Part 1 (1/2)

The Ayn Rand Lexicon.

Objectivism From a to Z.

Ayn Rand.

Harry Binsw.a.n.ger.

Introduction.

AYN RAND WAS a philosopher in the cla.s.sical sense: she was intent not on teasing apart some random sentences, but on defining a full system of thought, from epistemology to esthetics. Her writing, accordingly, is extensive, and the range of issues she covers enormous-so much so that it is often difficult for a reader to know where in her many books and articles to look for a specific formulation or topic. Even Miss Rand herself was sometimes hard-pressed in this regard.

The Ayn Rand Lexicon solves this problem. It is a compilation of key statements from Ayn Rand (and from a few other authorized Objectivist texts) on several hundred alphabetized topics in philosophy and related fields. The book was initially conceived by Harry Binsw.a.n.ger, who undertook it during Miss Rand's lifetime with her permission and approval.

Two different audiences can profit from the Lexicon. Those who know Miss Rand's works will find it a comprehensive guide to the literature. It will enable them to locate topics or pa.s.sages easily, and-by virtue of its detailed indexes and cross-references-to check on their wider context and ramifications. Newcomers to Ayn Rand will find the book an intriguing introduction to her thought, one eminently suited to browsing. Many such browsers, I venture to say, after sampling the entries under REASON, SELFISHNESS, CAPITALISM, and a few more such topics, will become hooked by the logic and originality of Ayn Rand's ideas. If this happens to you, the next step is to turn to one of her books.

By its nature, this kind of project requires an editor with a professional knowledge of philosophy in general and of Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, in particular. Harry Binsw.a.n.ger qualifies on both counts. He is a Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught philosophy for many years at Hunter College. Dr. Binsw.a.n.ger was an a.s.sociate of Miss Rand's. He taught Objectivism at the New School in New York City, and a.s.sisted in a course on the subject at the University of California (Berkeley). At present, Dr. Binsw.a.n.ger is editor of The Objectivist Forum, a magazine that applies Objectivism to philosophical and cultural issues.

In preparing the Lexicon, Dr. Binsw.a.n.ger has done a thorough and meticulous job. He has covered not only the familiar works of Ayn Rand, but also obscure and little-known sources. He has done the excerpting skillfully and accurately, always selecting essentials; as a result, the pa.s.sages he offers are generally self-contained and self-intelligible. And he has arranged the material within a given topic in a logical sequence, each excerpt building on the earlier ones. If one reads straight through a topic, one will discover not a series of disconnected sentences, but a definite structure and development; this makes the reading even more illuminating and enjoyable.

The Lexicon is a welcome addition to the growing Ayn Rand Library, of which it is Volume IV. It is going to be extremely helpful to me personally, and I am happy to recommend it to anyone interested in the thought of Ayn Rand. She herself, I know, would have been pleased to see it become a reality.

-Leonard Peikoff South Laguna, California January 1986.

Editor's Preface.

THE philosophic WRITINGS of Ayn Rand and her a.s.sociates have grown to include almost two thousand pages distributed among eight books-plus various lecture courses, newsletter articles, and pamphlets. Accordingly, I conceived the idea of creating a reference work, organized by topic, to function as an Objectivist dictionary or mini-encyclopedia.

I first proposed this idea to Ayn Rand in 1977. She was originally somewhat skeptical about its feasibility, being concerned as to whether her writings would lend themselves to the kind of excerpting that would be required. To sell her on the project, I wrote a detailed prospectus of the book and worked up a sample-the entries beginning with the letter ”N.” She was favorably impressed with the results and gave me permission to go ahead. She commented extensively on several dozen entries, helping me to define appropriate standards for excerpting and topic selection.

As the work progressed, Miss Rand became increasingly enthusiastic about the project. One value of the book had special meaning to her: it eliminates any shred of excuse (if ever there had been one) for the continual gross misrepresentation of her philosophy at the hands of hostile commentators. As she quipped to me, ”People will be able to took up BREAKFAST and see that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.”

