policy of the govern- ment is: hands off! The term “laissez-faire capitalism,” therefore, is a redundancy, albeit a necessary one in today’s linguistic chaos. …
Historically, pure capitalism has never existed. It was, however, approached by the West during the period of the Industrial Revolution; the best example was America in the nineteenth century. That was the closest men have yet come to an unbreached recognition of rights and, therefore, to a free market.
Since rights are the means of subordinating society to the moral law, capitalism is the only moral social system. …
What capitalism guarantees is that, if a man does choose to think, he can act accordingly.
A free market, as we know, is a corollary of a free mind. The point here is the converse: a free mind is a corollary of a free market. Every other social system clashes with every essential aspect of the mind’s function. …
From the moment of a free society’s first conscious breach of individual rights, the principle of independence has been dropped in favor of the principle of social conformity. The arena open to independence, therefore, starts to shrink and goes on shrinking (barring a fundamental change in the society’s philosophy)….
Intellectually, independence requires that one form one s own judgments. But a paternalistic society accepts the opposite premise: since men are incompetent to think for themselves, its advocates say, the government will do the thinking for them, by defining the right ideas and behavioral standards, then sending out the appropriate enforcement squads. …
Individualism and independence rise and fall together. Any other politics represents the opposite of the virtue of independence; it represents a form of slavery.
To the statist, moral judgment by the individual is intolerable. The authorities must have men who will heed them in all matters, including human interaction and association; it is impossible to plan a person’s actions for him if he retains the power to veto social arrangements by reference to his personal moral code. …
What statists of every kind need is not the cognitive self-assertion implicit in virtue, but the opposite; in this instance, they need a man’s willingness not to judge others independently, but to praise, blame, “negotiate,” or stay neutral, according to the requirements of “the community.” …
Since an individual under freedom chooses his own actions, he can be held responsible for them. Moral judgment of such a man is necessary and possible. If a man acts under compulsion, however, he cannot be held responsible. ..
In regard to action, justice consists in seeking and granting the earned, both in spirit and in matter; the essential rule is the trader principle.
The moral justification of capitalism is not that it serves the public. Capitalism does achieve the “public good” (appropriately defined), but this is an effect, not a cause; it is a secondary consequence, not an evaluative primary. The justification of capitalism is that it is the system which imple- ments a scientific code of morality; i.e., which recognizes man’s metaphysical nature and needs; i.e., which is based on reason and reality. A secondary consequence of such a system is that any group who lives under it and acts properly has to benefit. …
here can be no temptation to sacrifice any particle of the moral primary— which in this context is man’s rights—for the sake of any “social gains” whatsoever, whether imagined or real.
The most eloquent statement of this last point is given by Hank Rearden, the industrialist in Atlas Shrugged, during his trial before a panel of judges in a mixed-economy courtroom. He has been charged (correctly) with breaking an economic regulation which, the court stated, was designed to promote the “public good.” Rearden answers, in part:
I could say to you that you do not serve the public good— that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices—that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation—as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise.
If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own—1 would refuse. I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered,
I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!
…
Nor does “laissez-faire” mean that “anything goes”; in a republic, “nothing goes” that infringes man’s rights. …
The economic value of goods and services is their price (this term subsumes all forms of price, including wages, rents, and interest rates); and prices on a free market are determined by the law of supply and demand. Men create products and offer them for sale; this is supply. Other men offer their own products in exchange; this is demand. (The medium of exchange is money.) “Supply” and “demand,” therefore, are two perspectives on a single fact: a man’s supply is his demand; it is his only means of demanding another man’s supply.
The market price of a product is determined by the conjunction of two evaluations, i.e., by the voluntary agreement of sellers and buyers. If sellers decide to charge a thousand dollars for a barrel of flour because they feel “greed,” there will be no buyers; if buyers decide to pay only a nickel a barrel because they feel “need,” there will be no sellers and no flour. The market price is based not on arbitrary wishes, but on a definite mechanism: it is at once the highest price sellers can command and the lowest price buyers can find. Economic value thus determined is objective.
An objective value is an existent (in this instance, a product) as evaluated by a volitional consciousness pursuing a certain purpose in a certain cognitive context; the evaluation (including the purpose) must be rational, i.e., determined ultimately by the facts of reality. To quote again Ayn Rand’s formulation: “Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.
