Part 2 (1/2)

The latter viewpoint is fundamental to every version of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy. The advocates of this dichotomy divide the characteristics of the existents subsumed under a concept into two groups: those which are included in the meaning of the concept, and those-the great majority-which, they claim, are excluded from its meaning. The dichotomy among propositions follows directly. If a proposition links the ”included” characteristics with the concept, it can be validated merely by an ”a.n.a.lysis” of the concept; if it links the ”excluded” characteristics with the concept, it represents an act of ”synthesis.”

[Leonard Peikoff, ”The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 127.]

The Objectivist theory of concepts undercuts the theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy at its root.... Since a concept is an integration of units, it has no content or meaning apart from its units. The meaning of a concept consists of the units-the existents-which it incilidilig all the characteristics of these units.

Observe that concepts mean existents, not arbitrarily selected portions of existents. There is no basis whatever-neither metaphysical nor epistemological, neither in the nature of reality nor of a conceptual consciousness-for a division of the characteristics of a concept's units into two groups, one of which is excluded from the concept's meaning....

The fact that certain characteristics are, at a given time, unknown to man, does not indicate that these characteristics are excluded from the ent.i.ty-or from the concept. A is A; existents are what they are, independent of the state of human knowledge; and a concept means the existents which it integrates. Thus, a concept subsumes and includes all the characteristics of its referents, known and not-yet-known.

[ibid., 131.]

The theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy has its roots in two types of error: one epistemological, the other metaphysical. The epistemological error, as I have discussed, is an incorrect view of the nature of concepts. The metaphysical error is: the dichotomy between necessary and contingent facts.

[ibid., 144.]

Only in regard to the man-made is it valid to claim: ”It happens to be, but it could have been otherwise.” Even here, the term ”contingent” is highly misleading. Historically, that term has been used to designate a metaphysical category of much wider scope than the realm of human action; and it has always been a.s.sociated with a metaphysics which, in one form or another, denies the facts of Ident.i.ty and Causality. The ”necessary-contingent” terminology serves only to introduce confusion, and should be abandoned. What is required in this context is the distinction between the ”metaphysical” and the ”man-made.” ... Truths about metaphysical and about man-made facts are learned and validated by the same process: by observation; and, qua truths, both are equally necessary. Some facts are not necessary, but all truths are.

[Ibid., 150.1 The failure to recognize that logic is man's method of cognition, has produced a brood of artificial splits and dichotomies which represent restatements of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy from various aspects. Three in particular are prevalent today: logical truth vs. factual truth; the logically possible vs. the empirically possible; and the a priori vs. the a posteriori.

[Ibid., 152.]

The theory of the a.n.a.lytic-synthetic dichotomy presents men with the following choice: If your statement is proved, it says nothing about that which exists; if it is about existents, it cannot be proved. If it is demonstrated by logical argument, it represents a subjective convention; if it a.s.serts a fact, logic cannot establish it. If you validate it by an appeal to the meanings of your concepts, then it is cut off from reality; if you validate it by an appeal to your percepts, then you cannot be certain of it.

[Ibid., 126.]

See also CAUSALITY; CONCEPT-FORMATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; MEANING (of CONCEPTS); METAPHYSICAL vs. MAN-MADE; NECESSITY.

Anarchism. Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: ... a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.

[”The Nature of Government,” VOS, 152; pb 112.]

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door-or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.

The use of physical force-even its retaliatory use-cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to he unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors' intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice-the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another.

[Ibid., 146; pb 108.]

A recent variant of anarchistic theory, which is befuddling some of the younger advocates of freedom, is a weird absurdity called ”competing governments.” Accepting the basic premise of the modern statists-who see no difference between the functions of government and the functions of industry, between force and production, and who advocate government owners.h.i.+p of business-the proponents of ”competing governments” take the other side of the same coin and declare that since compet.i.tion is so beneficial to business, it should also be applied to government. Instead of a single, monopolistic government, they declare, there should be a number of different governments in the same geographical area, competing for the allegiance of individual citizens. with every citizen free to ”shop” and to patronize whatever government he chooses.

Remember that forcible restraint of men is the only service a government has to offer. Ask yourself what a compet.i.tion in forcible restraint would have to mean.

One cannot call this theory a contradiction in terms, since it is ohviously devoid of any understanding of the terms ”compet.i.tion” and ”government.” Nor can one call it a floating abstraction, since it is devoid of any contact with or reference to reality and cannot be concretized at all, not even roughly or approximately. One ill.u.s.tration will be sufficient : suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones' house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith's complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.

[Ibid., 152; pb 112.]

The common denominator of such [advocates of ”competing governments”] is the desire to escape from objectivity (objectivity requires a very long conceptual chain and very abstract principles), to act on whim, and to deal with men rather than with ideas-i.e., with the men of their own gang bound by the same concretes.

[”The Missing Link,” PWNI, 53; pb 44.]

Picture a band of strangers marching down Main Street, submachine guns at the ready. When confronted by the police, the leader of the band announces: ”Me and the boys are only here to see that justice is done, so you have no right to interfere with us.” According to the ”libertarian” anarchists, in such a confrontation the police are morally bound to withdraw, on pain of betraying the rights of self-defense and free trade.

[Harry Binsw.a.n.ger. ”Q & A Department: Anarchism,” TOF, Aug. 1981, 12.]

Private force is force not authorized by the government, not validated by its procedural safeguards, and not subject to its supervision. The government has to regard such private force as a threat-i.e., as a potential violation of individual rights. In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.

[Ibid., 11.]

See also COMPEt.i.tION; GOVERNMENT; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; LAW, OBJECTIVE and NON-OBJECTIVE; OBJECTIVITY; RETALIATORY FORCE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.

