The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 36

Rationalization. Since an emotion is experienced as an immediate primary, but is, in fact, a complex, derivative sum, it permits men to practice one of the ugliest of psychological phenomena: rationalization. Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false ident.i.ty, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications -in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of nationalizing is the hampering, the distortion and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

Philosophical catch phrases are handy means of rationalization. They are quoted, repeated and perpetuated in order to justify feelings which men are unwilling to admit.

"n.o.body can be certain of anything" is a rationalization for a feeling of envy and hatred toward those who are certain. "It may be true for you, but it's not true for me" is a rationalization for one's inability and unwillingness to prove the validity of one's contentions. "n.o.body is perfect in this world" is a rationalization for the desire to continue indulging in one's imperfections, i.e., the desire to escape morality. "n.o.body can help anything he does" is a rationalization for the escape from moral responsibility. "It may have been true yesterday, but it's not true today" is a rationalization for the desire to get away with contradictions. "Logic has nothing to do with reality" is a crude rationalization for a desire to subordinate reality to one's whims.

"I can't prove it, but I feel that it's true" is more than a rationalization: it is a description of the process of rationalizing. Men do not accept a catch phrase by a process of thought, they seize upon a catch phrase-any catch phrase-because it fits their emotions. Such men do not judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality-they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.

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, 21; pb 18.]

When a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an "ideal." but a rationalization.

[Ibid.. 24; pb 20.]

See also EMOTIONS; LOGIC; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; OBJECTIVITY; PHILOSOPHY; PROOF; RATIONALITY; SUBCONSCIOUS.

Reality. See Existence.

Reason. Reason is the faculty that ident.i.ties and integrates the material provided by man's senses.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 13; pb 20.]

Reason integrates man's perceptions by means of forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man's knowledge from the perceptual level, which he shares with animals, to the conceptual level, which he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic -and logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," PWNI, 75; pb 62.]

Reason is man's only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge-and, therefore, the rejection of reason means that men should act regardless of and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality.

["The Left: Old and New," NL, 84.]

The senses, concepts, logic: these are the elements of man's rational faculty-its start, its form, its method. In essence, "follow reason" means: base knowledge on observation; form concepts according to the actual (measurable) relations.h.i.+ps among concretes; use concepts according to the rules of logic (ultimately, the Law of Ident.i.ty). Since each of these elements is based on the facts of reality, the conclusions reached by a process of reason are objective.

The alternative to reason is some form of mysticism or skepticism.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 332; pb 305.]

[Reason] is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 13; pb 20.]

Man's essential characteristic is his rational faculty. Man's mind is his basic means of survival-his only means of gaining knowledge....

In order to sustain its life, every living species has to follow a certain course of action required by its nature. 'I'he action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.

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

To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason-Purpose-Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Setf-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.

[GS, FNI, 156; pb 128.]

Reason is man's tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables him to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong.

["Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand," pamphlet, 6.]

There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions-provided he observes their proper relations.h.i.+p. A rational man knows-or makes it a point to discover-the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relations.h.i.+p cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their pa.s.sive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow-then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction-his own and that of others.

[Ibid.]

I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind-a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," PWNI, 85; pb 70.]

Man's mind is his basic means of survival-and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man's own mind, and its product-truth-makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.

There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or "limited") reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day; but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times. Observe the nature of mankind's earliest legends-such as the fall of Lucifer, "the light-bearer," for the sin of defying authority; or the story of Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their "instincts," but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.

["The Comprachicos," NL, 227.]

Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind's greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement-and the eras of greatest political freedom.

["The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age," pamphlet, 5.]

Western civilization was the child and product of reason-via ancient Greece. In all other civilizations, reason has always been the menial servant-the handmaiden-of mysticism. You may observe the results. It is only Western culture that has ever been dominated-imperfectly, incompletely, precariously and at rare intervals-but still, dominated by reason. You may observe the results of that.

The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death-of freedom or slavery-of progress or stagnant brutality. Or, to put it another way, it is the conflict of consciousness versus unconsciousness.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," PWNI, 75; pb 62.]

If you rebel against reason, if you succ.u.mb to the old bromides of the Witch Doctors, such as: "Reason is the enemy of the artist" or "The cold hand of reason dissects and destroys the joyous spontaneity of man's creative imagination"-I suggest that you take note of the following fact: by rejecting reason and surrendering to the unhampered sway of their unleashed emotions (and whims), the apostles of irrationality, the existentialists, the Zen Buddhists, the non-objective artists, have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense of life, but a sense of doom, nausea and screaming, cosmic terror. Then read the stories of O. Henry or listen to the music of Viennese operettas and remember that these were the products of the spirit of the nineteenth century-a century ruled by the "cold, dissecting" hand of reason. And then ask yourself: which psycho-epistemology is appropriate to man, which is consonant with the facts of reality and with man's nature?

["The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age," RM, 119; pb 128.]

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This-the supremacy of reason-was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

["Brief Summary," TO, Sept. 1971, I.]

See also ART; AXIOMS; CAPITALISM; CONCEPTS; EMOTIONS; EPISTEMOLOGY; FREE WILL; HISTORY; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; KANT, IMMANUEL; KNOWLEDGE; LOGIC; MAN; MORALITY; OBJECTIVISM; OBJECTIVITY; PERCEPTION; PHISICAL FORCE; PRODUCTION; RATIONALISM vs. EMPIRICISM; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; THOUGHT/THINKING.

