The Journals of Ayn Rand, page 88
(The springboard for this article: The fact that men use the right epistemology in the physical sciences, to the extent that they do succeed, but have never identified it.)
1966-1967
[The following passages were cut from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
The first is from the conclusion to Chapter 5, “Definitions. ”]
It is as if man were still screaming in terror before the mystery of his own consciousness, unable to grasp the fact that human cognition is not to be achieved automatically, neither by passive absorption nor by active distortion of perceptual data, and that knowledge can be acquired only by a specific method whose terms are set irrevocably by the nature of man’s consciousness and of reality, and are not open to man’s choice, only to his discovery and practice—a rigorous method, to be practiced volitionally, whose reward is objective knowledge.
[From Chapter 6, “Axiomatic Concepts ”:]
The disintegration of a human consciousness means the attempted descent to an animal’s perceptual level of awareness, but with this difference: an animal, being unable to question reality, is unable to fake it and acts, moment by moment, in accordance with such facts as his limited awareness entitles him to perceive. Man, possessing the power to expand his consciousness, does not possess the power to shrink it; he cannot escape the integrating power of his brain and restrict himself to snatches of moment-by-moment awareness. If he rejects the task of conscious integration, his sub conscious does the job for him, and the result is not cognitive integration, but a blind, nightmare mixture of the part-grasped, part-evaded, part-felt, part-wished and whole terror, the state of a creature unfit to perceive reality on any level of awareness, and unable to survive—samples of which may be observed in any psychiatrist’s office or in the ranks of any irrationalist movement.
[From Chapter 7, “The Cognitive Role of Concepts”:]
The growth of language follows the growth of knowledge, guided by the principle of unit-economy. Every new branch of science creates a vocabulary of its own (which should be, but today is not, translatable without contradiction into the general language). The advent of every new industry creates new words, i.e., new concepts. (If Plato’s theory of universals needed any modern refutations, test it by asking yourself whether the archetypes of “monkey wrench,” “spark plug” and “television” had to wait two and a half thousand years in another dimension to be finally recalled by man.)
[After crossing out the above, AR wrote:]
The growth of language follows the growth of knowledge and the expansion of human activities. It is a vast, anonymous process, with many variations (in the optional area), many changes, false starts and short-lived attempts. Yet certain basic principles can be observed, demonstrating, not the arbitrary character, but the objectivity of that process.
In secular practice (i.e., omitting the concepts of mysticism, which have no referents), a word survives and gains general usage only when and if it designates an actual category of existents that need conceptual designation—with the principle of unit-economy determining that need. Slang is a major source of new words in the general language. Many slang terms are coined every year, by one group or another; some of them become fashionable, enjoy a brief, artificial popularity of random mouthing (intended to designate the fact that one is in with the right group, rather than any category of existents) and vanish, like the stale debris of some noisy party. But a few slang expressions survive and become part of formal language—the apt, incisive ones that designate some aspect of reality for which no formal term had previously existed (such as the verb “to kid” or the nouns “bum” or “stuffed shirt”).
[From Chapter 8, “Consciousness and Identity”:]
Such knowledge as mankind has acquired and such progress as it has made were achieved in spite of and in a constant struggle against its dominant theories of epistemology. Cognitive objectivity has existed in the world as a kind of unofficial, unrecognized underground, in isolated instances and sporadic snatches, fed by such partial leads as could be found in Aristotle’s far from perfect system. Objectivity has never had a full statement, a consistent theory or a firm epistemological foundation; and, even though it represented the implicit method practiced in every scientific achievement, particularly in the spectacular progress of the physical sciences, it was not identified nor acknowledged by its practitioners, which is an eloquent illustration of the ultimate futility of practice without theory, of man’s helplessness when he lacks an explicit statement of his merely implicit knowledge. Those who sought cognitive objectivity were helplessly vulnerable to the theoretical onslaughts of both mystics and skeptics—they had no answer to the flood of equivocations, merely sensing that something was very wrong in those arguments, but unable to discover why—and they lost the battle again and again, as they have lost it today, when we witness the spectacle of nuclear missiles on one hand and, on the other, a unanimous chorus proclaiming that knowledge is impossible to man (and, presumably, that a process of cognition based on conceptual “family resemblances” [a reference to Wittgenstein] will determine when those missiles are to be used).
