The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 32

["What Is Capitalism?" CUI, 19.]

The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state-it is only philosophy that can lead them out.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 58; pb 50.]

In philosophy, the fundamentals are metaphysics and epistemology. On the basis of a knowable universe and of a rational faculty's competence to grasp it, you can define man's proper ethics, politics and esthetics. (And if you make an error, you retain the means and the frame of reference necessary to correct it.) But what will you accomplish if you advocate honesty in ethics, while telling men that there is no such thing as truth, fact or reality? What will you do if you advocate political freedom on the grounds that you feel it is good, and find yourself confronting an ambitious thug who declares that he feels quite differently?

The layman's error, in regard to philosophy, is the tendency to accept consequences while ignoring their causes-to take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as "self-evident" of as an irreducible primary, while negating its preconditions.

["Philosophical Detection," PWNI, 14; pb 12.]

Philosophy provides man with a comprehensive view of life. In order to evaluate it properly, ask yourself what a given theory, if accepted, would do to a human life, starting with your own.

[Ibid., 19; pb 16.]

Man came into his own in Greece, some two-and-a-half thousand years ago. The birth of philosophy marked his adulthood; not the content of any particular system of philosophy, but deeper: the concept of philosophy-the realization that a comprehensive view of existence is to be reached by man's mind.

Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly a.s.sociated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza-but how many others? It is earlier than we think.

If you observe that ever since Hume and Kant (mainly Kant, because Hume was merely the Bertrand Russell of his time) philosophy has been striving to prove that man's mind is impotent, that there's no such thing as reality and we wouldn't be able to perceive it if there were-you will realize the magnitude of the treason involved.

["The Chickens' Homecoming," NL, 107.]

The foundation of any culture, the source responsible for all of its manifestations, is its philosophy. What does modern philosophy offer us? Virtually the only point of agreement among today's leading philosophers is that there is no such thing as philosophy-and that this knowledge const.i.tutes their claim to the t.i.tle of philosophers. With a hysterical virulence, strange in advocates of skepticism, they insist that there can be no valid philosophical systems (i.e., there can be no integrated, consistent, comprehensive view of existence)-that there are no answers to fundamental questions-there is no such thing as truth-there is no such thing as reason, and the battle is only over what should replace it: "linguistic games" or unbridled feelings?

["Our Cultural Value-Deprivation," TO, April 1966, 4.]

If, in the course of philosophical detection, you find yourself, at times, stopped by the indignantly bewildered question: "How could anyone arrive at such nonsense?"-you will begin to understand it when you discover that evil philosophies are systems of rationalization.

["Philosophical Detection," PWNI, 22; pb 18.]

Even though philosophy is held in a (today) well-earned contempt by the other college departments, it is philosophy that determines the nature and direction of all the other courses, because it is philosophy that formulates the principles of epistemology, i.e., the rules by which men are to acquire knowledge. The influence of the dominant philosophic theories permeates every other department, including the physical sciences.

["The Comprachicos," NL, 224.]

Philosophy is the foundation of science; epistemology is the foundation of philosophy. It is with a new approach to epistemology that the rebirth of philosophy has to begin.

[ITOE, 99.].

See also ARISTOTLE; COMMON SENSE; CULTURE; EPISTEMOLOGY; ESTHETICS; HISTORY; IDEOLOGY; INTELLECTUALS; LINGUISTIC a.n.a.lYSIS; LOGICAL POSITIVISM; MAN; METAPHYSICS; MILL, JOHN STUART; MORALITY; NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH; OBJECTIVISM; POLITICS; PRAGMATISM; PRINCIPLES; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; RELIGION; SCIENCE; SELF-EVIDENT.

Photography. A certain type of confusion about the relations.h.i.+p between scientific discoveries and art, leads to a frequently asked question: Is photography an art? The answer is: No. It is a technical, not a creative, skill. Art requires a selective re-creation. A camera cannot perform the basic task of painting: a visual conceptualization, i.e., the creation of a concrete in terms of abstract essentials. The selection of camera angles, lighting or lenses is merely a selection of the means to reproduce various aspects of the given, i.e., of an existing concrete. There is an artistic element in some photographs, which is the result of such selectivity as the photographer can exercise, and some of them can be very beautiful-but the same artistic element (purposeful selectivity) is present in many utilitarian products: in the better kinds of furniture, dress design, automobiles, packaging, etc. The commercial art work in ads (or posters or postage stamps) is frequently done by real artists and has greater esthetic value than many paintings, but utilitarian objects cannot be cla.s.sified as works of art.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 74.1 See also ART; ESTHETICS.

Physical Force. Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate-do you hear me? no man may start -the use of physical force against others.

To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. 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.

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason-as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no "right" to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a subst.i.tute, with a gun in place of a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument-is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act for his own rational interest; your gun demands of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does. You place him in a world where the price of his life is the surrender of all the virtues required by life-and death by a process of gradual destruction is all that you and your system will achieve, when death is made to be the ruling power, the winning argument in a society of men.

Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: "Your money or your life," or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: "Your children's education or your life," the meaning of that ultimatum is: "Your mind or your life"-and neither is possible to man without the other.

[GS, FNI, 164; pb 133.]

The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man-or group or society or government-has the right to a.s.sume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 31; pb 32.]

Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.

The precondition of a civilized society is the barring of physical force from social relations.h.i.+ps-thus establis.h.i.+ng the principle that if men wish to deal with one another, they may do so only by means of reason: by discussion, persuasion and voluntary, uncoerced agreement.

["The Nature of Government," VOS, 146; pb 108.]

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

["The Comprachicos," NL., 234.]

A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or "welfare." Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this att.i.tude is Galileo.) ["What Is Capitalism?" CUI, 17.]

Force is the antonym and negation of thought. Understanding is not produced by a punch in the face; intellectual clarity does not flow from the muzzle of a gun; the weighing of evidence is not mediated by spasms of terror. The mind is a cognitive faculty; it cannot achieve knowledge or conviction apart from or against its perception of reality; it cannot be forced.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 336; pb 309.]

An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying 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.

["What Is Capitalism?" CUI, 23.]

To deal with men by force is as impractical as to deal with nature by persuasion.

["The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNl, 39; pb 32.]

If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival. who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them -so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence. I offer you any criminal or any dictators.h.i.+p.

["What Is Capitalism?" CUI, 17.]

One does not and cannot "negotiate" with brutality, nor give it the benefit of the doubt. The moral absolute should be: if and when, in any dispute, one side initiates the use of physical force, that side is wrong- and no consideration or discussion of the issues is necessary or appropriate.

["Brief Comments," TO, March 1969, 1.]

When a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law-men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims-then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've pa.s.sed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.

["'The Meaning of Money," FNI. 109; pb 92.]

There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent's brain an argument-or a bullet.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 90; pb 90.]

Those who declare, today, that force is the only way to deal with men (with the unstated footnote that they, the speakers, would be safe in the position of rulers), ought to take a careful look at the history of absolute monarchies-and of modern dictators.h.i.+ps as well. Under the rule of force, it is the rulers who are in greatest danger, who live-and die-in permanent terror. The court intrigues, the plots and counterplots, the coups d'etat, the known executions and secret a.s.sa.s.sinations are a matter of record. So are the purges of Party leaders and their cliques, in n.a.z.i Germany and Soviet Russia.

["A Nation's Unity," ARL, II, 2, 2.]

Altruism gives to the use of force a moral sanction, making it not only an unavoidable practical recourse, but also a positive virtue, an expression of militant righteousness.

A man is morally the property of others-of those others it is his duty to serve-argue Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, explicitly or by implication. As such, a man has no moral right to refuse to make the requisite sacrifices for others. If he attempts it, he is depriving men of what is properly theirs, he is violating men's rights, their right to his service-and it is, therefore, an a.s.sertion of morality if others intervene forcibly and compel him to fulfill his obligations. "Social justice" in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 90; pb 91.]

The use of physical force-even its retaliatory use-cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors' intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

Visualize, for example, what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt.

The retaliatory use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules to define punishments and enforcement procedures. Men who attempt to prosecute crimes, without such rules, are a lynch mob. If a society left the retaliatory use of force in the hands of individual citizens, it would degenerate into mob rule, lynch law and an endless series of b.l.o.o.d.y private feuds or vendettas.

If physical force is to be barred from social relations.h.i.+ps, men need an inst.i.tution charged with the task of protecting their rights under an objective code of rules.

This is the task of a government-of a proper government-its basic task, its only moral justification and the reason why men do need a government.

A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control-i.e., under objectively defined laws.

["The Nature of Government," VOS, 146; pb 108.]

A unilateral breach of contract involves an indirect use of physical force: it consists, in essence, of one man receiving the material values, goods or services of another, then refusing to pay for them and thus keeping them by force (by mere physical possession), not by right-i.e., keeping them without the consent of their owner. Fraud involves a similarly indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values without their owner's consent, under false pretenses or false promises. Extortion is another variant of an indirect use of force: it consists of obtaining material values, not in exchange for values, but by the threat of force, violence or injury.

[Ibid., 150; pb 111.]

See also ALTRUISM; CRIME; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FRAUD; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICE; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; MORALITY; OBJECTIVE THEORY of VALUES; PRODUCTION; REASON; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; SELFISHNESS; STATISM; WAR.

Pity. Pity for the guilty is treason to the innocent.

["Bootleg Romanticism," RM, 123; pb 131.]

See also COMPa.s.sION; COMPROMISE; MERCY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT.

Platonic Realism. The "extreme realists" or Platonists,... hold that abstractions exist as real ent.i.ties or archetypes in another dimension of reality and that the concretes we perceive are merely their imperfect reflections, but the concretes evoke the abstractions in our mind. (According to Plato, they do so by evoking the memory of the archetypes which we had known, before birth, in that other dimension.) [ITOE, 2.].

