The Virtue Of Selfishness 10
On Page 70 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand’s associate, Nathaniel Brandens wrote 6. The Psychology of Pleasure: “Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need. Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful action—just as pain is the insignia of pain, suffering and death.”
My response: simple, normal, amoral, or moral pleasures are fine, and fine pleasure and joy of high caliber over viewing a lovely sunset, or writing a poem, and it is a reward for successful action. Pain can be natural, a feeling of hurt, and it need not be linked with the failure to be a productive competent first-hander, but it could be.
Branden: “Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting.”
My response: Branden is much more worldly and about finding joy here, whereas many Christian regarded earth as a vale of tears to be endured; and Jordan Peterson finds it axiomatic that life is suffering. Perhaps, a wise person seeks to enjoy both emotions in balance and in perspective to what one is experiencing and attempting to rectify and build. Branden is articulate when he defines living as acting to achieve values that one has adopted. If one has acted morally and built up a productive life for oneself out of rational self-interest, one would feel merited pleasure at acting successfully and this feeling would inspire one to do more in the future. Nice insight.
Branden: “Further, because the metaphysical meaning of pleasure to man, the state of enjoyment gives him a direct experience of his own efficacy, of his competence to deal with facts of reality, to achieve his values, to live. Implicitly contained in the experience of pleasure is the feeling: ‘I am in control of my existence’—just as implicitly contained in the experience of pain is the feeling: ‘I am helpless.’ A pleasure emotionally entails a sense of efficacy, so pain emotionally entails a sense of impotence.”
My response: this type of pleasure or pain is linked to the self-realized life of the individual, as conceived of under Objectivism. It is a higher level feeling similar to a sense of spiritual satisfaction, pleasure if one is competent in reality living as achieving one values, feeling pain if one failed or is a slug. I agree.
Branden on Pages 71 and 72: “Thus, in letting man’s experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence.
Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of a man’s body works as a barometer of health or injury, so does the pleasure-pain mechanism of his consciousness works on the same principle, acting as a barometer of what is form him or against him, what is beneficial to his life and what is inimical. But is a being of volitional consciousness, he has not innate ideas, no automatic or infallible knowledge of what his survival depends on. He must choose the values that are to guide his actions and sets his goals. His emotional mechanism will work according to the kind of values he chooses. It is his values that determine what a man feels to be for him or against him; it is his values that determine what a man seeks for pleasure.”
My response: It may be that this internal barometer of pleasure is linked to self-esteem if the individual is virtues, adopted high ideals, and has implemented them in his life, so that his internal barometer reminds him truthfully is he is doing well morally or not. The values he selected and his acting to bring them about in action, will make him feel pleasure so that he knows he is on the right track. I think we can have free will or free up our weak will, even though we have innate ideas from birth.
Branden” If a man makes an error in his choice of values, his emotional mechanism will not correct him: it has no will of its own. If a man’s values are such that he desires things which, in fact and reality, lead to his destruction, his emotional mechanism will not save him, but will, instead urge him on towards destruction: he will have to set it in reverse, against himself and the facts of reality, against his own life. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer: man has the power to program it but no power to change its nature—so that if he sets the wrong programming, he will not be able to escape the fact that the most self-destructive desire will have for him, the emotional intensity and urgency of life-saving actions. He has, of course, the power to change the programming—but only by changing his values.”
My response: I like his psychology. Our pleasure or pain of consciousness, as a mood mirror reflecting back to us how we are doing if we chose the right values or not, and if we are effecting them or not, is an internal signal to our conscious state of mind of how we are doing and where we are at and if we have failed, it is hard to reverse course.
Branden: “A man’s basic values reflect his conscious or subconscious view of himself and existence. They are the expression of (a) the degree and nature of his self-esteem or the lack of it, and (b) the extent to which he regards the universe as open to his understanding and action or closed—i.e., the extent to which he holds a benevolent or malevolent view of the existence. Thus, the things which a man seeks for pleasure or enjoyment, are profoundly revealing psychologically; they are the index of his character and soul. (By ‘soul,’ I mean: a man’s consciousness and his basic motivating values.)”
My response: the first-hander or great soul would have an optimistic, can-do attitude, having picked wise values, and then live to instantiate those values successfully as a life plan. It does not show that he feels the universe is malevolent or benevolent (on earth is malevolent more than benevolent) but his activism and resolve despite opposition to his plans by others or reality, be he successful or not, if he tries his best, he will feel pleasure and just pride because he really is doing something with his life.
Branden on Pages 72 and 73: “There are, broadly, five (interconnected) areas that allow a man to experience the enjoyment of life: productive work, human relations, recreation, art and sex.
