Part 28 (1/2)
[GS, FNI, 150; pb 123.]
Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized cla.s.srooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior. They, who pose as scientists and claim that man is only an animal, do not grant him inclusion in the law of existence they have granted to the lowest of insects. They recognize that every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature, they do not claim that a fish can live out of water or that a dog can live without its sense of smell-but man, they claim, the most complex of beings, man can survive in any way whatever, man has no ident.i.ty, no nature, and there's no practical reason why he cannot live with his means of survival destroyed, with his mind throttled and placed at the disposal of any orders they might care to issue.
Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live.
[Ibid.]
If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a ”moral commandment” is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists-and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason-Purpose-Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge-Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve-Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man's virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride.
[Ibid., 156; pb 128.]
You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island-it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today-and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin n.o.ble enough to buy it.
[Ibid., 156; pb 127.]
A moral code is a system of teleological measurement which grades the choices and actions open to man, according to the degree to which they achieve or frustrate the code's standard of value. The standard is the end, to which man's actions are the means.
A moral code is a set of abstract principles; to practice it, an individual must translate it into the appropriate concretes-he must choose the particular goals and values which he is to pursue. This requires that he define his particular hierarchy of values, in the order of their importance, and that he act accordingly.
[ITOE, 42.].
Morality per tains only to the sphere of man's free will-only to those actions which are open to his choice.
[”Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 4.]
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.
[GS, FNI, 168; pb 136.]
In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers-and mankind's tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.
[”Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” PWNI, 81; pb 67.]
See Conceptual Index: Ethics.
Motion. They proclaim that there are no ent.i.ties, that nothing exists but motion, and blank out the fact that motion presupposes the thing which moves, that without the concept of ent.i.ty, there can be no such concept as ”motion.”
[GS, FNI, 191; pb 154.]
Motions are motions of ent.i.ties; ... a child is aware of motion perceptually, but cannot conceptualize ”motion” until he has formed some concepts of that which moves, i.e., of ent.i.ties.
[ITOE, 18. ].
Concepts of motion are formed by specifying the distinctive nature of the motion and of the ent.i.ties performing it, and/or of the medium in which it is performed-and omitting the particular measurements of any given instance of such motion and of the ent.i.ties involved. For instance, the concept ”walking” denotes a certain kind of motion performed by living ent.i.ties possessing legs, and does not apply to the motion of a snake or of an automobile. The concept ”swimming” denotes the motion of any living ent.i.ty propelling itself through water, and does not apply to the motion of a boat. The concept ”flying” denotes the motion of any ent.i.ty propelling itself through the air, whether a bird or an airplane.
[Ibid., 20.]
The concept of ”location” arises in the context of ent.i.ties which are at rest relative to each other. A thing's location is the place where it is situated. But a moving object is not at any one place-it is in motion. One can locate a moving object only in the sense of specifying the location of the larger fixed region through which it is moving during a given period of time. For instance: ”Between 4:00 and 4:05 p.m., the car was moving through New York City.” One can narrow down the time period and, correspondingly, the region; but one cannot narrow down the time to nothing in the contradictory attempt to locate the moving car at a single, fixed position. If it is moving, it is not at a fixed position.
The law of ident.i.ty does not attempt to freeze reality. Change exists; it is a fact of reality. When a thing is changing, that is what it is doing, that is its ident.i.ty for that period. What is still is still. What is in process is in process. A is A.
[Harry Binsw.a.n.ger, ”Q & A Department: Ident.i.ty and Motion,” TOF, Dec. 1981, 14.]
See also CHANGE; ENt.i.tY; HIERARCHY of KNOWLEDGE; ”STOLEN CONCEPT,” FALLACY of.
Motion Pictures. In motion pictures or television, literature is the ruler and term-setter, with music serving only as an incidental, background accompaniment. Screen and television plays are subcategories of the drama, and in the dramatic arts ”the play is the thing.” The play is that which makes it art; the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 71.]
Visual art is an intrinsic part of films in a much deeper sense than the mere selection of sets and camera angles ... a ”motion picture” is literally that, and has to he a stylized visual composition in motion....
Potentially, motion pictures are a great art, but that potential has not as yet been actualized, except in single instances and random moments. An art that requires the synchronization of so many esthetic elements and so many different talents cannot develop in a period of philosophical-cultural disintegration such as the present. Its development requires the creative cooperation of men who are united, not necessarily by their formal philosophical convictions, but by their fundamental view of man, i.e.. by their sense of life.
[Ibid., 72.]
The movies are still in the position of a r.e.t.a.r.ded child: born into a collapsing family, i.e., a deteriorating culture, an art that demanded Romanticism was left to struggle blindly in the midst of a value-desert. It produced a few rare, almost accidental sparks of true greatness, displaying its untouched potential, then was swallowed again in a growing tide of mediocrity.
[Frank O'Connor, review of Lillian Gish's The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me, TO, Nov. 1969, 8.]
Today, the movies have gone all the way back to the pre-Griffith days; or rather, they have accepted, on a broad scale, the error that destroyed D. W. Griffith: the belief that a movie is primarily a director's art, that content, story, and cast do not matter-i.e., that it is an art concerned only with the ”how,” not the ”what”-i.e., that it is an art of means, without ends-i.e., that it is the field of trick photographers, not of artists.
[Ibid., 15.]
See also ART: DIRECTOR; LITERATURE; ROMANTICISM; SENSE of LIFE.
Motivation. Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man's basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action-and in order to understand a man's character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know ”what makes a man tick,” we must ask: ”What is he after?”
To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.
[”Basic Principles of Literature,” RM, 67; pb 88.]
See also ART; FREE WILL; LITERATURE; MOTIVATION by LOVE vs. by FEAR; PSYCHOLOGY; VALUES.
Motivation by Love vs. by Fear. Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death. Joy is not the absence of pain.
[GS, FNI, 166; pb 135.]
You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.
You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power-and secretly add that fear is the more ”practical”-you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have d.a.m.ned.
[Ibid., 167; pb 135.]
See also MOTIVATION; HAPPINESS; PLEASURE and PAIN; SUFFERING; VALUES; ZERO, REIFICATION of.
Music. Music employs the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body, and evokes man's sense-of-life emotions.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]