The Ayn Rand Lexicon - Objectivism From A To Z Part 28

[GS, FNI, 150; pb 123.]

Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized cla.s.srooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell-but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no ident.i.ty, no nature, and there's no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.

[Ibid.]

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. 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-Self-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. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.

[Ibid., 156; pb 128.]

You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island-it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today-and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin n.o.ble enough to buy it.

[Ibid., 156; pb 127.]

A moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man, according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code's standard of value. The standard is the end, to which man's actions are the means.

A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes-he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.

[ITOE, 42.].

Morality per tains only to the sphere of man's free will-only to those actions which are open to his choice.

["Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand," pamphlet, 4.]

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.

[GS, FNI, 168; pb 136.]

In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers-and mankind's tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.

["Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," PWNI, 81; pb 67.]

See Conceptual Index: Ethics.

Motion. They proclaim that there are no ent.i.ties, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of ent.i.ty, there can be no such concept as "motion."

[GS, FNI, 191; pb 154.]

Motions are motions of ent.i.ties; ... a child is aware of motion perceptually, but cannot conceptualize "motion" until he has formed some concepts of that which moves, i.e., of ent.i.ties.

[ITOE, 18. ].

Concepts of motion are formed by specifying the distinctive nature of the motion and of the ent.i.ties performing it, and/or of the medium in which it is performed-and omitting the particular measurements of any given instance of such motion and of the ent.i.ties involved. For instance, the concept "walking" denotes a certain kind of motion performed by living ent.i.ties possessing legs, and does not apply to the motion of a snake or of an automobile. The concept "swimming" denotes the motion of any living ent.i.ty propelling itself through water, and does not apply to the motion of a boat. The concept "flying" denotes the motion of any ent.i.ty propelling itself through the air, whether a bird or an airplane.

[Ibid., 20.]

The concept of "location" arises in the context of ent.i.ties which are at rest relative to each other. A thing's location is the place where it is situated. But a moving object is not at any one place-it is in motion. One can locate a moving object only in the sense of specifying the location of the larger fixed region through which it is moving during a given period of time. For instance: "Between 4:00 and 4:05 p.m., the car was moving through New York City." One can narrow down the time period and, correspondingly, the region; but one cannot narrow down the time to nothing in the contradictory attempt to locate the moving car at a single, fixed position. If it is moving, it is not at a fixed position.

The law of ident.i.ty does not attempt to freeze reality. Change exists; it is a fact of reality. When a thing is changing, that is what it is doing, that is its ident.i.ty for that period. What is still is still. What is in process is in process. A is A.

[Harry Binsw.a.n.ger, "Q & A Department: Ident.i.ty and Motion," TOF, Dec. 1981, 14.]

See also CHANGE; ENt.i.tY; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; "STOLEN CONCEPT," FALLACY of.

Motion Pictures. In motion pictures or television, literature is the ruler and term-setter, with music serving only as an incidental, background accompaniment. Screen and television plays are subcategories of the drama, and in the dramatic arts "the play is the thing." The play is that which makes it art; the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 71.]

Visual art is an intrinsic part of films in a much deeper sense than the mere selection of sets and camera angles ... a "motion picture" is literally that, and has to he a stylized visual composition in motion....

Potentially, motion pictures are a great art, but that potential has not as yet been actualized, except in single instances and random moments. An art that requires the synchronization of so many esthetic elements and so many different talents cannot develop in a period of philosophical-cultural disintegration such as the present. Its development requires the creative cooperation of men who are united, not necessarily by their formal philosophical convictions, but by their fundamental view of man, i.e.. by their sense of life.

[Ibid., 72.]

The movies are still in the position of a r.e.t.a.r.ded child: born into a collapsing family, i.e., a deteriorating culture, an art that demanded Romanticism was left to struggle blindly in the midst of a value-desert. It produced a few rare, almost accidental sparks of true greatness, displaying its untouched potential, then was swallowed again in a growing tide of mediocrity.

[Frank O'Connor, review of Lillian Gish's The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, TO, Nov. 1969, 8.]

Today, the movies have gone all the way back to the pre-Griffith days; or rather, they have accepted, on a broad scale, the error that destroyed D. W. Griffith: the belief that a movie is primarily a director's art, that content, story, and cast do not matter-i.e., that it is an art concerned only with the "how," not the "what"-i.e., that it is an art of means, without ends-i.e., that it is the field of trick photographers, not of artists.

[Ibid., 15.]

See also ART: DIRECTOR; LITERATURE; ROMANTICISM; SENSE of LIFE.

Motivation. Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man's basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action-and in order to understand a man's character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know "what makes a man tick," we must ask: "What is he after?"

To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.

