The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 26

Metaphysical vs. Man-Made. Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human partic.i.p.ation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different. For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls.

["The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made," PWNI, 33; pb 27.]

Things of human origin (whether physical or psychological) may be designated as "man-made facts"-as distinguished from the metaphysically given facts. A skysc.r.a.per is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact. One can alter a skysc.r.a.per or blow it up (just as one can alter or blow up a mountain), but so long as it exists, one cannot pretend that it is not there or that it is not what it is.

[Ibid., 37; pb 31.]

Nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated ... it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic const.i.tuent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the law of ident.i.ty. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe-from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life-are caused and determined by the ident.i.ties of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given-i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.

[Ibid., 30; pb 25.]

Man's faculty of volition as such is not a contradiction of nature, but it opens the way for a host of contradictions-when and if men do not grasp the crucial difference between the metaphysically given and any object, inst.i.tution, procedure, or rule of conduct made by man.

It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. Man is not omniscient or infallible: he can make innocent errors through lack of knowledge, or he can lie, cheat and fake. The man-made may be a product of genius, perceptiveness, ingenuity-or it may be a product of stupidity, deception, malice, evil. One man may be right and everyone else wrong, or vice versa (or any numerical division in between). Nature does not give man any automatic guarantee of the truth of his judgments (and this is a metaphysically given fact, which must be accepted). Who, then, is to judge? Each man, to the best of his ability and honesty. What is his standard of judgment? The metaphysically given.

The metaphysically given cannot be true or false, it simply is-and man determines the truth or falsehood of his judgments by whether they correspond to or contradict the facts of reality. The metaphysically given cannot be right or wrong-it is the standard of right or wrong, by which a (rational) man judges his goals, his values, his choices. The metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be. Nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice.

[Ibid., 32: pb 27.]

A man-made product did not have to exist, but, once made, it does exist. A man's actions did not have to be performed, but, once performed, they are facts of reality. The same is true of a man's character: he did not have to make the choices he made, but, once he has formed his character, it is a fact, and it is his personal ident.i.ty. (Man's volition gives him great, but not unlimited, lat.i.tude to change his character; if he does, the change becomes a fact.) [Ibid., 37; pb 31.]

[One must] distinguish metaphysical facts from man-made facts-i.e., facts which are inherent in the ident.i.ties of that which exists, from facts which depend upon the exercise of human volition. Because man has free will, no human choice-and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice-is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so; he could have chosen otherwise. For instance, the U.S. did not have to consist of 50 states; men could have subdivided the larger ones, or consolidated the smaller ones, etc.

Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality; it is a type of causation.... Further, metaphysical facts are unalterable by man, and limit the alternatives open to his choice. Man can rearrange the materials that exist in reality, but he cannot violate their ident.i.ty; he cannot escape the laws of nature. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

[Leonard Peikoff, "The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," ITOE, 149.]

In regard to nature, "to accept what I cannot change" means to accept the metaphysically given; "to change what I can" means to strive to rearrange the given by acquiring knowledge-as science and technology (e.g., medicine) are doing; "to know the difference" means to know that one cannot rebel against nature and, when no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely.... What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one's power, as one's own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one's mind dictates. The only means of "changing" men is the same as the means of "changing" nature: knowledge-which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors....

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

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

See also ABSOLUTES; CHARACTER; CREATION; FREE WILL; IDENt.i.tY; MORAL JUDGMENT; NATURE; NECESSITY; PHYSICAL FORCE; UNIVERSE.

Metaphysics. Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute-and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real-or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer-or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man's consciousness? Are they what they are-or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?

The nature of your actions-and of your ambition-will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept. These answers are the province of metaphysics-the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle's words, of "being qua being"-the basic branch of philosophy.

["Philosophy: Who Needs It," PWNI, 3; pb 2.]

The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics. Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole. It tells men what kind of world they live in, and whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it. It tells men whether they live in a world of solid ent.i.ties, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux. It tells men whether the things they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality, with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance, which leaves them staring and helpless.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 14; pb 23.]

See also ABSOLUTES; ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; EXISTENCE; IDENt.i.tY; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SUBJECTIVISM.

