In this book of hers, on Page 21 Ayn Rand is describing how animals know how to act within their knowledge and instinctual overlay. Beyond that, they do not know how to act or what to do. The animal cannot “ . . . it cannot suspend its own consciousness—it cannot choose not to perceive—it cannot evade its own perception—it can not ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
My response: Humans can choose to be stupid, irrational, even evil and the animal cannot: we can suspend our consciousness—we can choose not to perceive it—we can evade our own perception, we can ignore our own good and choose the evil and act as our own destroyers. Her moral psychology is first rate, and she loves the truth. Though an atheist, her metaphysical stance is accurate: humans can will to non-individuate and be evil or motivated by altruistic self-sacrifice. Most people shuffle through life seeking not beauty, the good or the just.
On Page 21 and Page 22 she writes, “Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.”
My response: our code of survival, our set of values, we need to survive minimally and to flourish, but we must devise that code of values. We rationally must decide what is good for us or evil (if one is a Christian or Jew, one could rely on the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule). We must choose our set of values, those that benefit our lives, not endanger them, and what goals will meet those values, and how best way to meet those goals.
Rand: “His own consciousness has to discover the answer to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on earth, the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge—man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man’s particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.”
My response: Since reading The Foutainhead carefully, recently, a second time, I now understand her thinking much more clearly, deeply. This ethicist and artist is not just blathering—she means what she says, she mostly knows what she is talking about, and she wishes people the best, that they should live as Roark, not Keating. It is not his consciousness that has to answer all these questions because God and the Good Spirits exist, and we can learn a lot from these benevolent beings. Still, they are maverizers, like we should be if we reason, feel and imagine in the mode of enlightened self-interest, then we can answer most of these questions. She is correct in admonishing that our consciousness will not work automatically—we must exercise it to the max to become a first-hander, not barely getting by, sliding through life as a barely conscious, minimally rational second-hander. For Rand, our consciousness is volitional and we must will to use it and self-develop and it is hard work, and it is a thrilling work of enlightened self-interest and individual-living more than sacrificing ourselves for others as part of the herd, popular, never lonely, but unfulfilled and relatively unproductive.
Rand: “Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.”
My response: both Rand and Dennis Prager agree—as do I—that humans do not reason enough, and thinking usually helps us survive and gather and live by good values (There are exceptions for we can think to identify an evil end, or how to achieve it or how to rationalize it to ourselves to ease our troubled consciences.? We need to follow our feelings and hunches about actions that are decent in line with our good willing, but none of this occurs easily, for an adult must have worked hard to know how to live, and how to be productive and virtuous.
Rand wants us to work hard mentally, to abstract and engage in concept-formation, to develop the consciousness that does not automatically function rationally, conceptually, and artistically.
On Pages 22 and 23, she writes that the process of concept-formation “ . . . consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term ‘conceptualizing.’ It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sun. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts is reason. The process is thinking.”
My response: if the egoist thinks for himself and revs up his mental operations to think, observe and decide and conclude as a self-realizer, then his creative and original thinking will open up endless possibilities for him, leading him to develop as a great soul, if you are a Mavellonialist, or as a first-hander if you are Howard Roark.
On Page 22, Rand describes how we need to think to function as fully human, happening by choice not automatic function: “In any hour and any issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.”
My response: we need to focus our minds so that we enjoy a full, active awareness of reality. We are creatures of higher consciousness, and we must individuate with that bright intelligence, or slide through life semi-conscious as a nonindiviudator. Her intelligent, activistic, logical interacting with the world out there is something that an egoist commits to all of his life, in all of his waking hours, and this higher-level egoistic involvement with the world is her ethical linking of the right epistemology linked to egoism and individual self-development through working and becoming, motivated by self-interest. I am on board with her.
Rand: she admonishes that the refusal to be self-motivated to do something with one’s life, being rationally and worldly at a high level of focused consciousness is to live as a semi-conscious creature, hiding behind altruistic motive and sacrificing oneself for the group to sidestep taking responsibility for one’s life and doing something with one’s life and with ones consciousness and personality.
I think, based on my own ethical thinking, she thinks selfishness is virtue not only because doing great work as a person is living not only makes one happy and alive, and full conscious and aware, but it renders one doing what one is meant to do ethically as a high level intelligent creature at the top of the food chain in the physical universe that she held was all that we ever know. It is one’s duty to live as a first-hander, and individuate, t settle for zombie like drifting as a nonindivudator and conformist, group-liver.
She really believes people should be motivate by self-interest and practiced what she preached as motivated by self-interest and growing into a secular great sou with all of her writing, teaching and philosophizing.
She is not an elitist, I think. She does not feel that there are a small elite like Roark and Dominique that are first-handers, and all that others can do as lives as herd-dwelling joiners of unremarkable achievement. That pattern is how we are naturally, but if we transvalue altruism into egoism, individual-living and self-realizing, then there is a ethos, a code of values that can inspire and teach average people how to be all that they can be, to become, live, work, love and die as first-handers or secular or religious great souls. Everyone has the talent and capacity for a full life by thinking, and focusing, really focusing.
Rand: “Psychologically, the choice ‘to think or not’ is the choice ‘to focus or not.’ Existentially, the choice ‘to focus or not’ is the choice ‘to be conscious or not.’ Metaphysically, the choice ‘to be conscious or not’ is the choice of life or death.”