May, 1968
[The following was cut from AR’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of The Fountainhead.]
I have been asked whether I have learned anything from the history of The Fountainhead and its readers. I have—and it was not an attractive discovery. I learned, at least in part, what makes those stillborn men extinguish the unrepeatable fact of being alive.
Without apology to Dostoevsky, this part of my discussion may be entitled “Notes from the Underground.”
It took me some time to identify and confirm the nature of that particular underground. I shall list the key points of the evidence, as I observed it.
Of the twelve publishers who rejected The Fountainhead, the most shocking rejection, to me, was by a house whose editor told me that their editorial board had evaluated my novel as: “a work of almost genius ‘genius’ in the power of its expression—’almost’ in the sense of its enormous bitterness,” but that they rejected it because they were certain it would not sell. (Incidentally, what they took for “bitterness” was the unforgiving tone of moral indignation.) The phenomenon of men acting on wrong standards of value did not puzzle me; but the phenomenon of men rejecting that which they regarded as a value by their own standards and judgment was, to me, psychologically inconceivable. I felt that I was sensing some profound evil which I would have to learn to identify someday.
After the publication of The Fountainhead, I met a woman, by chance, in a beauty parlor. She heard my name and she approached me to tell me how much she admired my novel. She was not gushing; she spoke quietly, intently and, to the best of my judgment, sincerely. It was the sincerity that made me take notice when she complimented me on my courage and added, with the faintest note of despair in her voice, referring to the spirit of my book: “Many of us feel that way, but we don’t have the courage to say it. We’re afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. She could not answer; she merely sighed and spread her hands out in a gesture of hopelessness, as if she were thinking of something intangible, too vast to identify. I tried to question her, but got no further clue. I truly did not know what she was talking about. I never saw her again. But the incident remained in my mind because I felt it was a clue to something either evil or very, very wrong, which I had to understand.
A brilliant young man [Leonard Peikoff] whom I met when he was seventeen (and who since has become one of my best friends), asked me, on our first meeting: “Is Howard Roark moral or is he practical? He seems to be both—yet I have always been told that it’s one or the other.” This choice was deeply disturbing to him, because he took moral issues seriously and because the same people urged him—at different times—to choose alternate sides of this dichotomy. It did not take me long to convince him that this was a false dichotomy, caused by the irrationality and impracticality of the mystic-altruist ethics, and that this was one example of why man needs a rational code of ethics. But I wondered—as I had wondered often, before and since—about the psychological state of those who maintain that dichotomy. What are moral values divorced from practice? And what is it that one chooses to practice, if it is divorced from moral values? [This paragraph was crossed out.]
In the early days of The Fountainhead’s history, when its success was still uncertain, I noticed the peculiar attitude of an editor of my acquaintance: his conviction that my novel was a great value and his emotional commitment to it were unquestionable, he had demonstrated it, in action, on many occasions—and yet, whenever I consulted him on any action to be taken on its behalf, his answers were vague, almost forced and singularly half-hearted. Then, one day, I asked him: “Tell me, you believe that The Fountainhead is great and, precisely for that reason, you believe that it is doomed, don’t you?” He answered in a low, unhappy voice: “Yes.”
The instances of men who paid me extravagant, unsolicited compliments at private gatherings, but never stated it in print or on public occasions, are too numerous to count. I do not mean the usual sort of gushers. Those men were prominent literary or professional figures who had no reason to flatter me; in many cases, they did not even say it to me, but to others, without knowing that I would ever hear about it. If such were their views, they had no reason to be afraid of expressing them publicly. Yet they kept silent.
The final clue was provided by a very perceptive friend of mine. He said he had observed a strange quality in many people’s enthusiasm for The Fountainhead: it was a furtive, secretive, subjective quality, almost like the reluctant confession of a guilty love. “They talk as an unhappily married man would talk about his secret mistress,” he said. “Their marriage is to the Establishment, to conventional values and the ‘accepted’ intellectual positions. But The Fountainhead is their passion.”
What I felt was something like a cold shudder.
