The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 13

An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection-to the conceptual identification of your inner states-you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception....

In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: "What do I feel?" and "Why do I feel it?"

["Philosophical Detection," PWNI, 20; pb 17.]

There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.

[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]

Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions-if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too-he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 24; pb 28.]

An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carca.s.s of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.

[GS, FNI, 187; pb 151.]

The quality of a computer's output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators' eloquent term "gigo"-which means: "Garbage in, garbage out." The same formula applies to the relations.h.i.+p between a man's thinking and his emotions.

A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it's set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 7; pb 6.]

Emotions are not tools of cognition... one must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one's own considered judgment from one's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 64; pb 55.]

The concept "emotion" is formed by retaining the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of the psychological action (an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent) and by omitting the particular contents (the existents) as well as the degree of emotional intensity.

[ITOE, 41.].

See also AUTOMATIZATION; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; FREUD; HAPPINESS; HOSTILITY; INTROSPECTION; LONELINESS; I.OVE; MOTIVATION; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PLEASURE and PAIN; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; SENSE of LIFE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUBCONSClOUS; VALUES; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.

End in Itself. See Ultimate Value.

Enlightenment, Age of. The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 102; pb 101.]

Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of G.o.d-and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.

In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from G.o.d to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature.... Men's operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm-solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.

[Ibid., 107; pb 106.]

Just as there are no limits to man's knowledge, many [Enlightenment era] thinkers held, so there are no limits to man's moral improvement. If man is not yet perfect, they held, he is at least perfectible. Just as there are objective, natural laws in science, so there are objective, natural laws in ethics; and man is capable of discovering such laws and of acting in accordance with them. He is capable not only of developing his intellect, but also of living by its guidance. (This, at least, was the Enlightenment's ethical program and promise.) Whatever the vacillations or doubts of particular thinkers, the dominant trend represented a new vision and estimate of man: man as a self-sufficient, rational being and, therefore, as basically good, as potentially n.o.ble, as a value.

[Ibid., 109; pb 107.]

The father of this new world was a single philosopher: Aristotle. On countless issues, Aristotle's views differ from those of the Enlightenment. But, in terms of broad fundamentals, the philosophy of Aristotle is the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

[Ibid., Ill; pb 109.]

In epistemology, the European champions of the intellect had been unable to formulate a tenable view of the nature of reason or, therefore, to validate their proclaimed confidence in its power. As a result, from the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even earlier), the philosophy advocating reason was in the process of gradual, but accelerating, disintegration.

[Ibid., 115; pb 113.]

See also AMERICA; ARISTOTLE; DARK AGES; FOUNDING FATHERS; HISTORY; MIDDLE AGES; NATURE; REASON; RELIGION; RENAISSANCE; SKEPTICISM.

Ent.i.ty. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an ent.i.ty of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

[GS, FNI, 152; pb 125.]

The development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., ent.i.ties. Of man's five cognitive senses, only two provide him with a direct awareness of ent.i.ties: sight and touch. The other three senses-hearing, taste and smell-give him an awareness of some of an ent.i.ty's attributes (or of the consequences produced by an ent.i.ty): they tell him that something makes sounds, or something tastes sweet, or something smells fresh; but in order to perceive this something, he needs sight and/or touch.

The concept "ent.i.ty" is (implicitly) the start of man's conceptual development and the building-block of his entire conceptual structure. It is by perceiving ent.i.ties that man perceives the universe.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 46.]

The first concepts man forms are concepts of ent.i.ties-since ent.i.ties are the only primary existents. (Attributes cannot exist by themselves, they are merely the characteristics of ent.i.ties; motions are motions of ent.i.ties; relations.h.i.+ps are relations.h.i.+ps among ent.i.ties.) [ITOE, 18.].

This term [ent.i.ty] may be used in several senses. If you speak in the primary sense, "ent.i.ty" has to be defined ostensively- that is to say, by pointing. I can, however, give you three descriptive characteristics essential to the primary, philosophic use of the term, according to Objectivism. This is not a definition, because I'd have to rely ultimately on pointing to make these points clear, but it will give you certain criteria for the application of the term in the primary sense....

1. An ent.i.ty means a self-sufficient form of existence-as against a quality, an action, a relations.h.i.+p, etc., which are simply aspects of an ent.i.ty that we separate out by specialized focus. An ent.i.ty is a thing.

