The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 27

It is highly doubtful that the pract.i.tioners and admirers of modern art have the intellectual capacity to understand its philosophical meaning; all they need to do is indulge the worst of their subconscious premises. But their leaders do understand the issue consciously: the father of modern art is Immanuel Kant (see his Critique of Judgment).

I do not know which is worse: to practice modern art as a colossal fraud or to do it sincerely.

Those who do not wish to be the pa.s.sive, silent victims of frauds of this kind, can learn from modern art the practical importance of philosophy, and the consequences of philosophical default. Specifically, it is the destruction of logic that disarmed the victims, and, more specifically, the destruction of definitions. Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

Works of art-tike everything else in the universe-are ent.i.ties of a specific nature: the concept requires a definition by their essential characteristics, which distinguish them from all other existing ent.i.ties. The genus of art works is: man-made objects which present a selective recreation of reality according to the artist's metaphysical value-judgments, by means of a specific material medium. The species are the works of the various branches of art, defined by the particular media which they employ and which indicate their relation to the various elements of man's cognitive faculty.

Man's need of precise definitions rests on the Law of Ident.i.ty: A is A, a thing is itself. A work of art is a specific ent.i.ty which possesses a specific nature. If it does not, it is not a work of art. If it is merely a material object, it belongs to some category of material objects-and if it does not belong to any particular category, it belongs to the one reserved for such phenomena: junk.

"Something made by an artist" is not a definition of art. A beard and a vacant stare are not the defining characteristics of an artist.

"Something in a frame hung on a wall" is not a definition of painting.

"Something with a number of pages in a binding" is not a definition of literature.

"Something piled together" is not a definition of sculpture.

"Something made of sounds produced by anything" is not a definition of music.

"Something glued on a flat surface" is not a definition of any art. There is no art that uses glue as a medium. Blades of gra.s.s glued on a sheet of paper to represent gra.s.s might be good occupational therapy for r.e.t.a.r.ded children-though I doubt it-but it is not art.

"Because I felt like it" is not a definition or validation of anything.

There is no place for whim in any human activity-if it is to be regarded as human. There is no place for the unknowable, the unintelligible, the undefinable, the non-objective in any human product. This side of an insane asylum, the actions of a human being are motivated by a conscious purpose; when they are not, they are of no interest to anyone outside a psychotherapist's office. And when the pract.i.tioners of modern art declare that they don't know what they are doing or what makes them do it, we should take their word for it and give them no further consideration.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 76.]

As an example of an entire field of activity based on nothing but the Argument from Intimidation, I give you modern art-where, in order to prove that they do possess the special insight possessed only by the mystic "elite," the populace are trying to surpa.s.s one another in loud exclamations on the splendor of some bare (but smudged) piece of canvas.

["The Argument from Intimidation," VOS, 193; pb 140.]

Just as modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to destroy the conceptual level of man's consciousness and even the perceptual level, reducing man's awareness to mere sensations-so modern art and literature are dominated by the attempt to disintegrate man's consciousness and reduce it to mere sensations, to the "enjoyment" of meaningless colors, noises and moods.

The art of any given period or culture is a faithful mirror of that culture's philosophy. If you see obscene, dismembered monstrosities leering at you from today's esthetic mirrors-the aborted creations of mediocrity, irrationality and panic-you are seeing the embodied, concretized reality of the philosophical premises that dominate today's culture. Only in this sense can those manifestations be called "art"-not by the intention or accomplishment of their perpetrators.

["Basic Principles of Literature," RM, 79; pb 97.]

The composite picture of man that emerges from the art of our time is the gigantic figure of an aborted embryo whose limbs suggest a vaguely anthropoid shape, who twists his upper extremity in a frantic quest for a light that cannot penetrate its empty sockets, who emits inarticulate sounds resembling snarls and moans, who crawls through a b.l.o.o.d.y muck, red froth dripping from his jaws, and struggles to throw the froth at his own non-existent face, who pauses periodically and, lifting the stumps of his arms, screams in abysmal terror at the universe at large.

