Part 24 (1/2)
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 32.]
[In The Fountainhead] the hero utters a line that has often been quoted by readers: ”To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.' ”
[”Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.]
[Selfless love] would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person's need of you. I don't have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound a.s.sertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.
[Ibid.]
One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.
A ”selfless,” ”disinterested” love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.
Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one's selfish interests. If a man who is pa.s.sionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a ”sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
[”The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 48; pb 44.]
The practical implementation of friends.h.i.+p, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one's own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.
[Ibid., 51; pb 46.]
To love is to value. The man who tells you that it is possible to value without values, to love those whom you appraise as worthless, is the man who tells you that it is possible to grow rich by consuming without producing and that paper money is as valuable as gold.... When it comes to love, the highest of emotions, you permit them to shriek at you accusingly that you are a moral delinquent if you're incapable of feeling causeless love. When a man feels fear without reason, you call him to the attention of a psychiatrist; you are not so careful to protect the meaning, the nature and the dignity of love.
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices. Your morality tells you that the purpose of love is to set you free of the bonds of morality, that love is superior to moral judgment, that true love transcends, forgives and survives every manner of evil in its object, and the greater the love the greater the depravity it permits to the loved. To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human, it tells you; to love him for his flaws is divine. To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice. You owe your love to those who don't deserve it, and the less they deserve it, the more love you owe them-the more loathsome the object, the n.o.bler your love-the more unfastidious your love, the greater your virtue-and if you can bring your soul to the state of a dump heap that welcomes anything on equal terms, if you can cease to value moral values, you have achieved the state of moral perfection.
[GS, FNI, 182; pb 147.]
Like any other value, love is not a static quant.i.ty to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned. The love for one friend is not a threat to the love for another, and neither is the love for the various members of one's family, a.s.suming they have earned it. The most exclusive form -romantic love-is not an issue of compet.i.tion. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the ”loser” could not have had what the ”winner” has earned.
It is only among the irrational, emotion-motivated persons, whose love is divorced from any standards of value, that chance rivalries, accidental conflicts and blind choices prevail. But then, whoever wins does not win much. Among the emotion-driven, neither love nor any other emotion has any meaning.
[”The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests,” VOS, 65; pb 55.]
Let us answer the question: ”Can you measure love?”
The concept ”love” is formed by isolating two or more instances of the appropriate psychological process, then retaining its distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics (an emotion proceeding from the evaluation of an existent as a positive value and as a source of pleasure) and omitting the object and the measurements of the process's intensity.
The object may he a thing, an event, an activity, a condition or a person. The intensity varies according to one's evaluation of the object, as, for instance, in such cases as one's love for ice cream, or for parties, or for reading, or for freedom, or for the person one marries. The concept ”love” subsumes a vast range of values and, consequently, of intensity: it extends from the lower levels (designated by the subcategory ”liking”) to the higher level (designated by the subcategory ”affection,” which is applicable only in regard to persons) to the highest level, which includes romantic love.
If one wants to measure the intensity of a particular instance of love, one does so by reference to the hierarchy of values of the person experiencing it. A man may love a woman, yet may rate the neurotic satisfactions of s.e.xual promiscuity higher than her value to him. Another man may love a woman, but may give her up, rating his fear of the disapproval of others (of his family, his friends or any random strangers) higher than her value. Still another man may risk his life to save the woman he loves, because all his other values would lose meaning without her. The emotions in these examples are not emotions of the same intensity or dimension. Do not let a James Taggart type of mystic tell you that love is immeasurable.
[ITOE, 44.].
See also ALTRUISM; CHARACTER; EMOTIONS; FEMININITY; MARRIAGE; PHILOSOPHY; SACRIFICE; SELF-ESTEEM; SELFISHNESS; SELFLESSNESS; SENSE of LIFE; s.e.x; TELEOLOGICAL MEASUREMENT; VALUES; VIRTUE.
M.