["Basic Principles of Literature," RM, 67; pb 88.]

See also ART; FREE WILL; LITERATURE; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PSYCHOLOGY; VALUES.

Motivation by Love vs. by Fear. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not the absence of pain.

[GS, FNI, 166; pb 135.]

You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power-and secretly add that fear is the more "practical"-you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have d.a.m.ned.

[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]

See also MOTIVATION; HAPPINESS; PLEASURE and PAIN; SUFFERING; VALUES; ZERO, REIFICATION of.

Music. Music employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man's sense-of-life emotions.

["Art and Cognition," RM, pb 46.]

The fundamental difference between music and the other arts lies in the fact that music is experienced as if it reversed man's normal psycho-epistemological process.

The other arts create a physical object (i.e., an object perceived by man's senses, be it a book or a painting) and the psycho-epistemological process goes from the perception of the object to the conceptual grasp of its meaning, to an appraisal in terms of one's basic values, to a consequent emotion. The pattern is: from perception-to conceptual understanding-to appraisal-to emotion.

The pattern of the process involved in music is: from perception-to emotion-to appraisal-to conceptual understanding.

Music is experienced as if it had the power to reach man's emotions directly.

[Ibid., 50.]

Psycho-epistemologically, the pattern of the response to music seems to be as follows: one perceives the music, one grasps the suggestion of a certain emotional state and, with one's sense of life serving as the criterion, one appraises this state as enjoyable or painful, desirable or undesirable, significant or negligible, according to whether it corresponds to or contradicts one's fundamental feeling about life.

[Ibid., 53.]

It is in terms of his fundamental emotions-i.e., the emotions produced by his own metaphysical value-judgments-that man responds to music.

Music cannot tell a story, it cannot deal with concretes, it cannot convey a specific existential phenomenon, such as a peaceful countryside or a stormy sea. the theme of a composition ent.i.tled "Spring Song" is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer. Even concepts which, intellectually, belong to a complex level of abstraction, such as "peace," "revolution," "religion," are too specific, too concrete to be expressed in music. All that music can do with such themes is convey the emotions of serenity, or defiance, or exaltation. Liszt's "St. Francis Walking on the Waters" was inspired by a specific legend, but what it conveys is a pa.s.sionately dedicated struggle and triumph-by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual listener to supply.

Music communicates emotions, which one grasps, but does not actually feel; what one feels is a suggestion, a kind of distant, dissociated, depersonalized emotion-until and unless it unites with one's own sense of life. But since the music's emotional content is not communicated conceptually or evoked existentially, one does feel it in some peculiar, subterranean way.

Music conveys the same categories of emotions to listeners who hold widely divergent views of life. As a rule, men agree on whether a given piece of music is gay or sad or violent or solemn. But even though, in a generalized way, they experience the same emotions in response to the same music, there are radical differences in how they appraise this experience-i. e.. how they feel about these feelings.

[Ibid., 52.]

The formulation of a common vocabulary of music ... would require: a translation of the musical experience, the inner experience, into conceptual terms; an explanation of why certain sounds strike us a certain way; a definition of the axioms of musical perception, from which the appropriate esthetic principles could be derived, which would serve as a base for the objective validation of esthetic judgments....

Until a conceptual vocabulary is discovered and defined, no objectively valid criterion of esthetic judgment is possible in the field of music....

No one, therefore, can claim the objective superiority of his choices over the choices of others. Where no objective proof is available, it's every man for himself-and only for himself.

The nature of musical perception has not been discovered because the key to the secret of music is physiological-it lies in the nature of the process by which man perceives sounds-and the answer would require the joint effort of a physiologist, a psychologist and a philosopher (an esthetician).

The start of a scientific approach to this problem and the lead to an answer were provided by Helmholtz, the great physiologist of the nineteenth century.

[Ibid., 55.]

From the standpoint of psycho-epistemology, I can offer a hypothesis on the nature of man's response to music, but I urge the reader to remember that it is only a hypothesis....

One may listen to noise for an hour, a day or a year, and it remains just noise. But musical tones heard in a certain kind of succession produce a different result-the human ear and brain integrate them into a new cognitive experience, into what may be called an auditory ent.i.ty: a melody. The integration is a physiological process; it is performed unconsciously and automatically. Man is aware of the process only by means of its results.

Helmholtz has demonstrated that the essence of musical perception is mathematical: the consonance or dissonance of harmonies depends on the ratios of the frequencies of their tones. The brain can integrate a ratio of one to two, for instance, but not of eight to nine....

The psycho-epistemological meaning of a given composition lies in the kind of work it demands of a listener's ear and brain.