Method, Concepts of. A special subcategory of concepts pertaining to the products of consciousness, is reserved for concepts of method. Concepts of method designate systematic courses of action devised by men for the purpose of achieving certain goals. The course of action may be purely psychological (such as a method of using one's consciousness) or it may involve a combination of psychological and physical actions (such as a method of drilling for oil), according to the goal to be achieved.

Concepts of method are formed by retaining the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of the purposive course of action and of its goal, while omitting the particular measurements of both.

For instance, the fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)-while omitting the length, complexity or specific steps of the process of logical inference, as well as the nature of the particular cognitive problem involved in any given instance of using logic.

Concepts of method represent a large part of man's conceptual equipment. Epistemology is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge. Ethics is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of living one's life. Medicine is a science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of curing disease. All the applied sciences (i.e., technology) are sciences devoted to the discovery of methods.

[ITOE, 46.].

See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; CONSCIOUSNESS; EPISTEMOLOGY; LOGIC; MATHEMATICS.

Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason.

["The Left: Old and New," NL, 83.]

In the history of Western civilization, the period known as the Dark Ages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, was a period when Western Europe existed without any social organization beyond chance local groupings cl.u.s.tered around small villages, large castles, and remnants of various traditions-swept periodically by ma.s.sive barbarian invasions, warring robber bands, and sundry local looters. It was as close to a state of pure anarchy as men could come. The feudal system grew out of the need for organized protection. The system, in essence, consisted in the peasants swearing allegiance to a lord, who claimed owners.h.i.+p of the land and a percentage of their harvest in exchange for his duty to protect them against military attacks.

This system brought some semblance of order, but no protection and no peace. Disarmed men were left in the total power of an armed ruler, who had his own military gang and who robbed them as ruthlessly as, but more systematically than, any foreign invader. The history of the Middle Ages is a series of internal and external wars: there were various lords struggling to enlarge their domains, foreign lords struggling to subjugate neighboring lands, and b.l.o.o.d.y, hopeless uprisings of desperate peasants, bloodily suppressed. It was also the longest period of stagnation-intellectually and productively-in Europe's history.

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

The medieval period, under the sway of such philosophers as Plotinus and Augustine, was an era dominated by Platonism. During much of this period Aristotle's philosophy was almost unknown in the West.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 22; pb 30.]

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.

[Ibid., 107; pb 106.]

The dominant moralists had said that man must not seek his ultimate fulfillment on earth; that he must renounce the pleasures of this life, whether as a flesh-mortifying ascetic or as an abstemious toilet, for the sake of G.o.d, salvation, and the life to come.... Whatever their concern with the individual soul, the medievals had derogated or failed to discover the individual man. In philosophy, the Platonists had denied his reality; in practice, the feudal system had (by implication) treated the group-the caste, the guild, etc.-as the operative social unit.

[Ibid., 110; pb 108.]

An entirely different view of man dominated the medieval Christian civilization. Man, according to Augustine, is "crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous." Medieval mystics regarded man as an evil creature whose body is loathsome because it is material, and whose mind is impotent because it is human. Hating man's body, they said that pleasure is evil, and virtue consists of renunciation. Hating this earth, they said that it is a prison where man is doomed to pain, misery, calamity. Hating life, they said that death and escape into some other dimension is all that man could-and should-hope for.

Man as a helpless and depraved creature, was the basic theme of medieval sculpture until the Gothic period, whether he was shown being pushed into h.e.l.l or accepted into Heaven.

[Mary Ann Sures, "Metaphysics in Marble," TO, Feb. 1969, 14.]

The supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, ... kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn.

[GS. FNI. 199; pb 160.]

See also ARISTOTLE; DARK AGES; FAITH; HISTORY; INDIVIDUALISM; MIRACLES; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; RENAISSANCE.

Middle Cla.s.s. A nation's productive-and moral, and intellectual -top is the middle cla.s.s. It is a broad reservoir of energy, it is a country's motor and lifeblood, which feeds the rest. The common denominator of its members, on their various levels of ability, is: independence. The upper cla.s.ses are merely a nation's past; the middle cla.s.s is its future.

