The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 24

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 29; pb 32.]

[In The Fountainhead] the hero utters a line that has often been quoted by readers: "To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.' "

["Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand," pamphlet, 7.]

[Selfless love] would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound a.s.sertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.

[Ibid.]

One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.

A "selfless," "disinterested" love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests. If a man who is pa.s.sionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a "sacrifice" for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.

["The Ethics of Emergencies," VOS, 48; pb 44.]

The practical implementation of friends.h.i.+p, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one's own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.

[Ibid., 51; pb 46.]

To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.... When it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them-the more loathsome the object, the n.o.bler your love-the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue-and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.

[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]

Like any other value, love is not a static quant.i.ty to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned. The love for one friend is not a threat to the love for another, and neither is the love for the various members of one's family, a.s.suming they have earned it. The most exclusive form -romantic love-is not an issue of compet.i.tion. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the "loser" could not have had what the "winner" has earned.

It is only among the irrational, emotion-motivated persons, whose love is divorced from any standards of value, that chance rivalries, accidental conflicts and blind choices prevail. But then, whoever wins does not win much. Among the emotion-driven, neither love nor any other emotion has any meaning.

["The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests," VOS, 65; pb 55.]

Let us answer the question: "Can you measure love?"

The concept "love" is formed by isolating two or more instances of the appropriate psychological process, then retaining its distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics (an emotion proceeding from the evaluation of an existent as a positive value and as a source of pleasure) and omitting the object and the measurements of the process's intensity.

The object may he a thing, an event, an activity, a condition or a person. The intensity varies according to one's evaluation of the object, as, for instance, in such cases as one's love for ice cream, or for parties, or for reading, or for freedom, or for the person one marries. The concept "love" subsumes a vast range of values and, consequently, of intensity: it extends from the lower levels (designated by the subcategory "liking") to the higher level (designated by the subcategory "affection," which is applicable only in regard to persons) to the highest level, which includes romantic love.

If one wants to measure the intensity of a particular instance of love, one does so by reference to the hierarchy of values of the person experiencing it. A man may love a woman, yet may rate the neurotic satisfactions of s.e.xual promiscuity higher than her value to him. Another man may love a woman, but may give her up, rating his fear of the disapproval of others (of his family, his friends or any random strangers) higher than her value. Still another man may risk his life to save the woman he loves, because all his other values would lose meaning without her. The emotions in these examples are not emotions of the same intensity or dimension. Do not let a James Taggart type of mystic tell you that love is immeasurable.

[ITOE, 44.].

See also ALTRUISM; CHARACTER; EMOTIONS; FEMININITY; MARRIAGE; PHILOSOPHY; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; SENSE of LIFE; s.e.x; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT; VALUES; VIRTUE.

M.

Malevolent Universe Premise. The altruist ethics is based on a "malevolent universe" metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed-that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him-that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.

As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics-as evidence of the fact that the material universe is not inimical to man and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence-observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.

["The Ethics of Emergencies," VOS, 55; pb 48.]

If you hold the wrong ideas on any fundamental philosophic issue, that will undercut or destroy the benevolent universe premise.... For example, any departure in metaphysics from the view that this world in which we live is reality, the full, final, absolute reality-any such departure will necessarily undercut a man's confidence in his ability to deal with the world, and thus will inject the malevolent-universe element. The same applies in epistemology: if you conclude in any form that reason is not valid, then man has no tool of achieving values; so defeat and tragedy are unavoidable.

This is true also of ethics. If men hold values incompatible with life-such as self-sacrifice and altruism-obviously they can't achieve such values; they will soon come to feel that evil is potent, whereas they are doomed to misery, suffering, failure. It is irrational codes of ethics above all else that feed the malevolent-universe att.i.tude in people and lead to the syndrome eloquently expressed by the philosopher Schopenhauer: "Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment of his falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his waking. Human life must be some kind of mistake."

Now there is certainly "some kind of mistake" here. But it's not life. It's the kind of philosophies used to wreck man-to make him incapable of living-philosophies, I may say, which are perfectly exemplified by the ideas of Schopenhauer.

[Leonard Peikoff, "The Philosophy of Objectivism" lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.]

See also ALTRUISM; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; EVIL; HAPPINESS; MAN; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; SENSE of LIFE; SUFFERING.

Man. Man's distinctive characteristic is his type of consciousness-a consciousness able to abstract, to form concepts, to apprehend reality by a process of reason ... [The] valid definition of man, within the context of his knowledge and of all of mankind's knowledge to-date [is]: "A rational animal."

("Rational," in this context, does not mean "acting invariably in accordance with reason"; it means "possessing the faculty of reason." A full biological definition of man would include many subcategories of "animal," but the general category and the ultimate definition remain the same.) [ITOE, 58.].

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.

[GS, FNI, 149; pb 122.]

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 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.

[Ihid.]

The key to what you so recklessly call "human nature," the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness.

[Ibid., 146; pb 120.]

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An "instinct" is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it.

[Ibid., 148; pb 121.]

Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality-which means: to be conscious-by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical: for man, primarily epistemological.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish-man builds irrigation ca.n.a.ls; if a flood strikes them, animals perish-man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish-man writes the Const.i.tution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom-by instinct.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 10; pb 15.]

