The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 21

Investment. If a man does not consume his goods at once, but saves them for the future, whether he wants to enlarge his production or to live on his savings (which he holds in the form of money)-in either case, he is counting on the fact that he will be able to exchange his money for the things he needs, when and as he needs them. This means that he is relying on a continuous process of production-which requires an uninterrupted flow of goods saved to fuel further and further production. This How is "investment capital," the stock seed of industry. When a rich man lends money to others, what he lends to them is the goods which he has not consumed.

This is the meaning of the concept "investment." If you have wondered how one can start producing, when nature requires time paid in advance, this is the beneficent process that enables men to do it: a successful man lends his goods to a promising beginner (or to any reputable producer)-in exchange for the payment of interest. The payment is for the risk he is taking: nature does not guarantee man's success, neither on a farm nor in a factory. If the venture fails, it means that the goods have been consumed without a productive return, so the investor loses his money; if the venture succeeds, the producer pays the interest out of the new goods, the profits, which the investment enabled him to make.

Observe, and bear in mind above all else, that this process applies only to financing the needs of production, not of consumption-and that its success rests on the investor's judgment of men's productive ability, not on his compa.s.sion for their feelings, hopes or dreams.

["Egalitarianism and Inflation," PWNI, 159; pb 131.]

See also CONSUMPTION; CREDIT; PRODUCTION; SAVINGS.

Irrationalism. Reason is the faculty that identifies, in conceptual terms, the material provided by man's senses. "Irrationalism" is the doctrine that reason is not a valid means of knowledge or a proper guide to action.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 41 ; pb 47.]

See also IRRATIONALITY; MYSTICISM; REASON; SKEPTICISM.

Irrationality. 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.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 20; pb 25.]

To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.

[GS, FNl, 156; pb 127.]

The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 24; pb 28.]

Irrationality is a state of default, the state of an unachieved human stature. When men do not choose to reach the conceptual level, their consciousness has no recourse but to its automatic, perceptual, semi-animal functions.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 19; pb 21.]

See also CONTRADICTIONS; EMOTIONS; EVASION; EVIL; FOCUS; RATIONALITY; REASON; WHIMS/WHIM-WORSHIP.

Irreducible Primaries. An irreducible primary is a fact which cannot be a.n.a.lyzed (i.e., broken into components) or derived from antecedent facts.

["Philosophical Detection," PWNI, 15; pb 13.]

See also AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; COROLLARIES; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; SELF-EVIDENT.

"Is"-"Ought" Dichotomy. It is only an ultimate goal, and end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "life." To speak of "value" as apart from "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible."

In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living ent.i.ties exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living ent.i.ty is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living ent.i.ty is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between "is" and "ought."

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 7; pb 17.]

See also GOAL-DIRECTED ACTION; GOOD, the; LIFE; MORALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; ULTIMATE VALUE; VALUES.

"Isolationism." A large-scale instance [of political smear-tactics], in the 1930's, was the introduction of the word "isolationism" into our political vocabulary. It was a derogatory term, suggesting something evil, and it had no clear, explicit definition. It was used to convey two meanings: one alleged, the other real-and to d.a.m.n both.

The alleged meaning was defined approximately like this: "Isolationism is the att.i.tude of a person who is interested only in his own country and is not concerned with the rest of the world." The real meaning was: "Patriotism and national self-interest."

What, exactly, is "concern with the rest of the world"? Since n.o.body did or could maintain the position that the state of the world is of no concern to this country, the term "isolationism" was a straw man used to misrepresent the position of those who were concerned with this country's interests. The concept of patriotism was replaced by the term "isolationism" and vanished from public discussion.

The number of distinguished patriotic leaders smeared, silenced, and eliminated by that tag would be hard to compute. Then, by a gradual, imperceptible process, the real purpose of the tag took over: the concept of "concern" was switched into "selfless concern." The ultimate result was a view of foreign policy which is wrecking the United States to this day: the suicidal view that our foreign policy must be guided, not by considerations of national self-interest, but by concern for the interests and welfare of the world, that is, of all countries except our own.

[" 'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing," CUI, 175.]

Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of "isolationism." The same intellectual groups (and even some of the same aging individuals) who coined that anti-concept in World War II-and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America's self-immolation-the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism), are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.

["The Lessons of Vietnam," ARL, III, 24, 4.]