A composition may demand the active alertness needed to resolve complex mathematical relationships-or it may deaden the brain by means of monotonous simplicity. It may demand a process of building an integrated sum-or it may break up the process of integration into an arbitrary series of random bits-or it may obliterate the process by a jumble of sounds mathematically-physiologically impossible to integrate, and thus turn into noise.

The listener becomes aware of this process in the form of a sense of efficacy, or of strain, or of boredom, or of frustration. His reaction is cognitive functioning on which he feels at home.

Ibid., 57.]

Music gives man's consciousness the same experience as the other arts: a concretization of his sense of life. But the abstraction being concretized is primarily epistemological, rather than metaphysical; the abstraction is man's consciousness, i.e., his method of cognitive functioning, which he experiences in the concrete form of hearing a specific piece of music. A man's acceptance or rejection of that music depends on whether it calls upon or clashes with, confirms or contradicts, his mind's way of working. The metaphysical aspect of the experience is the sense of a world which he is able to grasp, to which his mind's working is appropriate.

Music is the only phenomenon that permits an adult to experience the process of dealing with pure sense data. Single musical tones are not percepts, but pure sensations; they become percepts only when integrated. Sensations are man's first contact with reality; when integrated into percepts, they are the given, the self-evident, the not-to-be-doubted. Music offers man the singular opportunity to reenact, on the adult level, the primary process of his method of cognition: the automatic integration of sense data into an intelligible, meaningful ent.i.ty. To a conceptual consciousness, it is a unique form of rest and reward.

[Ibid., 59.]

See also ART; BALLET; CONCEPT-FORMATION; DANCE; EMOTIONS; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; OPERA and OPERETTA; PERFORMING ARTS; SENSATION; SENSE of LIFE.

Mystical Ethics. The mystic theory of ethics is explicitly based on the premise that the standard of value of man's ethics is set beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another, supernatural dimension, that ethics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man's life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for the guilt of being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the existential monument to this theory of ethics.

["The Objectivist Ethics," VOS, 33; pb 34.]

A mystic code of morality demanding self-sacrifice cannot be promulgated or propagated without a supreme ruler that becomes the collector of the sacrificing. Traditionally, there have been two such collectors: either G.o.d or society. The collector had to be inaccessible to mankind at large, and his authority had to be revealed only through an elite of special intermediaries, variously called "high priests," "commissars," "Gauleiters." etc.

["The Stimulus and the Response," PWNI, 177; pb 146.]

See also G.o.d; INTRINSIC THEORY of VALUES; MORALITY; RELIGION; SACRIFICE; STANDARD of VALUE; SUPERNATURALISM; VALUES.

Mysticism. What is mysticism? Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as "instinct," "intuition," "revelation," or any form of "just knowing."

Reason is the perception of reality, and rests on a single axiom: the Law of Ident.i.ty.

Mysticism is the claim to the perception of some other reality-other than the one in which we live-whose definition is only that it is not natural, it is supernatural, and is to be perceived by some form of unnatural or supernatural means.

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

The d.a.m.nation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, "higher," reality; the d.a.m.nation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the d.a.m.nation of man's mind as a source of pride, and the d.a.m.nation of reason as a "limited," deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the "real" reality and the "true" truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the d.a.m.nation of man's nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the d.a.m.nation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave-these are the necessary tenets of the [mystic's] view of existence, as they have been in every variant of [mystical] philosophy throughout the course of mankind's history.

["For the New Intellectual," FNI, 14; pb 18.]

To the [mystic], as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.

An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality-or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the [mystic's] epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the [mystic], emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy a.s.sociational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores.

Since the clash is constant, the [mystic's] solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, "higher" reality-where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his a.s.sertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a "superior" truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, "inferior," beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his "truth" as superior to their own perception of reality.

[Ibid., 12; pb 17.]

A mystic is a man who surrendered his mind at its first encounter with the minds of others. Somewhere in the distant reaches of his childhood, when his own understanding of reality clashed with the a.s.sertions of others, with their arbitrary orders and contradictory demands, he gave in to so craven a fear of independence that he renounced his rational faculty. At the crossroads of the choice between "I know" and "They say," he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings. His feelings become his only guide, his only remnant of personal ident.i.ty, he clings to them with ferocious possessiveness-and whatever thinking he does is devoted to the struggle of hiding from himself that the nature of his feelings is terror.

When a mystic declares that he feels the existence of a power superior to reason, he feels it all right, but that power is not an omniscient super-spirit of the universe, it is the consciousness of any pa.s.ser-by to whom he has surrendered his own. A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others. "They" are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent. "They" are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live. To control the consciousness of others becomes his only pa.s.sion; power-l.u.s.t is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.

[GS, FNI, 200; pb 160.) 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.