Productive work is the most fundamental of these: through his work man gains his basic sense of control over existence—his sense of efficacy—which is the necessary foundation of the ability to enjoy any other value. The man whose life lacks direction or purpose, the man who has no creative goal, necessarily feels helpless and out of control; the man who feels helpless and out of control, feels inadequate to and unfit for existence; and the man who feels unfit for existence is incapable of enjoying it.”
My response: Well said but I would add that a relationship with the Higher Power allows one to experience great enjoyment of life and may undergirded productive work in chosen and done what one must to feel the gusto from living and working and praying.
Branden: “One of the hallmarks of a man’s self-esteem , who regards the universe as open to his effort, is the profound pleasure he experiences in the productive work of his mind; his enjoyment of life is fed by his unceasing concern to grow in knowledge and ability—to think, to achieve, to move forward, to meet new challenges and overcome them—to earn the pride of constantly expanding efficacy.
A different kind of soul is revealed by the man, who, predominantly, takes pleasure only in working at the routine and familiar, who is inclined to enjoy working in a semi-daze, who sees happiness in freedom from challenge or struggle or effort: the soul of a man profoundly deficient in self-esteem, to whom the universe appears as unknowable and vaguely threatening, the man whose central motivating impulse is a longing for safety, not the safety that is won by efficacy, but the safety of the world in which efficacy is not demanded.”
My response: the low self-eteem of the second-hander makes him feel pain over his low values and underperforming, but he enjoys a sick pleasure of self-loathing by just doing the minimum to get by, he self-sacrificed his talent at the altar of mediocrity.
Branden on Pages 73 and 74: “Still another kind of soul is revealed by the man who finds it inconceivable that work—any form of work—can be enjoyable, who regards the effort of earning a living as a necessary evil, who dreams only of the pleasures that begin when the workday ends, the pleasure of drowning his brain in alcohol or television, or billiards or women, the pleasure of not being conscious: the soul of a man with scarcely a shred of self-esteem, who never expected the universe to be comprehensible, and takes his lethargic dread of it for granted, and whose only form of relief and only notion of enjoyment is the dim flicker of undemanding sensations.
Still another kind of soul is revealed by the man who take pleasure, not in achievement, but in destruction, whose action is aimed, not at attaining efficacy, but at ruling those that have attained it: the soul of a man so abjectly lacking in self-value, and so overwhelmed by the terror of existence, that his sole form of self-fulfillment is to unleash his resentment and hatred against those that do not share his state, those who are able to live—as if, by destroying the confident, the strong, and the healthy, he could convert incompetence into efficacy.
My response: these second-handers are well characterized, but the latter, Ellsworth Toohey, consumes all he touches by fire.
Branden on Page 74 and 75: “A rational, self-confident man is motivated by a love of values and by a desire to achieve them. A neurotic is motivated by fear and by a desire to escape it. This difference in motivation is reflected, not only in the things each man will seek for pleasure, but in the nature of the pleasure they will experience.
The emotional quality of the pleasure experienced by the four men described above for instance, is not the same . . . For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.”
My response Amen.
Branden on Page 78: “One of the hallmarks of the man who lacks self-esteem—and the real punishment for his moral and psychological default—is the fact that all his pleasures are pleasures of escape from the two pursuers whom he has betrayed and from which there is no escape; reality and his own mind.”
My response: We cannot run and we cannot hide very well or for very long from what we were born to take on.
Branden: “Since the function of pleasure is to afford man a sense of his own efficacy, the neurotic is caught in a deadly conflict: he is compelled, by his nature as a man, to feel a desperate need for pleasure, as a confirmation and expression of his control over reality—but he can find pleasure only in an escape from reality. That is the reason why his pleasures do not work, why they bring him, not a sense of pride, fulfillment, inspiration, but a sense of guilt, frustration hopelessness, shame. The effect of pleasure on a man of self-esteem is that of reward and confirmation. The effect of pleasure on a man who lacks self-esteem is that of a threat—the threat of anxiety, the shaking of the precarious foundation of his pseudo-self-value, the sharpening of the ever-present fear that the structure will collapse and he will find himself face to face with a stern, absolute, unknown and unforgiving reality . . . To preserve an unclouded capacity for the enjoyment of life, is an unusual moral and psychological achievement. Contrary to popular belief, it is the prerogative, not of mindlessness, but of an unremitting devotion to the act of perceiving reality, and of a scrupulous intellectual integrity. It is a reward of self-esteem.”
My response: I think most of Branden’s and, by extension, Rand’s psychological theory of a moral hierarchy of pleasure being linked to earned high self-esteem that is consciousness accruing this sense of self-regard while one works productively and substantively to bring into reality by thoughtful acts, the goals identified by the self as producing actions and values mesh, shaping it all into a beautiful life.
If you do not maverize, you will not feel that you esteem yourself because you do not: you have not dedicated yourself to developing the beautiful self.
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