What I grasped was that this was deeper and worse than simple cowardice or conformity. For whatever complexity of reasons—whether out of fear, or bewilderment, or discouragement, or repression, or years of conditioning by altruism’s vicious dichotomy between the moral and the practical, with the consequent feeling that the good is impractical, and the practical has no place for values—those men were consigning their values, the things they loved or admired or enjoyed, to the airless dungeon of subjectivism, as private fantasies or fragile, private treasures unfit for the sunlight of reality.
circa 1977
[The following daily schedule was undated. It was written after AR stopped writing The Ayn Rand Letter in February 1976, and before the death of her husband in November 1979.]
Tentative Schedule
Get up at 7:30 a.m.
7:30 a.m.-8:30 a.m.: Wake up and dress.
8:30 a.m.-1 p.m.: Main work (and Frank’s breakfast).
1 p.m.-2 p.m.: Lunch, house cleaning, order groceries.
2 p.m.-3 p.m.: Mail.
3 p.m.-4 p.m.: Algebra.
4 p.m.-5 p.m.: Reading lesson.
5 p.m.-6 p.m.: Reading.
6 p.m.-8 p.m.: Cooking, dinner, wash dishes.
8 p.m.-11 p.m. : Reading.
11 p.m.-1 a.m.: TV.
1 a.m.: Go to bed.
At present, main work should be “Philosophic Revolution Plan.” The reading period from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. should be given to order—cleaning up the organization of the house. The period after dinner should be elastic—including dates or talks with Frank. Once a week (Monday) should include attending to hair and wardrobe, or shopping (also—health). Sunday should be totally free—“whim-worshipping.” Saturday—should have secretary for mail.
Overall assignments: Time scheduie—“pleasure epistemology”—learning to read—algebra—diet.
Elements of action: Business (literary contracts, lectures).
Contacts (social dates, contacts for possible magazine).
Correspondence (fan-mail, personal) and bills.
Clothes (shopping, mending).
Order (papers, files, drawers, closets—house in general).
Health (dentist, etc.).
Meals.
Elements of creative action: Reading.
Time to think about psychology.
Time to think about myself and specific plan.
16
TWO POSSIBLE BOOKS
In the decade after Atlas Shrugged, AR made notes for a non-fiction book on Objectivism and for a novel entitled To Lome Dieterling. She did not get for in planning either book; the notes here represent in total a few days of work on each, spread over a period of years—what AR referred to as “work in small glances.”
June 8, 1958
Objectivism
A Philosophy for Living on Earth
Preface
I apologize for the subtitle of this book: it is the intellectual corruption of our age that made it necessary. If men were taught how to speak, it would be obvious that the word “living” refers to man; that man lives on earth; that “philosophy,” being the science of the nature of existence, is concerned with discovering the knowledge man requires for living; and, therefore, that the only words necessary are: “A philosophy.”
But since “philosophy” is the one concept which, today, has been all but destroyed, there are reasons why modern men cannot achieve a state of conceptual precision prior to acquiring the knowledge here to be presented. The purpose of this book is to make its subtitle redundant.
June 19, 1958
“Cosmology” has to be thrown out ofphilosophy. When this is done, the conflict between “rationalism” and “empiricism” will be wiped out--or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.
What, apparently, has never been challenged and what I took as a self-evident challenge (which it isn’t) is Thales’ approach to philosophy, namely: the idea that philosophy has to discover the nature of the universe in cosmo-logical terms. If Thales thought that everything is water, and the other pre-Socratics fought over whether it’s water and earth and fire, etc., then the empiricists were right in declaring that they would go by the evidence of observation, not by “rational” deduction—only then, of course, the whole issue and all its terms are [thoroughly confused]. The crux of the error here is in the word “nature.” I took Thales’ attempt to mean only the first attempt at, or groping toward, a unified view of knowledge and reality, i.e., an epistemological, not a metaphysical, attempt to establish the fact that things have natures.
Now I think that he meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a metaphysical attempt to establish the literal nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal “stuff.” If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some non-scientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered. [AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]
In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales’ time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales’ approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be “rationalists,” i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of “innate ideas,” and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. They did not realize that the Thales-Plato school was merely a case of “arrested empiricists,” that is, men who “rationalized” on the ground of taking partial knowledge as omniscience.
Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity—which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology—by the whole nonsense of the “moving spheres,” “the immovable mover,” teleology, etc.
The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness—a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge. Observe that all philosophers (except Aristotle) have been projecting their epistemologies into their metaphysics (or that their metaphysics were merely epistemological and psychological confessions). All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies or corruptions. “Existence exists” (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.