My response: The choice to be conscious or not is a choice to be human or not, or to exist at some lower level of existence as a herd-creature. When she asserts that the choice to be conscious or not is a choice of life or death, I believe she means it metaphorically, like when Jesus told his followers to let the dead bury the dead. Rand means something like that here: to be conscious, human, aware, focused and being all that one can be at work, play and when creating is to be spiritually alive (if she believed in spirituality), and to live as a second-hander is to slide through life as a zombie, dead-person-walking so to speak.
On Page 23 she elaborates on what she means by humans needing to think to live: their consciousness as focusing reasoning will help them figure out how get food, shelter, to build technology and structures to feed his family and to run a civilization: “yet, his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.”
What she writes on Page 23 and 24 is explanatory for Roark lived his life: “But man’s responsibility goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor ‘instinctive’—nor infallible. Man must initiate it, to sustain it, and to hear responsibility for its results. He must discover how to tell what is true and what is false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.”
My response: it would not hurt for the maverizer to have studied logic and philosophy, as an amateur intellectual, to help him learn to think for himself in singular ways as he goes off to be a farmer, blacksmith, or entrepreneur. His efforts will not all be correct the first time, but he will learn from his mistakes try again and continually improve. She warns that nature does not guarantee that he will succeed, but, if he perseveres and keeps mulling it over, something should start to work for him—I recommend.
She argues that succeeding and thriving is a do-it-yourself, engaged lifestyle: “Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material upon 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 a 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.”
My response: when Rand mentions that there is no limit to the knowledge that he can accrue and the enjoyment of life that he can achieve, this sound like maverization to me, and pleasure for her is having worked hard, developed the self creatively and rationally, so that the products of one’s thoughts, plans and creative fruits make one enjoy life, a high-end pleasure of merited satisfaction.
On Page 24, she points out how each human is thrown into the world, and we are not equipped to deal with it, let alone survive and thrive: “A being that does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot not automatically know what is right or wrong, what is good for him or what is 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 not open to 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. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and to stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means to survival; to a living consciousness, every ‘is’ implies an ‘ought.’ Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”
My response: Humans require knowledge and right values to know true from false, and right from wrong, so she shares with the reader her optimistic epistemology that we can know about reality and our function within it, and that we can leap from facts about the world to what we ought to do with the right values, so she offers objective morality and ethical certitude as graspable. We can choose to not think, be conscious, gain knowledge and live as self-interested first-handers, but if we choose to destroy ourselves, as we have done mostly through human history, we are not free from the consequences of poor choices. I agree.
Rand: “What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values that his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why man needs a code of ethics.
Now you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrational, that reason cannot guide man’s life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim, that ethics have nothing to do with reality, , with existence, with one’s practical actions and concerns—or that the goal of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.”
My response: she offers that we need a code of ethics, Objectivism, and that goals pursued must be in alignment with those objectivist moral values. I am not simply for rational ethics, but it should be our main set of values, as the ethical moderate in me, insists that irrational feelings, and religious influences, and worrying about goodness for the souls of the living and dead, I suggest that those secondary ethical needs are best met through main emphasis: Objectivist ethics and egoistic motivation for acting.
Rand: “Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of you whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”
My response: Ethics is not a mystic fantasy but is a supernatural code of ethics that grows out of natural law, the law ruling nature set up by the Father and Mother, the Clockmakers and Creators. It is not a subjective luxury or a social convention or social construct. It is objective and critical for human survival and flourishing, by the grace of God, of reality and of the nature of living.
On Pages
24 and 25 she quotes from her hero Galt: “Man has been called a rational being,
but rationality is a matter of choice---and the alternatives his nature offers
him: rational being or suicidal animal. Man must 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. A
code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
My response: Reason, choice, individualism, free speech and free will all seem to be linked, as are feeling, other-determinism, regulated speech, other-willedness. Our life, as well-lived, should be our primary value for living in this world as if it was the only world, or to prepare for afterlife in the next world. We must identify the values that we wish to live in accordance with, and then practice what we preach.
Rand: “The standard of value of Objectivist ethics—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life . . . Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is good; that which negates, opposes it and destroys it is evil.
My response: one’s life is the moral standard: okay, but I would add that a life lived not just physically but spiritually in this world is a life that lived to uplift the self, others and God. Evil degrades them all.
Rand: “Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.
My response: Rand goes on to note that first-handers think and work but there are many parasites that do not work or produce and just copy, steal or rob producers. That is how not to live.
Rand on Pages 26 and 27: “’Man’s survival qua man’ means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan—in all these aspects of existence which are open to his choice.
Man cannot survive as anything but man. He can abandon his means of survival, his mind, he can turn himself into a subhuman creature, and he can turn his life into a brief span of agony—just as his body can exist for a while in the process of disintegration by disease. But he cannot succeed, as a subhuman—as the ugly horror of the antirational periods of mankind’s history can demonstrate. Man has to be man by choice—and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man.
The Objectivist ethics holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.
My response: we can choose to fail and destroy ourselves, but we cannot be happy, successful, content or fulfilled living that wretched way. Life is a fine ethical standard for humans, and one’s individual life serves well as one’s ethical purpose and focus.
Rand: : “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself which is his own life.
Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep—virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The key cardinal values of Objectivist ethics—the three values, which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, ither their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work—pride is the result.
My response she has put together a tidy ethical system that seems tight and interlocking. Productive work, keeping the self busy, and filled with purpose, but I would like to subsume under productive work, the process of self-development.
Rand: “Rationality is man’s basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man’s basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction, that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.
My response her system seems consistent and clearly laid out.
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