Part 13 (1/2)
An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection-to the conceptual identification of your inner states-you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception....
In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: ”What do I feel?” and ”Why do I feel it?”
[”Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 20; pb 17.]
There can be no causeless love or any sort of causeless emotion. An emotion is a response to a fact of reality, an estimate dictated by your standards.
[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]
Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions-if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too-he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 24; pb 28.]
An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carca.s.s of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.
[GS, FNI, 187; pb 151.]
The quality of a computer's output is determined by the quality of its input. If your subconscious is programmed by chance, its output will have a corresponding character. You have probably heard the computer operators' eloquent term ”gigo”-which means: ”Garbage in, garbage out.” The same formula applies to the relations.h.i.+p between a man's thinking and his emotions.
A man who is run by emotions is like a man who is run by a computer whose print-outs he cannot read. He does not know whether its programming is true or false, right or wrong, whether it's set to lead him to success or destruction, whether it serves his goals or those of some evil, unknowable power. He is blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both.
[”Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 7; pb 6.]
Emotions are not tools of cognition... one must differentiate between one's thoughts and one's emotions with full clarity and precision. One does not have to be omniscient in order to possess knowledge; one merely has to know that which one does know, and distinguish it from that which one feels. Nor does one need a full system of philosophical epistemology in order to distinguish one's own considered judgment from one's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 64; pb 55.]
The concept ”emotion” is formed by retaining the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of the psychological action (an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent) and by omitting the particular contents (the existents) as well as the degree of emotional intensity.
[ITOE, 41.].
See also AUTOMATIZATION; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; FREUD; HAPPINESS; HOSTILITY; INTROSPECTION; LONELINESS; I.OVE; MOTIVATION; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PLEASURE and PAIN; PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; REASON; SENSE of LIFE; SOUL-BODY DICHOTOMY; SUBCONSClOUS; VALUES; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.
End in Itself. See Ultimate Value.
Enlightenment, Age of. The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present.
[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 102; pb 101.]
Confidence in the power of man replaced dependence on the grace of G.o.d-and that rare intellectual orientation emerged, the key to the Enlightenment approach in every branch of philosophy: secularism without skepticism.
In metaphysics, this meant a fundamental change in emphasis: from G.o.d to this world, the world of particulars in which men live, the realm of nature.... Men's operative conviction was that nature is an autonomous realm-solid, eternal, real in its own right. For centuries, nature had been regarded as a realm of miracles manipulated by a personal deity, a realm whose significance lay in the clues it offered to the purposes of its author. Now the operative conviction was that nature is a realm governed by scientific laws, which permit no miracles and which are intelligible without reference to the supernatural.
[Ibid., 107; pb 106.]
Just as there are no limits to man's knowledge, many [Enlightenment era] thinkers held, so there are no limits to man's moral improvement. If man is not yet perfect, they held, he is at least perfectible. Just as there are objective, natural laws in science, so there are objective, natural laws in ethics; and man is capable of discovering such laws and of acting in accordance with them. He is capable not only of developing his intellect, but also of living by its guidance. (This, at least, was the Enlightenment's ethical program and promise.) Whatever the vacillations or doubts of particular thinkers, the dominant trend represented a new vision and estimate of man: man as a self-sufficient, rational being and, therefore, as basically good, as potentially n.o.ble, as a value.
[Ibid., 109; pb 107.]
The father of this new world was a single philosopher: Aristotle. On countless issues, Aristotle's views differ from those of the Enlightenment. But, in terms of broad fundamentals, the philosophy of Aristotle is the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
[Ibid., Ill; pb 109.]
In epistemology, the European champions of the intellect had been unable to formulate a tenable view of the nature of reason or, therefore, to validate their proclaimed confidence in its power. As a result, from the beginning of the eighteenth century (and even earlier), the philosophy advocating reason was in the process of gradual, but accelerating, disintegration.
[Ibid., 115; pb 113.]
See also AMERICA; ARISTOTLE; DARK AGES; FOUNDING FATHERS; HISTORY; MIDDLE AGES; NATURE; REASON; RELIGION; RENAISSANCE; SKEPTICISM.
Ent.i.ty. To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an ent.i.ty of a specific nature made of specific attributes.
[GS, FNI, 152; pb 125.]
The development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., ent.i.ties. Of man's five cognitive senses, only two provide him with a direct awareness of ent.i.ties: sight and touch. The other three senses-hearing, taste and smell-give him an awareness of some of an ent.i.ty's attributes (or of the consequences produced by an ent.i.ty): they tell him that something makes sounds, or something tastes sweet, or something smells fresh; but in order to perceive this something, he needs sight and/or touch.
The concept ”ent.i.ty” is (implicitly) the start of man's conceptual development and the building-block of his entire conceptual structure. It is by perceiving ent.i.ties that man perceives the universe.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]
The first concepts man forms are concepts of ent.i.ties-since ent.i.ties are the only primary existents. (Attributes cannot exist by themselves, they are merely the characteristics of ent.i.ties; motions are motions of ent.i.ties; relations.h.i.+ps are relations.h.i.+ps among ent.i.ties.) [ITOE, 18.].
This term [ent.i.ty] may be used in several senses. If you speak in the primary sense, ”ent.i.ty” has to be defined ostensively- that is to say, by pointing. I can, however, give you three descriptive characteristics essential to the primary, philosophic use of the term, according to Objectivism. This is not a definition, because I'd have to rely ultimately on pointing to make these points clear, but it will give you certain criteria for the application of the term in the primary sense....
1. An ent.i.ty means a self-sufficient form of existence-as against a quality, an action, a relations.h.i.+p, etc., which are simply aspects of an ent.i.ty that we separate out by specialized focus. An ent.i.ty is a thing.
2. An ent.i.ty, in the primary sense, is a solid thing with a definite boundary-as against a fluid, such as air. In the literal sense, air is not an ent.i.ty. There are contexts, such as when the wind moves as one ma.s.s, when you can call it that, by a.n.a.logy, but in the primary sense, fluids are not ent.i.ties.
3. An ent.i.ty is perceptual in scale, in size. In other words it is a ”this” which you can point to and grasp by human perception. In an extended sense you can call molecules-or the universe as a whole-”ent.i.ties,” because they are self-sufficient things. But in the primary sense when we say that ent.i.ties are what is given in sense perception, we mean solid things which we can directly perceive.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), question period, Lecture 3.]
An ent.i.ty is a solid thing open to human perception and capable of independent action.
[Ibid., question period, Lecture 2.]
See also CAUSALITY; CHANGE; EXISTENCE; EXISTENT; IDENt.i.tY; MOTION; UNIVERSE.
Environmentalism. See Ecology/Environmental Movement.
Envy/Hatred of the Good for Being the Good. Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
”Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves.... That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree.... Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one's own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.