The above describes precisely how economic evaluations are made on a free market. Men are left free to judge the worth of various products, the worth to them; each judges in accordance with his own needs and goals as he himself understands these to apply in a particular context. Market value thus entails valuer, purpose, beneficiary, choice, knowledge—all the insignia of objective value as against the revealed variety. …
It is essential here to grasp Ayn Rand’s distinction between two forms of the objective: the philosophically objective and the socially objective. “By ‘philosophically objective,’” she writes,
I mean a value estimated from the standpoint of the best possible to man, i.e., by the criterion of the most rational mind possessing the greatest knowledge, in a given category, in a given period, and in a defined context (nothing can be estimated in an undefined context). For instance, it can be rationally proved that the airplane is objectively of immeasurably greater value to man (to man at his best) than the bicycle—and that the works of Victor Hugo are objectively of immeasurably greater value than trueconfession magazines. But if a given man’s intellectual potential can barely manage to enjoy true confessions, there is no reason why his meager earnings, the product of his effort, should be spent on books he cannot read—or on subsidizing the airplane industry, if his own transportation needs do not extend beyond the range of a bicycle. (Nor is there any reason why the rest of mankind should be held down to the level of his literary taste, his engineering capacity, and his income. Values are not determined by fiat nor by majority vote.)
Just as the number of its adherents is not a proof of an idea’s truth or falsehood, of an art work’s merit or demerit, of a product’s efficacy or inefficacy—so the freemarket value of goods or services does not necessarily represent their philosophically objective value, but only their socially objective value, i.e., the sum of the individual judgments of all the men involved in trade at a given time, the sum of what they valued, each in the context of his own life.”
The philosophically objective value of a product is the evaluation reached by the men with the best grasp of reality (in a specific category and context), regardless of whether or not they are involved in buying and selling the product.
The socially objective value is the evaluation reached by the actual buyers and sellers.
These two evaluations are not necessarily the same, because the buyers and sellers may lack the requisite grasp of reality; they may lack the knowledge which would make the product, as judged by their own mind, a need, a pleasure, a value (or, conversely, which would make the product a disvalue).
Economic power is the power resulting from the possession of wealth. Political power is the power resulting from the government’s monopoly on coercion. In essence, the difference is that between purchase and plunder. “[E]conomic power,” in Ayn Rand’s words, “is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction.” The first is aimed at man’s faculty of choice; the second (in a statist context) aims to negate the faculty of choice. The first appeals to motivation by love; the second, to motivation by fear. …
Wealth is not a static quantity, either; it, too, has to be created; and the more wealth there is in the world, the easier it is for everyone to flourish economically. Thus the relative riches of the poorest Western drone today, thanks to the “robber barons,” as against the standard of living of the most industrious serf under Pope Gregory VII or King Louis IX.
Ayn Rand summarizes in a definitive formulation:
Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.
This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man’s life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics)
Here again we see man’s need of unit-economy. Concepts condense percepts; philosophy, as the science of the broadest integrations, condenses concepts; and art then condenses philosophy—by returning to the perceptual level, this time in a form impregnated with a profound abstract meaning.
There is an obvious analogy here between language and art. Both blend parts (whether perceptual units or philosophical principles) into a whole by similar means: both complete a process of conceptual integration by the use of sensuous elements. Both thereby convert abstractions into the equivalent of concretes. As Miss Rand puts it, both convert abstractions “into specific entities open to man’s direct perception. The claim that ‘art is a universal language’ is not an empty metaphor, it is literally true—in the sense of the psychoepistemological function performed bv art.”
(“Psycho-epistemology” is an invaluable term of Ayn Rand’s, albeit one that pertains more to psychology than to philosophy. “Psycho-epistemology” designates “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” Epistemology, in essence, studies conscious, volitional processes; a “psycho-epistemological” method or function is one that also involves subconscious, automatized elements.) ….
Since the function of art is to bring man’s concepts to the perceptual level, the task of the artist is not to present conceptual information, but to provide man with a definite experience. It is the experience not of thinking, but of seeing, as he contemplates the artistic concrete: “This is what reality is like.”
