Ominous Parallels (40 page)

What fundamental truths did the Nazis and the American collectivists and all their sources in the history of philosophy struggle to evade and annihilate?

The answer is contained in two concepts, with everything they include, lead to, and presuppose:
reason
and
egoism.
These two, properly understood and accepted, are the immovable barrier to any attempt to establish totalitarian rule.

Obedience is the precondition of totalitarianism. The preconditions of obedience are fear and guilt; not merely the existential fear created by terroristic policies, but the deeper, metaphysical fear created by inner helplessness, the fear of a living creature deprived of any means to deal with reality; not merely the guilt of committing some specific crime, but the deeper, metaphysical guilt of feeling that one is innately unworthy and immoral.

Reason destroys fear; egoism destroys guilt. More precisely: reason does not permit man to feel metaphysically helpless; egoism does not permit him to accept unearned guilt or to regard himself as a sacrificial animal. But a man indoctrinated with the notion that reason is impotent and self-sacrifice is his moral duty, will obey anyone and anything.

If sacrifice is equated with virtue, there is no stopping the advance of the totalitarian state. “It goes on and will go on,” said Howard Roark, the hero of The
Fountainhead,
“so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it.”

“The world,” said Roark, “is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.” It was true in 1943, when The
Fountainhead
was published. It is just as true and much more obvious today.
⁴

A full system of philosophy advocating reason and egoism has been defined in our time by Ayn Rand. It is the philosophy of Objectivism, presented in detail in
Atlas Shrugged, Introduction to Objectivist
Epistemology, and
The Virtue
of Selfishness. It is the antidote to the present state of the world. (All further quotations, unless otherwise identified, are from the works of Ayn Rand.)
⁵

Most philosophers have left their starting points to un- named implication. The base of Objectivism is explicit:

“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”
⁶

Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.

The third axiom at the base of knowledge—an axiom true, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—is the Law of Identity. This law defines the essence of existence: to be is to be something, a thing is what it is; and leads to the fundamental principle of all action, the law of causality. The law of causality states that a thing’s actions are determined not by chance, but by its nature, i.e., by what it is.

It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms. Existence is the first axiom.
The universe exists independent
of consciousness.
Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but “Nature, to be cornmanded, must be obeyed” (Francis Bacon). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”
⁷

The philosophic source of this viewpoint and its major advocate in the history of philosophy is Aristotle. Its opponents are all the other major traditions, including Platonism, Christianity, and German idealism. Directly or indirectly, these traditions uphold the notion that consciousness is the creator of reality. The essence of this notion is the denial of the axiom that existence exists.

In the religious version, the deniers advocate a consciousness “above” nature, i.e., superior, and contradictory, to existence; in the social version, they melt nature into an indeterminate blur given transient semi-shape by human desire. The first school denies reality by upholding two of them. The second school dispenses with the concept of reality as such. The first rejects science, law, causality, identity, claiming that anything is possible to the omnipotent, miracle-working will of the Lord. The second states the religionists’ rejection in secular terms, claiming that anything is possible to the will of “the people.”

Neither school can claim a basis in objective evidence. There is no way to reason from nature to its negation, or from facts to their subversion, or from any premise to the obliteration of argument as such, i.e., of its foundation: the axioms of existence and identity.

Metaphysics and epistemology are closely interrelated; together they form a philosophy’s foundation. In the history of philosophy, the rejection of reality and the rejection of reason have been corollaries. Similarly, as Aristotle’s example indicates, a pro-reality metaphysics implies and requires a pro-reason epistemology.

Reason is defined by Ayn Rand as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”
⁸

Reason performs this function by means of concepts, and the validity of reason rests on the validity of concepts. But the nature and origin of concepts is a major philosophic problem. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality, and one can define objective principles to guide man’s process of cognition. If concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge, and man is helplessly blind.

This is the “problem of universals,” on which Western philosophy has foundered.

Plato claimed to find the referent of concepts not in this world, but in a supernatural dimension of essences. The Kantians regard concepts (some or all) as devoid of referents, i.e., as subjective creations of the human mind independent of external facts. Both approaches and all of their variants in the history of philosophy lead to the same essential consequence: the severing of man’s tools of cognition from reality, and therefore the undercutting of man’s mind. (Although Aristotle’s epistemology is far superior, his theory of concepts is intermingled with remnants of Platonism and is untenable.) Recent philosophers have given up the problem and, as a result, have given up philosophy as such.