Miss Rand had intended to read over the entire book, but after cornpleting the letter ”A” I had to shelve the project in order to found and edit The Objectivist Forum, and did not resume work on it until two years after her death. Consequently, she read only about 10 percent of the material.

I have endeavored to cull from the Objectivist corpus all the significant topics in philosophy and closely allied fields, such as psychology, economics, and intellectual history. The Lexicon, however, does not cover Ayn Rand's fiction writings, except for those philosophical pa.s.sages from her novels that were reprinted in her book For the New Intellectual. Material by authors other than Miss Rand is included only if she had given it an explicit public endors.e.m.e.nt-as with Leonard Peikoff's book The Ominous Parallels and his lecture course ”The Philosophy of Objectivism”-or if it was originally published under her editors.h.i.+p in The Objectivist Neusletier, The Objectivist, or The Ayn Rand Letter. I have also made use of four Objectivist Forum articles that Miss Rand read and approved.

To keep the book to a manageable size, I have had to omit many pa.s.sages which could have been included. I have sought to include under each heading only the essential pa.s.sages, roughly proportioning the length of the entries to their scope and importance, within the limits of the amount of material available in the sources. The entry under Immanuel Kant, for instance, is as long as it is not merely because Miss Rand had so much to say about Kant's philosophy, but because of his immense influence on the history of philosophy, and thus on history proper. Miss Rand regarded Kant as her chief philosophical antagonist. Nevertheless, I may have missed some pa.s.sages that merit inclusion, and readers are invited to send me any such pa.s.sages c/o New American Library for their possible inclusion in future editions. For some headings (e.g., KNOWLEDGE), I give only the term's definition and rely on the cross-references to lead the reader to other topics for elaboration.

In accordance with Miss Rand's wishes, I have included statements about other philosophies only in selected instances: on Aristotle (whose system is the closest to that of Objectivism), on Kant (whose system is the diametrical opposite of Objectivism), on Friedrich Nietzsche (whose views, though fundamentally opposed to Ayn Rand's, are often taken to be similar), on John Stuart Mill (the philosophical father of today's ”conservatives”), and on some influential contemporary schools: Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and Linguistic a.n.a.lysis. Those interested in the Objectivist a.n.a.lysis of other philosophies may consult For the New Intellectual and The Ominous Parallels.

In a number of instances, I have used oral material from Leonard Peikoff's tape-recorcfed lecture courses. Dr. Peikoff has edited these pa.s.sages for this purpose. I have also included a few statements by Miss Rand from the question-and-answer periods following these lectures. Miss Rand's answers, which were wholly extemporaneous, are presented virtually unedited.

In excerpting from written material, I have sought to minimize the clutter of ellipses and square brackets. Where I have excised material from within a continuous pa.s.sage, I have, of course, used ellipses to indicate that deletion. But I have not used ellipses at the beginning or end of entire pa.s.sages, even when I have made initial or terminal cuts. Thus, the reader is put on notice that, at the beginning of a pa.s.sage, some words from the start of the original sentence may have been dropped. Likewise, at the end of a pa.s.sage, sentences in the original may continue on beyond where they end here.

Square brackets are used to indicate my own interpolated words or introductory notes (except that I have retained the square brackets used by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, etc. to insert their own comments within a direct quotation from someone else). In a few instances, I have deleted italics, but as a rule they are as they appear in the original texts; in no case did I add italics.

Some entry headings appear in quotation marks. The quotes are used to indicate either a concept that Objectivism regards as invalid or obfuscatory (as with ”COLLECTIVE RIGHTS”), or a term used in a new or special sense (as with ”STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY OF). The content of the entry should make clear which function, in a given case, these quotation marks serve.

Some explanation is necessary about the manner in which I have identified the sources of the pa.s.sages quoted. The references include page numbers for both hardcover and paperback editions when possible (only paperback editions are currently available for Intruductiun to Objectivist Epistemology, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal). I have cited the page number only for the pa.s.sage's beginning even when it continues beyond that page in the original (e.g., a page reference normally given as ”54-56” would appear here only as ”54”). And, unless otherwise stated, all quotations are from Ayn Rand.

Note also that paperback page references for The Romantic Manifesto and The New Left refer to the second editions of these works. The first edition of the former did not include ”Art and Cognition,” and ”The Age of Envy” was not included in the first edition of the latter.

All the books cited are available in paperback editions from New American Library. Much of the other material, including back issues of Miss Rand's periodicals and some separate pamphlets, is available from The Objectivist Forum, P.O. Box 5311, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. (When an article published in a periodical has been reprinted in a book, only the book reference is given.) I wish to thank Leonard Peikoff for his continued encouragement and editorial advice. Thanks are also due to Allison Thomas Kunze for identifying several pa.s.sages that were worthy of inclusion and to Michael Palumbo for his meticulous a.s.sistance in a.s.sembling the ma.n.u.script.

I must stress that the Lexicon is not intended as a subst.i.tute for the primary sources from which it is derived. It is a fundamental tenet of Objectivism that philosophy is not a haphazard collecaion of out-of-context p.r.o.nouncements, but an integrated, hierarchically structured system, which has to be studied and judged as such. For a brief indication of what Objectivism as a philosophic system advocates, the reader may refer to the entry, OBJECTIVISM. For a fuller statement, the best single source is Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged (reprinted in For the New Intellectual).

-Harry Binsw.a.n.ger.

New York City.

February 1986.

Abbreviations.

A.

Abortion. An embryo has no riglels. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

[”Of Living Death,” TO, Oct. 1968, 6.]

Never mind the vicious nonsense of claiming that an embryo has a ”right to life.” A piece of protoplasm has no rights-and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. To equate a potential with an actual, is vicious; to advocate the sacrifice of the latter to the former, is unspeakable.... Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the antiabortionists obliterate the rights of the living: the right of young people to set the course of their own lives. The task of raising a child is a tremendous, lifelong responsibility, which no one should undertake unwittingly or unwillingly. Procreation is not a duty: human beings are not stock-farm animals. For conscientious persons, an unwanted pregnancy is a disaster; to oppose its termination is to advocate sacrifice, not for the sake of anyone's benefit, but for the sake of misery qua misery, for the sake of forbidding happiness and fulfillment to living human beings.

[”A Last Survey,” ARL, IV, 2, 3.]

If any among you are confused or taken in by the argument that the cells of an embryo are living human cells, remember that so are all the cells of your body, including the cells of your skin, your tonsils, or your ruptured appendix-and that cutting them is murder, according to the notions of that proposed law. Remember also that a potentiality is not the equivalent of an actuality-and that a human being's life begins at birth.

The question of abortion involves much more than the termination of a pregnancy: it is a question of the entire life of the parents. As I have said before, parenthood is an enormous responsibility; it is an impossible responsibility for young people who are ambitious and struggling, but poor; particularly if they are intelligent and conscientious enough not to abandon their child on a doorstep nor to surrender it to adoption. For such young people, pregnancy is a death sentence: parenthood would force them to give up their future, and condemn them to a life of hopeless drudgery, of slavery to a child's physical and financial needs. The situation of an unwed mother, abandoned by her lover, is even worse.

I cannot quite imagine the state of mind of a person who would wish to condemn a fellow human being to such a horror. I cannot project the degree of hatred required to make those women run around in crusades against abortion. Hatred is what they certainly project, not love for the embryos, which is a piece of nonsense no one could experience, but hatred, a virulent hatred for an unnamed object. Judging by the degree of those women's intensity, I would say that it is an issue of self-esteem and that their fear is metaphysical. Their hatred is directed against human beings as such, against the mind, against reason, against ambition, against success, against love, against any value that brings happiness to human life. In compliance with the dishonesty that dominates today's intellectual field, they call themselves ”pro-life.”

By what right does anyone claim the power to dispose of the lives of others and to dictate their personal choices?

[”The Age of Mediocrity,” TOF, June 1981, 3.]

A proper, philosophically valid definition of man as ”a rational animal,” would not permit anyone to ascribe the status of ”person” to a few human cells.

[Ibid., 2.]

See also BIRTH CONTROL; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; LIFE, RIGHT to; MAN; s.e.x.

Absolutes. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.