2. An ent.i.ty, in the primary sense, is a solid thing with a definite boundary-as against a fluid, such as air. In the literal sense, air is not an ent.i.ty. There are contexts, such as when the wind moves as one ma.s.s, when you can call it that, by a.n.a.logy, but in the primary sense, fluids are not ent.i.ties.

3. An ent.i.ty is perceptual in scale, in size. In other words it is a "this" which you can point to and grasp by human perception. In an extended sense you can call molecules-or the universe as a whole-"ent.i.ties," because they are self-sufficient things. But in the primary sense when we say that ent.i.ties are what is given in sense perception, we mean solid things which we can directly perceive.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism" lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 3.]

An ent.i.ty is a solid thing open to human perception and capable of independent action.

[Ibid., question period, Lecture 2.]

See also CAUSALITY; CHANGE; EXISTENCE; EXISTENT; IDENt.i.tY; MOTION; UNIVERSE.

Environmentalism. See Ecology/Environmental Movement.

Envy/Hatred of the Good for Being the Good. Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

"Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves.... That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree.... Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one's own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one's automatized response to values is hatred.

["The Age of Envy," NL, 152.]

Consider the full meaning of this att.i.tude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man's survival, and wider: of any living organism's survival. Life is a process of sen-sustain ing and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction "value," apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one-it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.

[Ibid., 157.]

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.... They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they're after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

[GS, FNI, 203; pb 163.]

See also AMORALISM; ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; APPEASE MENT; EMOTIONS; EVIL; GOOD, the; HOSTILITY; VALUES.

Epistemology. Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge.

[ITOE, 47.].

Since man is not omniscient or infallible, you have to discover what you can claim as knowledge and how to prove the validity of your conclusions. Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason-or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power? Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses-or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man's mind before he was born? Is reason competent to perceive reality-or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason? Can man achieve certainty -or is he doomed to perpetual doubt? The extent of your self-confidence-and of your success-will be different, according to which set of answers you accept.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 3; pb 3.]

Man is neither infallible nor omniscient; if he were, a discipline such as epistemoiogy-the theory of knowledge-would not be necessary nor possible: his knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total. But such is not man's nature. Man is a being of volitional consciousness: beyond the level of percepts-a level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival-man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not, and by a process of reason, which he may apply correctly or not. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy; he is capable of error, of evasion, of psychological distortion. He needs a method of cognition, which he himself has to discover: he must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge. Two questions are involved in his every conclusion, conviction, decision, choice or claim: What do I know?-and: How do I know it?

It is the task of epistemology to provide the answer to the "How?"-which then enables the special sciences to provide the answers to the "What?"

In the history of philosophy-with some very rare exceptions-epistemological theories have consisted of attempts to escape one or the other of the two fundamental questions which cannot be escaped. Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reat.i.ty-the attempt to a.s.sert the primacy of consciousness over existence.

[ITOE, 104.].

See Conceptual Index: Epistemology.

Equality (Social-Political). See Egalitarianism.

Errors of Knowledge vs. Breaches of Morality. Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming, as a license, that they "just feel it"-or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: "It's only logic," which means: "It's only reality." The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.

[GS, FNI, 224; pb 179.]

See also EVASION; EVIL; FREE WILL; GOOD, the; IRRATIONALITY; KNOWLEDGE; MORALITY; STANDARD of VALUE.

Essence/Essential Characteristic. See Definitions.

Esthetic Abstractions. There are many special or "cross-filed" chains of abstractions (of interconnected concepts) in man's mind. Cognitive abstractions are the fundamental chain, on which all the others depend. Such chains are mental integrations, serving a special purpose and formed accordingly by a special criterion.

Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one cla.s.s of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?

An artist does not fake reat.i.ty-he stylizes it. He selects those aspects of existence which he regards as metaphysically signihcant-and by isolating and stressing them, by omitting the insignificant and accidental, he presents his view of existence. His concepts are not divorced from the facts of reality-they are concepts which integrate the facts and his metaphysical evaluation of the facts. His selection const.i.tutes his evaluation: everything included in a work of art-from theme to subject to brushstroke or adjective-acquires metaphysical significance by the mere fact of being included, of being important enough to include.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of Ancient Greece) who presents man as a G.o.d-like figure is aware of the fact that men may be crippled or diseased or helpless; but he regards these conditions as accidental, as irrelevant to the essential nature of man-and he presents a figure embodying strength, beauty, intelligence, self-confidence, as man's proper, natural state.