See also "ANTI-CONCEPTS"; COMMUNISM; FOREIGN POLlCY; SOVIET RUSSIA.

J.

Judgment. See Moral Judgment.

Justice. Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification-that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly, that just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of sc.r.a.p than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero-that your moral appraisal is the coin paying men for their virtues or vices, and this payment demands of you as scrupulous an honor as you bring to financial transactions-that to withhold your contempt from men's vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement-that to place any other concern higher than justice is to devaluate your moral currency and defraud the good in favor of the evil, since only the good can lose by a default of justice and only the evil can profit-and that the bottom of the pit at the end of that road, the act of moral bankruptcy, is to punish men for their virtues and reward them for their vices, that that is the collapse to full depravity, the Black Ma.s.s of the worship of death, the dedication of your consciousness to the destruction of existence.

[GS, FNI, 158; pb 129.]

What fact of reality gave rise to the concept "justice"? The fact that man must draw conclusions about the things, people and events around him, i.e., must judge and evaluate them. Is his judgment automatically right? No. What causes his judgment to be wrong? The lack of sufficient evidence, or his evasion of the evidence, or his inclusion of considerations other than the facts of the case. How, then, is he to arrive at the right judgment? By basing it exclusively on the factual evidence and by considering all the relevant evidence available. But isn't this a description of "objectivity"? Yes, "objective judgment" is one of the wider categories to which the concept "justice" belongs. What distinguishes "justice" from other instances of objective judgment? When one evaluates the nature or actions of inanimate objects, the criterion of judgment is determined by the particular purpose for which one evaluates them. But how does one determine a criterion for evaluating the character and actions of men, in view of the fact that men possess the faculty of volition? What science can provide an objective criterion of evaluation in regard to volitional matters? Ethics. Now, do I need a concept to designate the act of judging a man's character and/or actions exclusively on the basis of all the factual evidence available, and of evaluating it by means of an objective moral criterion? Yes. That concept is "justice."

[ITOE, 67.].

It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. When your impartial att.i.tude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you-whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

["How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society," VOS, 89; pb 71.]

Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues.

["The Ethics of Emergencies," VOS, 52: pb 47.]

The new "theory of justice" [of John Rawls] demands that men counteract the "injustice" of nature by inst.i.tuting the most obscenely unthinkable injustice among men: deprive "those favored by nature" (i.e., the talented, the intelligent, the creative) of the right to the rewards they produce (i.e., the right to life)-and grant to the incompetent, the stupid, the slothful a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce, could not imagine, and would not know what to do with.

["An Unt.i.tled Letter," PWNI, 132; pb 110.]

See also CAPITALISM; COMPa.s.sION; EGALITARIANISM; HONESTY; MERCY; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; OBJECTIVITY; RATIONALITY; TRADER PRINCIPLE; VIRTUE.

K.

Kant, Immanuel. On every fundamental issue, Kant's philosophy is the exact opposite of Objectivism.

["Brief Summary," TO, Sept. 1971, 4.]

Metaphysics and Epistemology The man who ... closed the door of philosophy to reason, was Immanuel Kant....

Kant's expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base-and what it had to be saved from was reason.

Attila's share of Kant's universe includes this earth, physical reality, man's senses, perceptions, reason and science, all of it labeled the "phenomenal" world. The Witch Doctor's share is another, "higher," reality, labeled the "noumenal" world, and a special manifestation, labeled the "categorical imperative," which dictates to man the rules of morality and which makes itself known by means of a feeling, as a special sense of duty.

The "phenomenal" world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man's conceptual faculty: man's basic concepts (such as time, s.p.a.ce, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled "categories" and "forms of perception") which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man's concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are "limited," said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason's validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the "noumenal" world. The "noumenal" world is unknowable; it is the world of "real" reality, "superior" truth and "things in themselves" or "things as they are"-which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant's theory of the "categories" as the source of man's concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; 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.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 31; pb 30.]

The motive of all the attacks on man's rational faculty-from any quarter, in any of the endless variations, under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes-is a single, hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of ident.i.ty. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses ident.i.ty, that it is a faculty of a specific nature, functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after another, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard ident.i.ty as the disqualifying element of consciousness.

The implicit, but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy, is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality, that "true" knowledge has to be causeless, i.e., acquired without any means of cognition.

