Part 14 (1/2)
[Ibid., 191; pb 154.]
It is not any crime you have ever committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or Haws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them-it is not any sort of Original Sin or unknown prenatal deficiency, but the knowledge and fact of your basic default, of suspending your mind, of refusing to think. Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your ”selfishness,” weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.
[Ibid..22) ; pb 176.]
See also CONTEXT-DROPPING; EVIL; FOCUS; FREE WILL; IRRATIONALITY; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; RATIONALITY; RATIONALIZATION; SUBJECTIVISM.
Evil. The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics-the standard by which one judges what is good or evil-is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.
Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS. 16; pb 23.
Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think-not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment-on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not p.r.o.nounce the verdict ”It is.”
[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]
Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.
[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]
I saw that evil was impotent-that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real-and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.
[Ibid.. 206; pb 165.]
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
[”The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 149.]
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
[GS, FNl. 217; pb 173.]
The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.
[”Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt,” TO, Jan. 1966, 6.]
When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels-and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.
[GS, FNI, 217; pb 173.]
As a being of volitional consciousness, [man] knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.... No man can survive the moment of p.r.o.nouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.
[lbid., 221; pb 176.]
See also ABSOLUTES; AMORALISM; APPEAs.e.m.e.nT; COMPROMISE; CYNICISM; ENVY/HATRED of the GOOD for BEING the GOOD; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; FREE WILL; GOOD, the; IRRATIONALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.
Existence. Existence exists-and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an ent.i.ty of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was-no matter what his errors -the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Ident.i.ty, Consciousness is Identification.
[GS, FNI, 152; pb 124.]
Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason.
[Ibid., 154; pb 126.]
Existence is a self-sufficient primary. It is not a product of a supernatural dimension, or of anything else. There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it-and no alternative to it. Existence exists-and only existence exists. Its existence and its nature are irreducible and unalterable.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 148.]
The first and primary axiomatic concepts are ”existence,” ”ident.i.ty” (which is a corollary of ”existence”) and ”consciousness.”
[ITOE, 73.].
An axomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be a.n.a.lyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.
[Ibid.]
One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot a.n.a.lyze (or ”prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to ”prove” them is self-contradictory : it is an attempt to ”prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.) [Ibid.]
Existence and ident.i.ty are not attributes of existents, they are the existents.... The units of the concepts ”existence” and ”ident.i.ty” are every ent.i.ty, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist.
[Ibid., 74.]
See also ABSOLUTES; ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ATHEISM; AXIOMATIC CONCEPTS; AXIOMS; EXISTENT; IDENt.i.tY; INFINITY; METAPHYSICS; METAPHYSICAL; NATURE; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; s.p.a.cE; TIME; UNIVERSE; ZERO, REIFICATION of.
Existent. The building-block of man's knowledge is the concept of an ”existent”-of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action. Since it is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) and man grasps it implicitly on the perceptual level-i.e., he grasps the const.i.tuents of the concept ”existent,” the data which are later to be integrated by that concept. It is this implicit knowledge that permits his consciousness to develop further.
(It may be supposed that the concept ”existent” is implicit even on the level of sensations-if and to the extent that a consciousness is able to discriminate on that level. A sensation is a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments. A sensation does not tell man what exists, but only that it exists.) The (implicit) concept ”existent” undergoes three stages of development in man's mind. The first stage is a child's awareness of objects, of things-which represents the (implicit) concept ”ent.i.ty.” The second and closely allied stage is the awareness of specific, particular things which he can recognize and distinguish from the rest of his perceptual fiefd-which represents the (implicit) concept ”ident.i.ty.”
The third stage consists of grasping relations.h.i.+ps among these ent.i.ties by grasping the similarities and differences of their ident.i.ties. This requires the transformation of the (implicit) concept ”ent.i.ty” into the (implicit) concept ”unit.”
[ITOE, 6.].
See also CONCEPT-FORMATION; ENt.i.tY; EXISTENCE; IDENt.i.tY; IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE; SENSATIONS; UNIT.
F.
Faith ”Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof.
[Leonard Peikoff, OP, 48; pb 54.]
Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
[GS, FNI, 223; pb 178.]