Ayn Rand challenges and sweeps aside the main bulwark of the anti-mind axis. Her historic feat is to tie man’s distinctive form of cognition to reality, i.e., to validate man’s reason.

According to Objectivism, concepts
are
derived from and do refer to the facts of reality.

The mind at birth (as Aristotle first stated) is tabula
rasa;
there are no innate ideas. The senses are man’s primary means of contact with reality; they give him the precondition of all subsequent knowledge, the evidence that something is. What the something is he discovers on the conceptual level of awareness.

Conceptualization is man’s method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one’s perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without
specifying their measurements
, which vary from case to case. “A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted.”

The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in
any
quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given
any
value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but
conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.
⁹

Concepts are neither supernatural nor subjective: they refer to facts of this world, as processed by man’s means of cognition. (The foregoing is a brief indication; for a full discussion see
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
)

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) relationships among concretes; use concepts according to the rules of logic (ultimately, the Law of Identity). 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.

The mystic seeks supernatural knowledge; the skeptic denies the possibility of any knowledge. The mystic claims that man’s means of cognition are inadequate and that true knowledge requires illumination from God; the skeptic agrees, then throws out God. The mystic upholds absolutes, which he defends by an appeal to faith; the skeptic answers that he has no faith. The mystic’s faith, ultimately, is in his feelings, which he regards as a pipeline to the beyond; the skeptic drops the beyond, then follows
his
feelings, which, he says, are the only basis of action in an unknowable world.

Feelings are products of men’s ideas and value-judgments, held consciously or subconsciously. Feelings are not tools of cognition or a guide to action.

The old-fashioned religionists condemned human reason on the grounds that it is limited, finite, earthbound, as against the perfect but ineffable mind of God. This implies an attack on identity (as does any rejection of the finite); but it does so under cover of affirming a consciousness with an allegedly greater, supernatural identity. The modern nihilists are more explicit: they campaign, not for the infinite, but for a zero. Just as in metaphysics they reject the concept of reality, so in epistemology they reject the possibility of consciousness.

Man, say the Kantians, cannot know “things as they are,” because his knowledge is acquired by human senses, human concepts, human logic, i.e., by the human means of knowledge.

The same type of argument would apply to any consciousness—human, animal, or divine (assuming the latter existed): if it is something, if it is limited to some, any, means of knowledge, then by the same reasoning it would not know “things as they are,” but only “things as they appear” to that kind of consciousness.

Kant objects to the fact that man’s mind has a nature. His theory is: identity—the essence of existence—invalidates consciousness. Or: a means of knowledge makes knowledge impossible. As Ayn Rand points out, this theory implies that “man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist,
because
he perceives them.”
¹⁰

Just as Kant’s epistemological nihilism sweeps cognition away from identity, so his ethical nihilism sweeps morality—the field of
values—
away from any enjoyment of life.

The Objectivist ethics is the opposite of Kant’s.

The Objectivist ethics begins with a fundamental question: why is ethics necessary?

The answer lies in man’s nature as a living organism. A living organism has to act in the face of a constant alternative: life or death. Life is conditional; it can be sustained only by a specific course of action performed by the living organism, such as the actions of obtaining food. In this regard plants and animals have no choice: within the limits of their powers, they take automatically the actions their life requires. Man does have a choice. He does not know automatically what actions will sustain him; if he is to survive he must discover, then practice by choice, a code of values and virtues, the specific code which human life requires. The purpose of ethics is to define such a code.

Objectivism is the first philosophy to identify the relationship between life and moral values. “Ethics,” writes Ayn Rand, “is an
objective
,
metaphysical necessity of man’s survival
—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”

The standard of ethics, required by the nature of reality and the nature of man, is Man’s Life. “All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”

“Man’s mind,” states John Galt, the protagonist of
Atlas Shrugged,

is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.
¹¹

Thinking is not an automatic process. A man can choose to think or to let his mind stagnate, or he can choose actively to turn against his intelligence, to evade his knowledge, to subvert his reason. If he refuses to think, he courts disaster: he cannot with impunity reject his means of perceiving reality.

Thinking is a delicate, difficult process, which man cannot perform unless knowledge is his goal, logic is his method, and the judgment of his mind is his guiding absolute. Thought requires selfishness, the fundamental selfishness of a rational faculty that places nothing above the integrity of its own function.