["The Dead End," ARL. 1, 20, 3.]

The middle cla.s.s is the heart, the lifeblood, the energy source of a free, industrial economy, i.e., of capitalism; it did not and cannot exist under any other system; it is the product of upward mobility, incompatible with frozen social castes. Do not ask, therefore, for whom the bell of inflation is tolling; it tolls for you. It is not at the destruction of a handful of the rich that inflation is aimed (the rich are mostly in the vanguard of the destroyers), but at the middle cla.s.s.

["The Inverted Moral Priorities," ARL, III, 21, 2.]

See also CAPITALISM; INFLATION.

Military Conscription. See Draft.

Mill, John Stuart. Religious influences are not the only villain behind the censors.h.i.+p legislation; there is another one: the social school of morality, exemplified by John Stuart Mill. Mill rejected the concept of individual rights and replaced it with the notion that the "public good" is the sole justification of individual freedom. (Society, he argued, has the power to enslave or destroy its exceptional men, but it should permit them to be free, because it benefits from their efforts.) Among the many defaults of the conservatives in the past hundred years, the most shameful one, perhaps, is the fact that they accepted John Stuart Mill as a defender of capitalism.

["Thought Control," ARL, III, 2, 2.]

The terrible aspect of Mill's influence is the fact that his followers become unable to consider great values-such as truth, science, morality, art-apart from and without the permission of "the people's desires."

[Ibid., 3.]

[Mill's] On Liberty is the most pernicious piece of collectivism ever adopted by suicidal defenders of liberty.

["An Unt.i.tled Letter," PWNI, 138; pb 114.]

A weary agnostic on most of the fundamental issues of philosophy, Mill bases his defense of capitalism on the ethics of Utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a union of hedonism and Christianity. The first teaches man to love pleasure; the second, to love his neighbor. The union consists in teaching man to love his neighbor's pleasure. To be exact, the Utilitarians teach that an action is moral if its result is to maximize pleasure among men in general. This theory holds that man's duty is to serve-according to a purely quant.i.tative standard of value.

He is to serve not the well-being of the nation or of the economic cla.s.s, but "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," regardless of who comprise it in any given issue. As to one's own happiness, says Mill, the individual must be "disinterested" and "strictly impartial"; he must remember that he is only one unit out of the dozens, or millions, of men affected by his actions. "All honor to those who can abnegate for themselves the personal enjoyment of life," says Mill, "when by such renunciation they contribute worthily to increase the amount of happiness in the world...."

Capitalism, Mill acknowledges, is not based on any desire for abnegation or renunciation; it is based on the desire for selfish profit. Nevertheless, he says, the capitalist system ensures that, most of the time, the actual result of individual profit-seeking is the happiness of society as a whole. Hence the individual should be left free of government regulation. He should be left free not as an absolute (there are no absolutes, says Mill), but under the present circ.u.mstances-not on the ground of inalienable rights (there are no such rights, Mill holds), but of social utility.

Under capitalism, concluded one American economist of the period with evident moral relief, "the Lord maketh the selfishness of man to work for the material welfare of his kind." As one commentator observes, the essence of this argument is the claim that capitalism is justified by its ability to convert "man's baseness" to "n.o.ble ends." "Baseness" here means egoism; "n.o.bility" means altruism. And the justification of individual freedom in terms of its contribution to the welfare of society means collectivism.

Mill (along with Smith, Say, and the rest of the cla.s.sical economists) was trying to defend an individualist system by accepting the fundamental moral ideas of its opponents. It did not take Mill long to grasp this contradiction in some terms and amend his political views accordingly. He ended his life as a self-proclaimed "qualified socialist."

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 122; pb 119.]

See also AGNOSTICISM; ALTRUISM; CAPITALISM; COLLECTIVISM; "CONSERVATIVES"; FREE SPEECH; HAPPINESS; HEDONISM; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PLEASURE and PAIN; "PUBLIC INTEREST," the; UTILITARIANISM; VALUES.

Mind-Body Dichotomy. See Soul-Body Dichotomy.

Minority Rights. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

["America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," CUI, 61.]