Ancient Greece. The sound of the first human step in recorded history, the prelude to the entrance of the producer on the historical scene, was the birth of philosophy in ancient Greece. All earlier cultures had been ruled, not by reason, but by mysticism: the task of philosophy --the formulation of an integrated view of man, of existence, of the universe-was the monopoly of various religions. that enforced their views by the authority of a claim to supernatural knowledge and dictated the rules that controlled men's lives. Philosophy was born in a period when ... a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an un.o.bstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.

[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 19; pb 22.]

Ancient Greece tore away the heavy shroud of mysticism woven for centuries in murky temples, and achieved, in three centuries, what Egypt had not dreamed of in thirty: a civilization that was essentially pro-man and pro-life. The achievements of the Greeks rested on their confidence in the power of man's mind-the power of reason. For the first time, men sought to understand the causes of natural phenomena, and gradually replaced superst.i.tion with the beginnings of science. For the first time, men sought to guide their lives by the judgment of reason, instead of resorting exclusively to divine will and revelation.

The Greeks built temples for their G.o.ds, but they conceived of their G.o.ds as perfect human beings, rejecting the cats, crocodiles and cow-headed monstrosities enshrined and wors.h.i.+ped by the Egyptians. Greek G.o.ds personified abstractions such as Beauty, Wisdom, Justice, Victory, which are proper human values. In the Greek religion, there was no omnipotent mystical authority and no organized priesthood. The Greek had only a vague idea of, and little interest in, an afterlife.

[Mary Ann Sures, ”Metaphysics in Marble,” TO, Feb. 1969, 12.]

See also ART; HISTORY; MYSTICISM; REASON; PHILOSOPHY.

”Anti-Concepts.” An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate....

One of today's fas.h.i.+onable anti-concepts is ”polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad-undesirabte, socially destructive, evil-something that would split the country into irrecortcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of ”argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would ”polarize” the country-which is supposed to make one's opponents retreat, protesting that they didn't mean it. Mean-what? ...

It is doubtfut-even in the midst of today's intellectual decadence-that one could get away with declaring explicitly: ”Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares: ”Don't let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight's object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of ”polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts.

[”Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 1.]

Observe the technique involved ... It consists of creating an artificial, unnecessary, and (rationally) unusable term, designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concepts-a term which sounds like a concept, but stands for a ”package-deal” of disparate, incongruous, contradictory elements taken out of any logical conceptual order or context, a ”package-deal” whose (approximately) defining characteristic is always a non-essential. This last is the essence of the trick.

Let me remind you that the purpose of a definition is to distinguish the things subsumed under a single concept from all other things in existence; and, therefore, their defining characteristic must always be that essential characteristic which distinguishes them from everything else.

So long as men use language, that is the way they will use it. There is no other way to communicate. And if a man accepts a term with a definition by non-essentials, his mind will subst.i.tute for it the essential characteristic of the objects he is trying to designate.... Thus the real meaning of the term will automatically replace the alleged meaning.

[” 'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing,” CUI, 176.]

[Some other terms that Ayn Rand identified as anti-concepts are ”consumerisrn,” ”duty,” ”ethnicity,” ”extremism,” ”isolationism,” ”McCarthyism,” ”meritocracy,” and ”simplistic.”]

See also ARGUMENT from INTIMIDATION; CONCEPTS; DEFINITIONS; INVALID CONCEPTS; ”PACKAGE-DEALING,” FALLACY of.

Anti-Conceptual Mentality. The main characteristic of this mentality is a special kind of pa.s.sivity: not pa.s.sivity as such and not across-the-board, but pa.s.sivity beyond a certain limit-i.e., pa.s.sivity in regard to the process of conceptualization and, therefore, in regard to fundamental principles. It is a mentality which decided, at a certain point of development, that it knows enough and does not care to look further. What does it accept as ”enough”? The immediately given, directly perceivable concretes of its background....

To grasp and deal with such concretes, a human being needs a certain degree of conceptual development, a process which the brain of an animal cannot perform. But after the initial feat of learning to speak, a child can counterfeit this process, by memorization and imitation. The anti-conceptual mentality stops on this level of development-on the first levels of abstractions, which identify perceptual material consisting predominantly of physical objects-and does not choose to take the next, crucial, fully volitional step: the higher levels of abstraction from abstractions, which cannot be learned by imitation. (See my book Introduction to Objectivist Epestencology.) ...

The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as ”self-evident.” It treats concepts as if they were (memorized) percepts; it treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes. To such a mentality, everything is the given: the pa.s.sage of time, the four seasons, the inst.i.tution of marriage, the weather, the breeding of children, a flood, a fire, an earthquake, a revolution, a book are phenomena of the same order. The distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made is not merely unknown to this mentality, it is incommunicable.

[”The Missing Link,” PWNI, 45; pb 38.]

[This type of mentality] has learned to speak, but has never grasped the process of conceptualization. Concepts, to him, are merely some sort of code signals employed by other people for some inexplicable reason, signals that have no relation to reality or to himself. He treats concepts as if they were percepts, and their meaning changes with any change of circ.u.mstances. Whatever he learns or happens to retain is treated, in his mind, as if it had always been there, as if it were an item of direct awareness, with no memory of how he acquired it-as a random store of unprocessed material that comes and goes at the mercy of chance.... He does not seek knowledge-he ”exposes himself” to ”experience,” hoping, in effect, that it will push something into his mind; if nothing happens, he feels with self-righteous rancor that there is nothing he can do about it. Mental action, i.e., mental effort-any sort of processing, identifying, organizing, integrating, critical evaluation or control of his mental content-is an alien realm.