"Redistribution" of Wealth. If a man proposes to redistribute wealth, he means explicitly and necessarily that the wealth is his to distribute. If he proposes it in the name of the government, then the wealth belongs to the government; if in the name of society, then it belongs to society. No one, to my knowledge, did or could define a difference between that proposal and the basic principle of communism.

["The Dead End," ARL, 1,20,2.]

Observe that any social movement which begins by "redistributing" income, ends up by distributing sacrifices.

["The Fascist New Frontier," pamphlet, 5.]

Whoever claims the "right" to "redistribute" the wealth produced by others is claiming the "right" to treat human beings as chattel.

["The Monument Builders," VOS, 120; pb 91.]

See also COLLECTIVISM; COMMUNISM; MONEY; PROPERTY RIGHTS; SACRIFICE.

Reification of the Zero See Zero, Reification of.

Religion, PLAYBOY: Has no religion, in your estimation, ever offered anything of constructive value to human life?

RAND: Qua religion, no-in the sense of blind belief, belief unsupported by, or contrary to, the facts of reality and the conclusions of reason. Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason. But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man's life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very-how should I say it?-dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith.

["Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand," pamphlet, 10.]

Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.

[Ibid.]

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call [man's] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor-he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire-he acquired the capacity of s.e.xual enjoyment. The evils for which they d.a.m.n him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was-that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love -he was not man.

Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain-and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

[GS, FNI, 169; pb 137.]

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is G.o.d, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive-a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence.... Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of G.o.d.... Man's standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of G.o.d, whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith.... The purpose of man's life ... is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

[Ibid., 171; pb 139.]

The kind of sense of life that produced the [papal] encyclical "Populorum Progressio" ... was not produced by the sense of life of any one person, but by the sense of life of an inst.i.tution.

The dominant chord of the encyclical's sense of life is hatted for man's mind-hence hatred for man-hence hatred for life and for this earth-hence hatred for man's enjoyment of his life on earth-and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.

["Requiem for Man," CUI, 304.]

The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today's intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.

Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.

No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skysc.r.a.per being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanis.h.i.+ng, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.

It's either-or. If capitalism's befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.

Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonis.h.i.+ng. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism-the same goal, global rule by force-the same enemy, man's mind.

There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the n.a.z.is, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.

[Ibid., 316.]

Is there any difference between the encyclical's philosophy and communism? I am perfectly willing, on this matter, to take the word of an eminent Catholic authority. Under the headline: "Encyclical Termed Rebuff to Marxism," The New York Times of March 31, 1967, reports: "The Rev. John Courtney Murray, the prominent Jesuit theologian, described Pope Paul's newest encyclical yesterday as 'the church's definitive answer to Marxism.' ... 'The Marxists have proposed one way, and in pursuing their program they rely on man alone,' Father Murray said. 'Now Pope Paul VI has issued a detailed plan to accomplish the same goal on the basis of true humanism-humanism that recognizes man's religious nature.' "

Amen.

So much for those American "conservatives" who claim that religion is the base of capitalism-and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.

And so much for those modern "liberals" who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress-and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superst.i.tious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side-then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.

[Ibid., 314.]

[There is one] possibly misleading sentence... in Roark's speech: "From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skysc.r.a.per, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man-the function of his reasoning mind."

This could be misinterpreted to mean an endors.e.m.e.nt of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark's and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man's mind, not of supernatural revelation.

But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics-not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction "ethics," the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, n.o.bility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself....

Religion's monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. 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.

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

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.

["The Chickens' Homecoming," NL, 108.]

The ideology that opposes man's enjoyment of his life on earth and holds s.e.x as such to be evil-the same ideology that is the source and cause of anti-obscenity censors.h.i.+p [is]: religion.

For a discussion of the profound, metaphysical reasons of religion's antagonism to s.e.x, I refer you to my article "Of Living Death" (The Objectivist, September-November 1968), which deals with the papal encyclical on contraception, "Of Human Life." Today, most people who profess to be religious, particularly in this country, do not share that condemnation of s.e.x-but it is an ancient tradition which survives, consciously or subconsciously, even in the minds of many irreligious persons, because it is a logical consequence implicit in the basic causes and motives of any form of mysticism.

["Thought Control." ARL, III. 1,3.]

Since religion is a primitive form of philosophy-an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality-many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive, aspect of man's existence.

["Philosophy and Sense of Life," RM, 31; pb 25.]

In mankind's history, art began as an adjunct (and, often, a monopoly) of religion. Religion was the primitive form of philosophy: it provided man with a comprehensive view of existence. Observe that the art of those primitive cultures was a concretization of their religion's metaphysical and ethical abstractions.

["The Psycho-Epistemology of Art," RM, 23; pb 20.]

It has often been noted that a proof of G.o.d would be fatal to religion: a G.o.d susceptible of proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one ent.i.ty among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man's mind.

[Leonard Peikoff, " 'Maybe You're Wrong,' " TOF, April 1981, 12.]

See also ABORTION; AGNOSTICISM; ALTRUISM; ART; ATHEISM; BIRTH CONTROL; COMMUNISM; "CONSERVATIVES"; DARK AGES; FAITH; G.o.d; MAN; MAN-WORs.h.i.+P; MORALITY; MYSTICISM; ORIGINAL SIN; PHILOSOPHY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; REASON; SACRED; SACRIFICE; s.e.x; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUPERNATURALISM.