The Journals of Ayn Rand (132 page)

“Sense of Life and the Primacy of Consciousness ”:
Man needs a state of psychological integration—of inner unity and, therefore,
full certainty.
Uncertainty is a dangerous state for man existentially, and unsupportable psychologically. The truly unbearable uncertainty is uncertainty about the validity of one’s own consciousness. And since man never learned how to live with a volitional consciousness, how to possess certainty and knowledge without infallibility and omniscience—his most urgent need is the
validation
of his own consciousness. Therefore, in the absence of a
rational epistemology
(which is the only solution to this problem) man takes his consciousness as an absolute (uncritically) and fakes reality to fit it—in order not to face the horror of an impotent consciousness; hence, Platonism and other such philosophies. (This is the distorted element of truth in such systems—or the psycho-epistemological need which makes them possible. A great deal of conscious evil and faking for evil motives is involved in the authors of such philosophies, as, for instance, in Hume or Kant.)

 

 

Psychological selfishness:
the kind of selfishness that consists of constant focusing on: “What does it show about me?” (Which implies psycho-epistemological passivity, determinism, the taking of emotions as causeless primaries, emotion-motivation, whim-worship, the primacy of consciousness.) The “games” of double-meaning dialogue, focused on “beating” somebody—the focus on “impressing” somebody or “proving” something about oneself, rather than on facts and reality. In regard to art: the focusing, not on whether one enjoys a given work of art, but on: “What will it prove about me if I enjoy it or not?” (The paradox: enormous and irrational concern with one’s
moral status
—by a person who has given up values and moral sovereignty.) The irrationality of altruism on this issue: the advice to “come out of yourself” and “concern yourself with the ‘wider’ world,” which is equated with “concern with others”—as if the objective
meant
the collective, as if “others” had a stake in reality, but one did not, as if the withdrawal from reality into one’s own feelings were actually to one’s own interest.

(This is actually the issue of “self-doubt-centeredness.”)
[AR regarded the term “self-centered” as a pejorative, meaning, roughly, “neurotically concerned with one’s own worth, ” i.e., “centered on self-doubt. ” In her view, the virtue of selfishness requires that one be “reality-centered. ”]

The issue
of men’s unidentified
best: The reversal of the idea that men pretend to be good in public, but are monsters in private (like
Peyton Place).
The exact opposite is true: men (I suspect, predominantly) repress and hide their best (their values, their honest or profound thoughts, their serious concerns), and put on an act of cautious, empty superficiality (and, often, moral treason) in public. The “lynching” spirit: the worst in men is encouraged by a mob feeling (and I doubt whether the best ever is—such instances as “public” courage are not courage).

(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.)

 

 

[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.