Part 16 (1/2)
The communists and the n.a.z.is are merely two variants of the same evil notion: collectivism. But both should be free to speak-evil ideas are dangerous only by default of men advocating better ideas.
[The Objectivist Calendar, June 1978.]
The difference between an exchange of ideas and an exchange of blows is self-evident. The line of demarcation between freedom of speech and freedom of action is established by the ban on the initiation of physical force.
[”The Cas.h.i.+ng-In: The Student 'Rebellion,' ”CUI, 258.]
[In regard to the lawsuit to prevent a n.a.z.i group from marching in Skokie, Illinois:]
What I challenge (and not only because of that particular case) is the interpretation of demonstrations and of other actions as so-called ”symbolic speech.” When you lose the distinction between action and speech, you lose, eventually, the freedom of both. The Skokie case is a good ill.u.s.tration of that principle. There is no such thing as ”symbolic speech.” You do not have the right to parade through the public streets or to obstruct public thoroughfares. You have the right of a.s.sembly, yes, on your own property, and on the property of your adherents or your friends. But n.o.body has the ”right” to clog the streets. The streets are only for pa.s.sage. The hippies, in the 60s, should have been forbidden to lie down on city pavements. (They used to lie down across a street and cause dreadful traffic snarls, in order to display their views, to attract attention, to register a protest.) If they were permitted to do it, the n.a.z.is should be permitted as well. Properly, both should have been forbidden. They may speak, yes. They may not take action at whim on public property.
[The Objectivist Calendar, June 1978.]
I want to state, for the record, my own view of what is called ”hardcore” p.o.r.nography. I regard it as unspeakably disgusting. I have not read any of the books or seen any of the current movies belonging to that category, and I do not intend ever to read or see them. The descriptions provided in legal cases, as well as the ”modern” touches in ”soft-core” productions, are sufficient grounds on which to form an opinion. The reason of my opinion is the opposite of the usual one: I do not regard s.e.x as evil-I regard it as good, as one of the most important aspects of human life, too important to be made the subject of public anatomical display. But the issue here is not one's view of s.e.x. The issue is freedom of speech and of the press-i.e., the right to hold any view and to express it.
It is not very inspiring to fight for the freedom of the purveyors of p.o.r.nography or their customers. But in the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive pract.i.tioners. In this case, the disgusting nature of the offenders makes it a good test of one's loyalty to a principle.
[”Censors.h.i.+p: Local and Express,” PWNI, 211; pb 173.]
Only one aspect of s.e.x is a legitimate field for legislation: the protection of minors and of unconsenting adults. Apart from criminal actions (such as rape), this aspect includes the need to 'protect people from being confronted with sights they regard as loathsome. (A corollary of the freedom to see and hear, is the freedom not to look or listen.) Legal restraints on certain types of public displays, such as posters or window displays, are proper-but this is an issue of procedure, of etiquette, not of morality....
The rights of those who seek p.o.r.nography would not be infringed by rules protecting the rights of those who find p.o.r.nography offensive-e.g., s.e.xually explicit posters may properly be forbidden in public places; warning signs, such as ”For Adults Only.” may properly be required of private places which are open to the public. This protects the unconsenting, and has nothing to do with censors.h.i.+p, i.e., with prohibiting thought or speech.
[”Thought Control,” ARL, III, 2. 2.J See also CENSORs.h.i.+P; HUMAN RIGHTS and PROPERTYRIGHTS; INDIVIDUAL, RIGHTS,- PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Free Will. That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ”free will” is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.
[GS, FNI, 155; pb 127.]
To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ”human nature,” the open secret you live with, yet dread to name. is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, who are a human being, the question ”to be or not to be” is the question ”to think or not to think.” ”A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions.
(Ibid.. 146; pb 120.]
Man's consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform-and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional ; volition begins with the first syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade-to maintain a state of full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semi-conscious daze, at the mercy of whatever a.s.sociational whims the unfocused mechanism of his consciousness produces.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 9; pb 14.]
Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality-or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, a.s.sociational connections it might happen to make.
When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man-in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a consciousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human being-an unfocused mind is not conscious.