The entire apparatus of Kant's system, like a hippopotamus engaged in belly-dancing, goes through its gyrations while resting on a single point: that man's knowledge is not valid because his consciousness possesses ident.i.ty....

This is a negation, not only of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such, whether man's, insect's or G.o.d's. (If one supposed the existence of G.o.d, the negation would still apply: either G.o.d perceives through no means whatever, in which case he possesses no ident.i.ty-or he perceives by some divine means and no others, in which case his perception is not valid.) As Berkeley negated existence by claiming that "to be, is to be perceived," so Kant negates consciousness by implying that to be perceived, is not to be....

From primordial mysticism to this, its climax, the attack on man's consciousness and particularly on his conceptual faculty has rested on the unchallenged premise that any knowledge acquired by a process of consciousness is necessarily subjective and cannot correspond to the facts of reality, since it is "processed knowledge."

Make no mistake about the actual meaning of that premise: it is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive-since in fact, in reality, on earth, every aspect of being alive involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. (This is an example of the fact that the revolt against ident.i.ty is a revolt against existence. "The desire not to be anything, is the desire not to be." Atlas Shrugged.) All knowledge is processed knowledge-whether on the sensory. perceptual or conceptual level. An "unprocessed" knowledge would be a knowledge acquired without means of cognition. Consciousness ... is not a pa.s.sive state, but an active process. And more: the satisfaction of every need of a living organism requires an act of processing by that organism, be it the need of air, of food or of knowledge.

[ITOE. 106.].

A "straw man" is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, c.u.mbersome, ponderous construction as Kant's system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was-and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man's ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human conscionsness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant's robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason.

No, Kant did not destroy reason; he merely did as thorough a job of undercutting as anyone could ever do.

If you trace the roots of all our current philosophies-such as pragmatism, logical positivism, and all the rest of the neo-mystics who announce happily that you cannot prove that you exist-you will find that they all grew out of Kant.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the 'Modern World," PWNI, 77; pb 64.]

One of Kant's major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a ma.s.sive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 23; pb 31.]

Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain authentic respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. The Kantian mysticism, however, suffers from no such pagan restraints. It flows forth triumphantly, sweeping the prostrate human mind before it. Since man can never escape the distorting agents inherent in the structure of his consciousness, says Kant, "things in themselves" are in principle unknowable. Reason is impotent to discover anything about reality; if it tries, it can only bog down in impenetrable contradictions. Logic is merely a subjective human device, devoid of reference to or basis in reality. Science, while useful as a means of ordering the data of the world of appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man's own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.

Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different, nonrational method. The door is now open to faith. Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in G.o.d and in an afterlife), even though they cannot prove the truth of their beliefs.... "I have," writes Kant, "therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."

[Ibid., 24; pb 32.]

There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man's feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism-the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant's system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant's fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind's structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained-as Kant had said-then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic cla.s.ses. On this issue, as on many others, the n.a.z.is follow the Marxists, but subst.i.tute race for cla.s.s.

[Ibid., 59; pb 63.]

A man's self, [Kant] maintains, like everything else, is a part of reality -it, too, is something in itself-and if reality is unknowable, then so is a man's self. A man is able, Kant concludes, to know only his phenomenal ego, his self as it appears to him (in introspection); he cannot know his noumenal ego, his "ego as it is in itself."

Man is, therefore, a creature in metaphysical conflict. He is so to speak a metaphysical biped, with one (unreal) foot in the phenomenal world and one (unknowable) foot in the noumenal world.

[Ibid., 75; pb 77.]

Ethics As to Kant's version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of [Kantian] universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.) Those who accept any part of Kant's philosophy-metaphysical, epistemological or moral-deserve it.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 33; pb 32.]

The arch-advocate of "duty" is Immanuel Kant; he went so much farther than other theorists that they seem innocently benevolent by comparison. "Duty," he holds, is the only standard of virtue; but virtue is not its own reward: if a reward is involved, it is no longer virtue. The only moral motivation, he holds, is devotion to duty for duty's sake; only an action motivated exclusively by such devotion is a moral action (i.e., an action performed without any concern for "inclination" [desire] or self-interest).

"It is a duty to preserve one's life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty-then his maxim has a moral import" (Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. R. P. Wolff, New York, Bobbs-Merrill, 1969, pp. 16-17).

["Causality Versus Duty," PWNI, 115; pb 96.]