Consciousness-for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as "hunger"), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available-but to build the simplest shelter. he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no "instincts" will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge -and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 13: ph 21.]

To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.

["What Is Capitalism?" CUI, 21.]

If some men do not choose to think. they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others-but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue-the fact remains that reason is man's means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.

[Ibid.]

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him-by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 14; pb 22.]

The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man's products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically-and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man's volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic const.i.tuents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the ent.i.ty "man." Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.

["The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNI, 38; pb 31.]

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

[Ibid., 39; pb 32.]

An animal's life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal's consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 18; pb 24.]

Man is the only living species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; but such transmission requires a process of thought on the part of the individual recipients. As witness, the breakdowns of civilization, the dark ages in the history of mankind's progress, when the acc.u.mulated knowledge of centuries vanished from the lives of men who were unable, unwilling, or forbidden to think.

["What Is Capitalism?" GUI, 16.]

Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life-but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).

["A Nation's Unity," ARL, II, 2, 3.]

A living ent.i.ty that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

[GS, FNI, 148; pb 122.]

Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural ent.i.ty, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind ("soul"), is above nature-or as a subnatural ent.i.ty, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature ("ecology"). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the law of ident.i.ty.

But man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific ident.i.ty. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of ident.i.ty, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man's consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the ident.i.ty) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man's choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.) ["The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNI, 32; pb 26.]

Whatever he was-that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love-he was not man.

[GS, FNI, 169; pb 137.]

They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth-and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost-yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and a soul moved by mystic revelations-he was left as the pa.s.sively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.

[Ibid., 170; pb 138.]

Man is an indivisible ent.i.ty, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness, and ... he may permit no breach between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions.

[Ibid., 157; pb 129.]

Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision-i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears. In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or "instinctual" knowledge. Physically, he would fall an easy prey, not only to the higher animals, but also to the lowest bacteria: he is the most complex organism and, in a contest of brute force, extremely fragile and vulnerable. His only weapon-his basic means of survival-is his mind.

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the G.o.ds which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.

["The Anti-Industrial Revolution," NL, 136.]

"It's only human," you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abas.e.m.e.nt where you seek to make the concept "human" mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure-as if "to feel" were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not -as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

[GS, FNI, 209; pb 167.]

In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his t.i.tle. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.

[Ibid., 241; pb 191.]

See also CONCEPTS; EMOTIONS; FREE WILL; HISTORY; MAN-WORs.h.i.+P; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; PERCEPTION; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; REASON; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; THOUGHT/THINKING.

Man-Wors.h.i.+p. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach. "Exaltation" is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. "Wors.h.i.+p" means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. "Reverence" means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one's knees. "Sacred" means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.

But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or enn.o.bling, without the self-abas.e.m.e.nt required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.

It is this highest level of man's emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.

It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man wors.h.i.+p.

It is an emotion that a few-a very few-men experience consistently; some men experience it in rare, single sparks that flash and die without consequences; some do not know what I am talking about; some do and spend their lives as frantically virulent spark-extinguishers.

Do not confuse "man wors.h.i.+p" with the many attempts, not to emanc.i.p.ate morality from religion and bring it into the realm of reason, but to subst.i.tute a secular meaning for the worst, the most profoundly irrational elements of religion. For instance, there are all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, n.a.z.i, etc.), which preserve the religious-altruist ethics in full and merely subst.i.tute "society" for G.o.d as the beneficiary of man's self-immolation. There are the various schools of modern philosophy which, rejecting the law of ident.i.ty, proclaim that reality is an indeterminate flux ruled by miracles and shaped by whims-not G.o.d's whims, but man's or "society's." These neomystics are not man-wors.h.i.+pers; they are merely the secularizers of as profound a hatred for man as that of their avowedly mystic predecessors.

A cruder variant of the same hatred is represented by those concrete-bound, "statistical" mentalities who-unable to grasp the meaning of man's volition-declare that man cannot be an object of wors.h.i.+p, since they have never encountered any specimens of humanity who deserved it.

The man-wors.h.i.+pers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it.... [Man-wors.h.i.+pers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man's self-esteem and the sacred-ness of his happiness on earth.

["Introduction to The Fountainhead," TO, March 1968, 4.]

This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history. Today, it is virtually non-existent. Yet this is the view with which-in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, pa.s.sion and agonized confusion-the best of mankind's youth start out in life. It is not even a view, for most of them, but a foggy, groping, undefined sense made of raw pain and incommunicable happiness. It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one's life is important, that great achievements are within one's capacity, and that great things lie ahead.

It is not in the nature of man-nor of any living ent.i.ty-to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and d.a.m.ning existence; that requires a process of corruption, whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a n.o.ble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

[Ibid., 6.]

See also FEMININITY; MAN; HAPPINESS; RELIGION; SACRED; SELF-ESTEEM; SENSE of LIFE.

Managerial Work. Managerial work-the organization and integration of human effort into purposeful, large-scale, long-range activities-is, in the realm of action, what man's conceptual faculty is in the realm of cognition.

["The Cas.h.i.+ng-in: The Student 'Rebellion,' " CUI, 262.]

If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker (or of a professor) who, doing some small, routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine (or the lectern of a cla.s.sroom), does not choose to know how the machine (or the cla.s.sroom) got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.