Engendered by generations of anti-rational philosophy, three emotions dominate the sense of life of modern man: fear, guilt and pity (more precisely, self-pity). Fear, as the appropriate emotion of a creature deprived of his means of survival, his mind; guilt, as the appropriate emotion of a creature devoid of moral values; pity, as the means of escape from these two, as the only response such a creature could beg for. A sensitive, discriminating man, who has absorbed that sense of life, but retained some vestige of self-esteem, will avoid so revealing a profession as art. But this does not stop the others.

Fear, guilt and the quest for pity combine to set the trend of art in the same direction, in order to express, justify and rationalize the artists' own feelings. To justify a chronic fear, one has to portray existence as evil; to escape from guilt and arouse pity, one has to portray man as impotent and innately loathsome. Hence the compet.i.tion among modern artists to find ever lower levels of depravity and ever higher degrees of mawkishness-a compet.i.tion to shock the public out of its wits and jerk its tears. Hence the frantic search for misery, the descent from compa.s.sionate studies of alcoholism and s.e.xual perversion to dope, incest, psychosis, murder, cannibalism.

["Bootleg Romanticism," RM, 122; pb 130.]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; ART; DEFINITIONS; GENUS and SPECIES; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; PHILOSOPHY; REASON; SENSATIONS; SUBJECTIVISM: WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.

Money. Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, h.o.m.ogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Cold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple harter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you'll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish. time you wish.

["Egalitarianism and Inflation," PWNI, 154; pb 127.]

Money cannot function as money, i.e., as a medium of exchange, unless it is backed by actual. unconsumed goods.

["Hunger and Freedom," ARL, III, 22, 3.]

So you think that money is the root of all evil? ... Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor-your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions -and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made-before it can be looted or mooched-made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

["The Meaning of Money," FNI, 104; pb 88.]

Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders.

[Ibid., 105; pb 89.]

So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another-their only subst.i.tute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

[Ibid., 108; pb 91.]

Most people lump together into the same category all men who become rich, refusing to consider the essential question: the source of the riches, the means by which the wealth was acquired.

Money is a tool of exchange; it represents wealth only so long as it can be traded for material goods and services. Wealth does not grow in nature; it has to be produced by men. Nature gives us only the raw materials, but it is man's mind that has to discover the knowledge of how to use them. It is man's thinking and labor that transform the materials into food, clothing, shelter or television sets-into all the goods that men require for their survival, comfort and pleasure.

Behind every step of humanity's long climb from the cave to New York City, there is the man who took that step for the first time-the man who discovered how to make a fire or a wheel or an airplane or an electric light.

When people refuse to consider the source of wealth, what they refuse to recognize is the fact that wealth is the product of man's intellect, of his creative ability, fully as much as is art, science, philosophy or any other human value.

["The Money-Making Personality," TOF, Feb. 1983, 2.]

Money is a great power-because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called "academic freedom," it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers.

["The Sanction of the Victims," TOF, April 1982, 7.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; GOLD STANDARD; INFLATION; MARKET VALUE; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; PURCHASING POWER; SANCTION of the VICTIM; SAVINGS; SELFISHNESS; TRADER PRINCIPLE.

Monopoly. The alleged purpose of the Ant.i.trust laws was to protect compet.i.tion; that purpose was based on the socialistic fallacy that a free, unregulated market will inevitably lead to the establishment of coercive monopolies. But, in fact, no coercive monopoly has ever been or ever can be established by means of free trade on a free market. Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of compet.i.tors into a given field, by legislative action. (For a full demonstration of this fact, I refer you to the works of the best economists.) ["Ant.i.trust: The Rule of Unreason," TON, Feb. 1962, 5.]

A "coercive monopoly" is a business concern that can set its prices and production policies independent of the market, with immunity from compet.i.tion, from the law of supply and demand. An economy dominated by such monopolies would be rigid and stagnant.

The necessary precondition of a coercive monopoly is closed entry-the barring of all competing producers from a given field. This can be accomplished only by an act of government intervention, in the form of special regulations, subsidies, or franchises. Without government a.s.sistance, it is impossible for a would-be monopolist to set and maintain his prices and production policies independent of the rest of the economy. For if he attempted to set his prices and production at a level that would yield profits to new entrants significantly above those available in other fields, compet.i.tors would be sure to invade his industry.