His view of morality is propagated by men who have never heard of him-he merely gave them a formal, academic status. A Kantian sense of "duty" is inculcated by parents whenever they declare that a child must do something because he must. A child brought up under the constant battering of causeless, arbitrary, contradictory, inexplicable "musts" loses (or never acquires) the ability to grasp the distinction between realistic necessity and human whims-and spends his life abjectly, dutifully obeying the second and defying the first. In the full meaning of the term, he grows up without a clear grasp of reality.

[Ibid., 118; pb 98.]

In a deontological [duty-centered] theory, all personal desires are banished from the realm of morality; a personal desire has no moral significance, be it a desire to create or a desire to kill. For example, if a man is not supporting his life from duty, such a morality makes no distinction between supporting it by honest labor or by robbery. If a man wants to be honest, he deserves no moral credit; as Kant would put it, such honesty is "praiseworthy," but without "moral import." Only a vicious represser, who feels a profound desire to lie, cheat and steal, but forces himself to act honestly for the sake of "duty," would receive a recognition of moral worth from Kant and his ilk.

This is the sort of theory that gives morality a bad name.

The widespread fear and/or resentment of morality-the feeling that morality is an enemy, a musty realm of suffering and senseless boredom -is not the product of mystic, ascetic or Christian codes as such, but a monument to the ugliest repository of hatred for life, man and reason: the soul of Immanuel Kant.

[Ibid., 117; pb 97.]

In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it-but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind.

Even then, however, he cannot be sure that no fragment of desire is "secretly" moving him. The far clearer case, the one case in which a man can at least come close to knowing that he is moral, occurs when the man's desires clash with his duty and he acts in defiance of his desires.

[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 73; pb 75.]

Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to advance this ethics as a matter of philosophic principle, explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised-essentially uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint.

Thus, although he believed that the dutiful man would be rewarded with happiness after death (and that this is proper), Kant holds that the man who is motivated by such a consideration is nonmoral (since he is still acting from inclination, albeit a supernaturally oriented one). Nor will Kant permit the dutiful man to be motivated even by the desire to feel a sense of moral self-approval.

The main line of pre-Kantian moralists had urged man to perform certain actions in order to reach a goal of some kind. They had urged man to love the object which is the good (however it was conceived) and strive to gain it, even if most transferred the quest to the next life. They had asked man to practice a code of virtues as a means to the attainment of values. Kant dissociates virtue from the pursuit of any goal. He dissociates it from man's love of or even interest in any object. Which means: he dissociates morality from values, any values, values as such.

[Ibid., 76; pb 78.]

It is not inner peace that Kant holds out to man, not otherworldly serenity or ethereal tranquillity, but war, a b.l.o.o.d.y, unremitting war against pa.s.sionate, indomitable temptation. It is the lot of the moral man to struggle against undutiful feelings inherent in his nature, and the more intensely he feels and the more desperately he struggles, the greater his claim to virtue. It is the lot of the moral man to burn with desire and then, on principle-the principle of duty-to thwart it. The hallmark of the moral man is to suffer.

[Ibid., 80; pb 82.]

If men lived the sort of life Kant demands, who or what would gain from it? Nothing and no one. The concept of "gain" has been expunged from morality. For Kant, it is the dutiful sacrifice as such that const.i.tutes a man's claim to virtue; the welfare of any recipient is morally incidental. Virtue, for Kant, is not the service of an interest-neither of the self nor of G.o.d nor of others. (A man can claim moral credit for service to others in this view, not because they benefit, but only insofar as he loses.) Here is the essence and climax of the ethics of self-sacrifice, finally, after two thousand years, come to full, philosophic expression in the Western world: your interests-of whatever kind, including the interest in being moral-are a mark of moral imperfection because they are interests. Your desires, regardless of their content, deserve no respect because they are desires. Do your duty, which is yours because you have desires, and which is sublime because, unadulterated by the stigma of any gain, it shines forth unsullied, in loss, pain, conflict, torture. Sacrifice the thing you want, without beneficiaries, supernatural or social; sacrifice your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self, because they are your values, your self-interest, your happiness, your self; sacrifice them to morality, i.e., to the noumenal dimension, i.e., to nothing knowable or conceivable to man, i.e., as far as man living on this earth is concerned, to nothing.

The moral commandment is: thou shalt sacrifice, sacrifice everything, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an end in itself.

[Ibid., 82; pb 83.]