Romanticism
“Romanticism” denotes an art movement dating from the early nineteenth century; among its greatest writers are Victor Hugo, Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Schiller, and Edmond Rostand. This movement must not be confused,with what is called “Romanticism” in philosophy, i.e., the Fichte-SchellingSchopenhauer brand of mysticism. Judged by essentials, Ayn Rand holds, these two movements are opposites. …
“Romanticism,” in Ayn Rand’s definition, “is a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition.” …
What dominated the culture was a largely subconscious confidence in the power of man’s mind; the political corollary was the spread of capitalism. Thus arose an art intoxicated by the discovery of man’s unlimited potential, an art centering on choice and freedom, emphasizing the ability of the individual to select his course and to act accordingly.
The Romanticists were generally unphilosophical and did not identify their roots in the above terms. They did not know that Aristotle was their father or that freedom requires capitalism. On the contrary, most believed in loose versions of mysticism and altruism. They were united only on the principle that man is self-directed and goal-directed, that he is an initiator moved by values he has freely accepted. What these artists rejected was a single tenet: determinism (on which Naturalism was later based). They rejected the idea of man as a puppet, whether of God or society. …
Naturalism
When the era of Naturalism arrived, its exponents soon dropped the abstract approach to characterization. The writer, it was increasingly said, must be “value-free”; he must not project a hero or any other departure from “men as they are”; the latter, being socially determined, are inevitable. …
In their conscious attempt, however, as Ayn Rand writes, the Naturalists were “dedicated to the negation of art. . . . In answer to the question: ‘What is man?’ . . . [they said:] These are the folks next door.’ Art—the integrator of metaphysics, the concretizer of man’s widest abstractions—was shrinking to the level of a plodding, concrete-bound dolt. . . .”
(Given their belief in human helplessness, the Naturalists were drawn to the depiction of negatives: of poverty, wretchedness, ugliness, corruption. In the end, their portrait of doom became so stark that the school broke up. Its remnants merged into the depravity school of literature, which offers not sta- tistical averages, but, once again, metaphysical projections: this time of man not as potential hero, but as inevitable monster.)
To the Romanticist, intoxicated as he is with the possible, it is a virtue, not a flaw, that the men and events he portrays are exceptional, dramatic, heroic, beautiful. It is a badge of honor that he does not record “things as they are,” but looks beyond them. In his view, the people one sees represent merely the choices that specific individuals happen to have made. Such people do not exhaust that which counts about man: the choices open to him by his nature. In this regard, the Romanticist follows (while the Naturalist denies) what Ayn Rand calls “the most important principle of the esthetics of literature.” The principle was first formulated, logically enough, by the father of logic.
The duel between plato and aristotle
If man is the conceptual being, philosophy is the prime mover of history.
A conceptual being is moved by the content of his mind— ultimately, by his broadest integrations. Man’s actions depend on his values. His values depend on his metaphysics. His conclusions in every field depend on his method of using his consciousness, his epistemology. In the life of such a being, fundamental ideas, explicit or implicit, are the ruling power. …
Philosophy is not the only cause of the course of the centuries. It is the ultimate cause, the cause of all the other causes. …
The books of philosophers are the beginning. Step by step, the books turn into motives, passions, statues, politicians, and headlines.
Philosophy determines essentials, not details. If men act on certain principles (and choose not to rethink them), the actors will reach the end result logically inherent in those principles. Philosophy does not, however, determine all the concrete forms a principle can take, or the oscillations within a progression, or the time intervals among its steps. Philosophy determines only the basic direction—and outcome. …
For two millennia, Western history has been the expression of a philosophic duel. The duelists are Plato and Aristotle.
Plato is the first thinker to systematize other-worldliness. His metaphysics, identified in Objectivist terms, upholds the primacy of consciousness; his epistemology, intrinsicism and its corollary, mysticism; his ethics, the code of sacrifice.
Aristotle, Plato’s devoted student for twenty years, is the first thinker to systematize worldliness. His metaphysics upholds the primacy of existence; his epistemology, the validity of reason; his ethics, the ideal of personal happiness. …
The first battle in the historical duel was won decisively by Plato, through the work of such disciples as Plotinus and Augustine.