Psychologically, the choice ”to think or not” is the choice ”to focus or not.” Existentially, the choice ”to focus or not” is the choice ”to be conscious or not.” Metaphysically, the choice ”to be conscious or not” is the choice of life or death....
A process of thought is not automatic nor ”instinctive” nor involuntary-nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficacy of his mental effort.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him-by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind....
That which [man's] survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every ”is” implies an ”ought.” Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer-and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13; pb 21.]
The faculty of volition operates in regard to the two fundamental aspects of man's life: consciousness and existence, i.e., his psychological action and his existential action, i.e., the formation of his own character and the course of action he pursues in the physical world.
[”What Is Romanticism?” RM, 82; pb 100.]
A social environment can neither force a man to think nor prevent him from thinking. But a social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one's rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa.
[”Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” TO, April 1966, 2.]
A man's volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic const.i.tuents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the ent.i.ty ”man.” Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.
[”The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 38; pb 31.]
Because man has free will, no human choice-and no phenomenon which is a product of human choice-is metaphysically necessary. In regard to any man-made fact, it is valid to claim that man has chosen thus, but it was not inherent in the nature of existence for him to have done so: he could have chosen otherwise.
Choice, however, is not chance. Volition is not an exception to the Law of Causality; it is a type of causation.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The a.n.a.lytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” ITOE, 149.]
Man exists and his mind exists. Both are part of nature, both possess a specific ident.i.ty. The attribute of volition does not contradict the fact of ident.i.ty, just as the existence of living organisms does not contradict the existence of inanimate matter. Living organisms possess the power of self-initiated motion, which inanimate matter does not possess; man's consciousness possesses the power of self-initiated motion in the realm of cognition (thinking), which the consciousnesses of other living species do not possess. But just as animals are able to move only in accordance with the nature of their bodies, so man is able to initiate and direct his mental action only in accordance with the nature (the ident.i.ty) of his consciousness. His volition is limited to his cognitive processes; he has the power to identify (and to conceive of rearranging) the elements of reality, but not the power to alter them. He has the power to use his cognitive faculty as its nature requires, but not the power to alter it nor to escape the consequences of its misuse. He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow. (The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty deterrnines a man's choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.) [”The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 32; pb 26.
See also CAUSALITY; CONSCIOUSNESS; DETERMINISM; EVASION; FOCUS; METAPHYSICAL us. MAN-MADE; MORALITY; PERCEPTION; ROMANTICISM; REASON; THOUGHT/THINKING; SENSATIONS; STANDARD of VALUE; VOLITIONAL.
Freedom. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]
Freedom, in a political context, has only one meaning: the absence of pltYlical coercion.
[Ibid.]
Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man's survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don't. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man's mind.
A rational mind does not work under compulsion; it does not subordinate its grasp of reality to anyone's orders, directives, or controls; it does not sacrifice its knowledge, its view of the truth, to anyone's opinions, threats, wishes, plans, or ”welfare.” Such a mind may be hampered by others, it may be silenced, proscribed, imprisoned, or destroyed; it cannot be forced; a gun is not an argument. (An example and symbol of this att.i.tude is Galileo.) It is from the work and the inviolate integrity of such minds-from the intransigent innovators-that all of mankind's knowledge and achievements have come. (See The Fountainhead.) It is to such minds that mankind owes its survival. (See Atlas Shrugged.) [”What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]
Foggy metaphors, sloppy images, unfocused poetry, and equivocations-such as ”A hungry man is not free”-do not alter the fact that only political power is the power of physical coercion.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state-and nothing else.
[”Conservatism: An Obituary,” CUI, 192.]
The issue is not slavery for a ”good” cause versus slavery for a ”bad” cause; the issue is not dictators.h.i.+p by a ”good” gang versus dictators.h.i.+p by a ”bad” gang. The issue is freedom versus dictators.h.i.+p.
[Ibid., 193.]
A ”right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.
[”Man's Rights,” VOS, 124; pb 93.) If one upholds freedom, one must uphold man's individual rights; it one upholds man's individual rights, one must uphold his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to the pursuit of his own happiness-which means: one must uphold a political system that guarantees and protects these rights-which means: the pot.i.tico-economic system of capitalism.