[Alan Greenspan, "Ant.i.trust," CUI, 68.]

See also ANt.i.tRUST LAWS; COMPEt.i.tION; ECONOMIC POWER us. POLITICAL POWER; FREE MARKET; INTERVENTIONISM (ECO NOMIC).

Moral Cowardice. Moral cowardice is fear of upholding the good because it is good, and fear of opposing the evil because it is evil.

["Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt," TO, Jan. 1966, 5.) Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser's belief in the supremacy of evil, which means-not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing, blinding panic-that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.

[Ibid., 4.]

See also APPEAs.e.m.e.nT; COMPROMISE; COURAGE and CONFIDENCE; EVIL; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY.

Moral Judgment. One must never fail to p.r.o.nounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man's character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pa.s.s moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguis.h.i.+ng good from evil.

It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. When your impartial att.i.tude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you-whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

But to p.r.o.nounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character: one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind's judgment of the facts of reality-so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.

["How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?" VOS, 89; pb 71.]

If people did not indulge in such abject evasions as the claim that some contemptible liar "means well"-that a mooching b.u.m "can't help it"-that a juvenile delinquent "needs love"-that a criminal "doesn't know any better"-that a power-seeking politician is moved by patriotic concern for "the public good"-that communists are merely "agrarian reformers"-the history of the past few decades, or centuries, would have been different.

[Ibid., 93; pb 73.]

The precept: "Judge not, that ye be not judged" ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is .a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; 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.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one's mood, one's memorized slogans or one's snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that "everybody is white" or "everybody is black" or "everybody is neither white nor black, but gray," is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one's feelings, "instincts" or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one p.r.o.nounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer "Why?" and to prove one's case-to oneself and to any rational inquirer.

[Ibid., 91; pb 72.]

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life....

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

[GS, FNI, 216; pb 173.]

Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not ot psychological diagnosis. Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on perceivable, demonstrable facts. A man's moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions-not on the basis of inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious.

A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious. His psychological problems are his private concern which is not to be paraded in public and not to be made a burden on innocent victims or a hunting ground for poaching psychologizers. Morality demands that one treat and judge men as responsible adults.

This means that one grants a man the respect of a.s.suming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are-not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning. One neither speaks nor listens to people in code.

["The Psychology of 'Psychologizing,' "TO, March 1971, 5.]

It is not man's subconscious, but his conscious mind that is subject to his direct control-and to moral judgment. It is a specific individual's conscious mind that one judges (on the basis of objective evidence) in order to judge his moral character.

... The alternative is not: rash, indiscriminate moralizing or cowardly, evasive moral neutrality-i.e., condemnation without knowledge or the refusal to know, in order not to condemn. These are two interchangeable variants of the same motive: escape from the responsibility of cognition and of moral judgment.

[Ibid., 6.]

See also ABSOLUTES; CHARACTER; COMPROMISE; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; EVIL; JUSTICE; MORALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; "PSYCHOLOGIZING"; RATIONALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.

Moral.Practical Dichotomy. Your impracticable creed ... [inculcates a] lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil- and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain-then your choice is to be moral or to live.

The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man's existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils d.a.m.ned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical "good" was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical "evil" was production, you believe that robbery is practical.

Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.

Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures-and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless s.l.u.t, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral.

If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple d.a.m.nation-of yourself, of life, of virtue-in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

[GS, FNI, 214; pb 171.]

See also ALTRUISM; "DUTY"; EVIL; GOOD, the; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; PLEASURE and PAIN; RATIONALITY; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STANDARD of VALUE.

Morality. What is morality, or ethics? It is 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. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all-and why?

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 2; pb 13.]

Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival....

I quote from Galt's speech: "Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a vatue-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. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics-the standard by which one judges what is good or evit-is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.

Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

[Ibid., 16; pb 23.]

Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man-in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

[Ibid., 19; pb 25.]

Life or death is man's only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.

["Causality Versus Duty," PWNI, 118; pb 99.]

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.