The defense of minority rights is acclaimed today, virtually by everyone, as a moral principle of a high order. But this principle, which forbids discrimination, is applied by most of the "liberal" intellectuals in a discriminatory manner: it is applied only to racial or religious minorities. It is not applied to that small, exploited, denounced, defenseless minority which consists of businessmen.

Yet every ugly, brutal aspect of injustice toward racial or religious minorities is being practiced toward businessmen.

[Ibid., 44.]

See also BUSINESSMEN; DEMOCRACY; "ETHNICITY"; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; RACISM.

Miracles. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.

[GS, FNI, 188; pb 151.]

See also CAUSALITY; G.o.d; MYSTICISM; RELIGION; SUPERNATURALISM.

Mixed Economy. We are not a capitalist system any longer: we are a mixed economy, i.e., a mixture of capitalism and statism, of freedom and controls. A mixed economy is a country in the process of disintegration, a civil war of pressure-groups looting and devouring one another.

["The Obliteration of Capitalism," CUI, 185.]

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls-with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictators.h.i.+p. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws-no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy-which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged-is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. Such a system-or, more precisely, anti-system-breaks up a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense, as the nature of such a jungle demands. While, politically, a mixed economy preserves the semblance of an organized society with a semblance of law and order, economically it is the equivalent of the chaos that had ruled China for centuries: a chaos of robber gangs looting-and draining-the productive elements of the country.

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, inst.i.tutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government-i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all-is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm-material, spiritual, inteuectuat-so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. If the game is to continue, nothing can be permitted to remain firm, solid, absolute, untouchable; everything (and everyone) has to be fluid, flexible, indeterminate, approximate. By what standard are anyone's actions to be guided? By the expediency of any immediate moment.

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.

["The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus," CUI, 206.]

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept "just a few controls" is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to subst.i.tute for it the principle of the government's unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement. As an example of this process, observe the present domestic policy of the United States.

["Doesn't Life Require Compromise?" VOS, 86; pb 68.]

You have seen, within the span of the last few years, that controls breed more controls, and that the proliferation of controls breeds the proliferation of pressure groups. Today, you see political manipulators setting up new conflicts, such as ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, even welfare-recipients against the self-supporting. Openly and cynically, these new groups clamor for "a bigger slice of the pie" (which you have to bake).

["The Princ.i.p.als and the Principles," ARL, II, 21, 3.]

In a controlled (or mixed) economy, a legislator's job consists in sacrificing some men to others. No matter what choice he makes, no choice of this kind can be morally justified (and never has been). Proceeding from an immoral base, no decision of his can be honest or dishonest, just or unjust-these concepts are inapplicable. He becomes, therefore, an easy target for the promptings of any pressure group, any lobbyist, any influence-peddler, any maniputator-he has no standards by which to judge or to resist them. You do not know what hidden powers drive him or what he is doing. Neither does he.

[Ibid., 4.]

If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

["The Pull Peddlers," CUI, 170.]

A mixed economy has to reach the day when it faces a final crossroad: either the private sector regains its freedom and starts rebuilding-or it gives up and lets the absolute state take over the shambles.

["A Preview," ARL, 1, 23, 4.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPROMISE; FREEDOM; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; INTERVENTIONISM (ECONOMIC); LOBBYING; PHYSICAL FORCE; STATISM.

Modern Art. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 75.]

Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art-the disintegration of man's conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.

To reduce man's consciousness to the level of sensations, with no capacity to integrate them, is the intention behind the reducing of language to grunts, of literature to "moods," of painting to smears, of sculpture to slabs, of music to noise.

But there is a philosophically and psychopathologically instructive element in the spectacle of that gutter. It demonstrates-by the negative means of an absence-the relations.h.i.+ps of art to philosophy, of reason to man's survival, of hatred for reason to hatred for existence. After centuries of the philosophers' war against reason, they have succeeded -by the method of vivisection-in producing exponents of what man is like when deprived of his rational faculty, and these in turn are giving us images of what existence is like to a being with an empty skull.

While the alleged advocates of reason oppose "system-building" and haggle apologetically over concrete-bound words or mystically floating abstractions, its enemies seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason, that art is man's psycho-epistemological conditioner, and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man's integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.