The extreme realist (Platonist) and the moderate realist (Aristotelian) schools of thought regard the referents of concepts as intrinsic, i.e., as "universals" inherent in things (either as archetypes or as metaphysical essences), as special existents unrelated to man's consciousness-to be perceived by man directly, like any other kind of concrete existents, but perceived by some non-sensory or extra-sensory means.

[Ibid., 70.]

The Platonist school begins by accepting the primacy of consciousness, by reversing the relations.h.i.+p of consciousness to existence, by a.s.suming that reality must conform to the content of consciousness, not the other way around-on the premise that the presence of any notion in man's mind proves the existence of a corresponding referent in reality.

[Ibid., 71.]

The content of true reality, according to Plato, is a set of universals or Forms-in effect, a set of disembodied abstractions representing that which is in common among various groups of particulars in this world. Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are non-material ent.i.ties in another dimension, independent of man's mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume-the concretes that make up this wortd-are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality.

Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal "man," they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect. To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous ent.i.ty-just as. if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous ent.i.ties.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 18; pb 27.]

See also ABSTRACTION (PROCESS of); ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ARISTOTLE; COLLECTIVISM; CONCEPT FORMATION; CONCEPTS; OBJECTlV!TY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; REASON.

Pleasure and Pain. Now in what manner does a human being discover the concept of "value"? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of "good or evil" in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of ent.i.ty he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man-and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness-serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it. The best ill.u.s.tration of this can be seen in the rare, freak cases of children who are born without the capacity to experience physical pain; such children do not survive for long; they have no means of discovering what can injure them, no warning signals, and thus a minor cut can develop into a deadly infection, or a major illness can remain undetected until it is too late to fight it.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 8; pb 17.]

The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure.... A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel -unti) the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.

["Our Cultural Value-Deprivation," TO, April 1966, 3.]

See also EMOTIONS; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; LIFE; MILL, JOHN STUART; STANDARD of VALUE; SENSATIONS; SUBCONSCIOUS; SUFFFRING; UTILITARIANISM; VALUES; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.

Plot. A plot is a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.

The word "purposeful" in this definition has two applications: it applies to the author and to the characters of a novel. It demands that the author devise a logical structure of events, a sequence in which every major event is connected with, determined by and proceeds from the preceding events of the story-a sequence in which nothing is irrelevant, arbitrary or accidental, so that the logic of the events leads inevitably to a final resolution.

Such a sequence cannot be constructed unless the main characters of the novel are engaged in the pursuit of some purpose-unless they are motivated by some goals that direct their actions. In real life, only a process of final causation-i.e.. the process of choosing a goal, then taking the steps to achieve it-can give logical continuity, coherence and meaning to a man's actions. Only men striving to achieve a purpose can move through a meaningful series of events.

Contrary to the prevalent literary doctrines of today, it is realism that demands a plot structure in a novel. All human actions are goal-directed, consciously or subconsciously; purposelessness is contrary to man's nature: it is a state of neurosis. Therefore, if one is to present man as he is-as he is metaphysically, by his nature, in reality-one has to present him in goal-directed action.

["Basic Principles of Literature," RM, 59; pb 82.]

To present a story in terms of action means: to present it in terms of events. A story in which nothing happens is not a story. A story whose events are haphazard and accidental is either an inept conglomeration or, at best, a chronicle, a memoir, a reportorial recording, not a novel.

A chronicle, real or invented, may possess certain values; but these values are primarily informative-historical or sociological or psychological-not primarily esthetic or literary; they are only partly literary.

Since art is a selective re-creation and since events are the building blocks of a novel, a writer who fails to exercise selectivity in regard to events defaults on the most important aspect of his art.

[Ibid.]

Since a plot is the dramatization of goal-directed action, it has to be based on conflict; it may be one character's inner conflict or a conflict of goals and values between two or more characters. Since goals are not achieved automatically, the dramatization of a purposeful pursuit has to include obstacles; it has to involve a clash, a struggle-an action struggle, but not a purely physical one. Since art is a concretization of values, there are not many errors as bad esthetically-or as dull-as fist fights, chases, escapes and other forms of physical action, divorced from any psychological conflict or intellectual value-meaning. Physical action, as such, is not a plot nor a subst.i.tute for a plot-as many bad writers attempt to make it, particularly in today's television dramas.

This is the other side of the mind-body dichotomy that plagues literature. Ideas or psychological states divorced from action do not const.i.tute a story-and neither does physical action divorced from ideas and values.

[Ibid., 65; pb 86.]

To isolate and bring into clear focus, into a single issue or a single scene, the essence of a conflict which, in "real life," might be atomized and scattered over a lifetime in the form of meaningless clashes, to condense a long, steady drizzle of buckshot into the explosion of a blockbuster-that is the highest, hardest and most demanding function of art.

[Ibid., 61; pb 84.]