The Dark Ages were dark on principle. As the barbarians were sacking the body of Rome, the Church was struggling to annul the last vestiges of its spirit, wrenching the West away from nature, astronomy, philosophy, nudity, pleasure, instilling in men’s souls the adoration of Eternity, with all its temporal consequences. …
For centuries, Aristotle’s works were lost to the West. Then Thomas Aquinas turned Aristotle loose in that desert of crosses and gallows. Reason, Aquinas taught, is not a handmaiden of faith, but an autonomous faculty, which men must use and obey; the physical world is not an insubstantial emanation, but solid, knowable, real; life is not to be cursed, but to be lived. Within a century, the West was on the threshold of the Renaissance.
The period from Aquinas through Locke and Newton was a transition, at once gingerly and accelerating. The rediscovery of pagan civilization, the outpouring of explorations and inventions, the rise of man-glorifying art and of earthly philosophy, the affirmation of man s individual rights, the inte- gration of earlier leads into the first system of modern science—all of it represents a prodigious effort to throw off the medieval shackles and reorient the Western mind. It was the prologue to a climax, the first unabashedly secular culture since antiquity: the Enlightenment. Once again, thinkers ac- cepted reason as uncontroversial. …
Faith and force, as Ayn Rand observed, entail each other, a fact exemplified in the feudalism of the medieval centuries. But reason and freedom entail each other, too. The purest example of this fact was the emergence of a new nation in the New World. It was the first time a nation had ever been founded consciously on a philosophic theory. The theory was the principle of rights.
Man, America’s Founding Fathers said in essence, is the rational animal. Therefore the individual, not the state, is sovereign; man must be left free to think, and to act accordingly. …
The combination of reason and freedom is potent. In the nineteenth century, it led to the Industrial Revolution, to Romantic art, and to an authentic good will among men; it led to an unprecedented burst of wealth, beauty, happiness. Wherever they looked, people saw a smiling present and a radiant future. The idea of continuous improvement came to be taken for granted, as though it were an axiom. Progress, people thought, is now automatic and inevitable. …
The whole magnificent development—including science, America, and industrialization—was an anomaly. The ideas on which the development rested were on their way out even as they were giving birth to all these epochal achievements.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes planted Platonism once again at the base of philosophy. Thanks to their intrinsicist element, the Aristotelians had always been vulnerable to attack; above all, they were vulnerable in two crucial areas, the theory of concepts and the validation of ethics. (Ethics, Aristotle had taught, is not a field susceptible to objective demonstration.) …
Kant is a different case. He denies Existence not in the name of a fantasy, but of nothing; he denies it in the name of a dimension that is, by his own insistent statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. The mind, he says, is cut off not merely from some aspects of “things in themselves,” but from everything real; any cognitive faculty is cut off because it has a nature, any nature. Man’s proper goal, says Kant, is not happiness, whether in this life or the next. The “radically evil” creature (Kant’s words) should sacrifice his desires from duty, as an end in itself. …
Occasional fig leaves aside, Kant offers humanity no alternative to the realm of that which is, and no reward for renouncing it. He is the first philosopher in history to reject reality, thought, and values, not for the sake of some “higher” version of them, but for the sake of the rejection. The power in behalf of which his genius speaks is not “pure reason,” but pure destruction.…
Kant, surrounded by the Enlightenment, did not develop the political implications of his philosophy. His followers, however, had no trouble in seeing the point; from the premises he supplied, Fichte, Hegel, Marx (and Bismarck) drew the conclusion. Thus the two most passionately antifreedom movements in history, Communism and Fascism, along with all their lesser, welfare-statist antecedents and kin.
Modern statism emanated, as it had to, from the “land of poets and philosophers.” The reason is not the “innate depravity” of the Germans, but the nature of their premier philosopher. …
Objectivism is preeminently an American viewpoint, even though most people, here and abroad, know nothing about it. It is American because it identifies the implicit base of the United States, as the country was originally conceived. …
To the end of her life, Ayn Rand upheld her distinctive “benevolent-universe” premise. The good, she maintained, can be achieved; “it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.”4 So long as there is no censorship, she taught, there is a chance for persuasion to succeed.
If no definite prediction can be made, she taught, then in reason only one action is proper: to go on fighting for reason.
“All things excellent,” said Spinoza, “are as difficult as they are rare.” Since human values are not automatic, his statement is undeniable.
In another respect, however—and this is Ayn Rand’s unique perspective—the task ahead is not difficult.
To save the world is the simplest thing in the world.
All one has to do is think.