Malevolent Universe Premise. The altruist ethics is based on a ”malevolent universe” metaphysics, on the theory that man, by his very nature, is helpless and doomed-that success, happiness, achievement are impossible to him-that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary goal is to combat them.
As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics-as evidence of the fact that the material universe is not inimical to man and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence-observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.
[”The Ethics of Emergencies,” VOS, 55; pb 48.]
If you hold the wrong ideas on any fundamental philosophic issue, that will undercut or destroy the benevolent universe premise.... For example, any departure in metaphysics from the view that this world in which we live is reality, the full, final, absolute reality-any such departure will necessarily undercut a man's confidence in his ability to deal with the world, and thus will inject the malevolent-universe element. The same applies in epistemology: if you conclude in any form that reason is not valid, then man has no tool of achieving values; so defeat and tragedy are unavoidable.
This is true also of ethics. If men hold values incompatible with life-such as self-sacrifice and altruism-obviously they can't achieve such values; they will soon come to feel that evil is potent, whereas they are doomed to misery, suffering, failure. It is irrational codes of ethics above all else that feed the malevolent-universe att.i.tude in people and lead to the syndrome eloquently expressed by the philosopher Schopenhauer: ”Whatever one may say, the happiest moment of the happy man is the moment of his falling asleep, and the unhappiest moment of the unhappy that of his waking. Human life must be some kind of mistake.”
Now there is certainly ”some kind of mistake” here. But it's not life. It's the kind of philosophies used to wreck man-to make him incapable of living-philosophies, I may say, which are perfectly exemplified by the ideas of Schopenhauer.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”The Philosophy of Objectivism” lecture series (1976), Lecture 8.]
See also ALTRUISM; BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE PREMISE; EVIL; HAPPINESS; MAN; METAPHYSICAL VALUE-JUDGMENTS; SENSE of LIFE; SUFFERING.
Man. Man's distinctive characteristic is his type of consciousness-a consciousness able to abstract, to form concepts, to apprehend reality by a process of reason ... [The] valid definition of man, within the context of his knowledge and of all of mankind's knowledge to-date [is]: ”A rational animal.”
(”Rational,” in this context, does not mean ”acting invariably in accordance with reason”; it means ”possessing the faculty of reason.” A full biological definition of man would include many subcategories of ”animal,” but the general category and the ultimate definition remain the same.) [ITOE, 58.].
Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.
[GS, FNI, 149; pb 122.]
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice.
[Ihid.]
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.
[Ibid., 146; pb 120.]
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An ”instinct” is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love for life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it.
[Ibid., 148; pb 121.]
Man cannot survive on the perceptual level of his consciousness; his senses do not provide him with an automatic guidance, they do not give him the knowledge he needs, only the material of knowledge, which his mind has to integrate. Man is the only living species who has to perceive reality-which means: to be conscious-by choice. But he shares with other species the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical: for man, primarily epistemological.
Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish-man builds irrigation ca.n.a.ls; if a flood strikes them, animals perish-man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish-man writes the Const.i.tution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom-by instinct.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 10; pb 15.]
Consciousness-for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as ”hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical needs without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available-but to build the simplest shelter. he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no ”instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge -and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 13: ph 21.]
To the extent that a man is guided by his rational judgment, he acts in accordance with the requirements of his nature and, to that extent, succeeds in achieving a human form of survival and well-being; to the extent that he acts irrationally, he acts as his own destroyer.
[”What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 21.]
If some men do not choose to think. they can survive only by imitating and repeating a routine of work discovered by others but those others had to discover it, or none would have survived. If some men do not choose to think or to work, they can survive (temporarily) only by looting the goods produced by others-but those others had to produce them, or none would have survived. Regardless of what choice is made, in this issue, by any man or by any number of men, regardless of what blind, irrational, or evil course they may choose to pursue-the fact remains that reason is man's means of survival and that men prosper or fail, survive or perish in proportion to the degree of their rationality.
[Ibid.]