An artist (as, for instance, the sculptors of the Middle Ages) who presents man as a deformed monstrosity is aware of the fact that there are men who are healthy, happy or confident; but he regards these conditions as accidental or illusory, as irrelevant to man's essential nature-and he presents a tortured figure embodying pain, ugliness, terror, as man's proper, natural state.

["Art and Sense of Life," RM, 45; pb 36.]

See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; CONCEPTS; ESTHETICS ; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; NORMATIVE ABSTRACTIONS; SENSE of LIFE.

Esthetic Judgment. Now a word of warning about the criteria of esthetic judgment. A sense of life is the source of art, but it is not the sole qualification of an artist or of an esthetician, and it is not a criterion of esthetic judgment. Emotions are not tools of cognition. Esthetics is a branch of phiiosophy-and just as a philosopher does not approach any other branch of his science with his feelings or emotions as his criterion of judgment, so he cannot do it in the field of esthetics. A sense of life is not sufficient professional equipment. An esthetician-as well as any man who attempts to evaluate art works-must be guided by more than an emotion.

The fact that one agrees or disagrees with an artist's philosophy is irrelevant to an esthetic appraisal of his work qua art. One does not have to agree with an artist (nor even to enjoy him) in order to evaluate his work. In essence, an objective evaluation requires that one identify the artist's theme, the abstract meaning of his work (exclusively by identifying the evidence contained in the work and allowing no other, outside considerations), then evaluate the means by which he conveys it-i.e., taking his theme as criterion, evaluate the purely esthetic elements of the work, the technical mastery (or lack of it) with which he projects for fails to project) his view of life....

Since art is a philosophical composite, it is not a contradiction to say: "This is a great work of art, but I don't like it," provided one defines the exact meaning of that statement: the first part refers to a purely esthetic appraisal, the second to a deeper philosophical level which includes more than esthetic values.

["Art and Sense of Life," RM, 53; pb 42.]

See also ART; ESTHETICS; MORAL JUDGMENT; SENSE of LIFE.

Esthetics. The fifth and last branch of philosophy is esthetics, the study of art, which is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 4; pb 4.]

The esthetic principles which apply to all art, regardless of an individual artist's philosophy, and which must guide an objective evaluation ... are defined by the science of esthetics-a task at which modern philosophy has failed dismally.

["Art and Sense of Life," RM, 54: pb 42.]

The position of art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation (or, today, his retrogression) in the humanities....

While, in other fields of knowledge, men have outgrown the practice of seeking the guidance of mystic oracles whose qualification for the job was unintelligibility, in the field of esthetics this practice has remained in full force and is becoming more crudely obvious today. Just as savages took the phenomena of nature for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or a.n.a.lyzed, as the exclusive domain of unknowable demons-so today's epistemological savages take art for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or a.n.a.lyzed, as the exclusive domain of a special kind of unknowable demons: their emotions. The only difference is that the prehistorical savages' error was innocent.

["The Psycho-Epistemology of Art," RM, 17; pb 15.]

See Conceptual Index: Esthetics Ethics. See Morality.

"Ethnicity." "Ethnicity" is an anti-concept, used as a disguise for the word "racism"-and it has no clearly definable meaning.... The term "ethnicity" stresses the traditional, rather than the physiological characteristics of a group, such as language-but physiology, i.e., race, is involved.... So the advocacy of "ethnicity," means racism plus tradition -i.e., racism plus conformity-i.e., racism plus staleness.

["Global Balkanization," pamphlet, 6.]

Ethnicity is not a valid consideration, morally or politically, and does not endow anyone with any special rights.

[Ibid., 14.]

See also "ANTI-CONCEPTS"; COLLECTIVISM; CULTURE; RACISM; TRADITION; TRIBALISM.

Evasion. Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think-not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not p.r.o.nounce the verdict "It is." Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say "It is," you are refusing to say "I am." By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: "Who am I to know? he is declaring: "Who am I to live?"

[GS, FNI, 155, pb 127.]

Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic-words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter-and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.