Part 31 (1/2)
[”The Nature of Government,” VOS, 146; pb 108.]
See also ANARCHISM; GOVERNMENT; PEACE MOVEMENTS; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; WAR.
”Package-Dealing,” Fallacy of. ”Package-dealing” is the fallacy of failing to discriminate crucial differences. It consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or ”package,” elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.
[Leonard Peikoff, editor's footnote to Ayn Rand's ”The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 30; pb 24.]
[Package-dealing employs] the shabby old gimmick of equating opposites by subst.i.tuting nonessentials for their essential characteristics, obliterating differences.
[”How to Read (and Not to Write),” ARL, 1, 26, 3.]
A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: ”A hungry man is not free,” or ”It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations-and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. 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.
The difference between political power and any other kind of social ”power,” between a government and any private organisation, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.
[”America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” CUI, 46.]
A typical package-deal, used by professors of philosophy, runs as follows: to prove the a.s.sertion that there is no such thing as ”necessity” in the universe, a professor declares that just as this country did not have to have fifty states, there could have been forty-eight or fifty-two-so the solar system did not have to have nine planets, there could have been seven or eleven. It is not sufficient, he declares, to prove that something is, one must also prove that it had to be-and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes.
[”The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” PWNI, 34; pb 28.]
See also ”ANTI-CONCEPTS”; DEFINITIONS; ECONOMIC POWER vs. POLITICAL POWER; FUNDAMENTALITY, RULE of; NECESSITY; ”RAND'S RAZOR”; STATISM.
Painting. Painting [re-creates reality] by means of color on a two-dimensional surface.
[”Art and Cognition,” RM, pb 46.]
The so-called visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture) produce concrete, perceptually available ent.i.ties and make them convey an abstract, conceptual meaning.
[Ibid., 47.]
The visual arts do not deal with the sensory field of awareness as such, but with the sensory field as perceived by a conceptual consciousness.
[Ibid.]
It is a common experience to observe that a particular painting-foi example, a still life of apples-makes its subject ”more real than it is in reality.” The apples seem brighter and firmer, they seem to possess an almost self-a.s.sertive character, a kind of heightened reality which neither their real-life models nor any color photograph can match. Yet if one examines them closely, one sees that no real-life apple ever looked like that. What is it, then, that the artist has done? He has created a visual abstraction.
He has performed the process of concept-formation-of isolating and integrating-but in exclusively visual terms. He has isolated the essential, distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of apples, and integrated them into a single visual unit. He has brought the conceptual method of functioning to the operations of a single sense organ, the organ of sight.
[Ibid. ]
The closer an artist comes to a conceptual method of functioning visually, the greater his work. The greatest of all artists, Vermeer, devoted his paintings to a single theme: light itself. The guiding principle of his compositions is: the contextual nature of our perception of light (and of color). The physical objects in a Vermeer canvas are chosen and placed in such a way that their combined interrelations.h.i.+ps feature, lead to and make possible the painting's brightest patches of light, sometimes blindingly bright, in a manner which no one has been able to render before or since.
(Compare the radiant austerity of Vermeer's work to the silliness of the dots-and-dashes Impressionists who allegedly intended to paint pure light. He raised perception to the conceptual level; they attempted to disintegrate perception into sense data.) One might wish (and I do) that Vermeer had chosen better subjects to express his theme, but to him, apparently, the subjects were only the means to his end. What his style projects is a concretized image of an immense, nonvisual abstraction: the psycho-epistemology of a rational mind. It projects clarity, discipline, confidence, purpose, power-a universe open to man. When one feels, looking at a Vermeer painting: ”This is my view of life,” the feeling involves much more than mere visual perception.
[Ibid., 48.]
See also ABSTRACTIONS and CONCRETES; ART; BEAUTY; CONCEPTS; CONTEXT; ESTHETICS; MODERN ART; SENSE of LIFE; STYLE; SUBJECT (in ART); VISUAL ARTS.
Parts of Speech. See Grammar.
Patents and Copyrights. Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man's right to the product of his mind.
[”Patents and Copyrights,” CUI, 130.]
What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind's contribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject of patents and copyrights is intellectual property.
An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. An invention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; a story has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protects is not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. By forbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, in effect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object's value, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not be used without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mind to that which it has brought into existence.
It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot be patented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, which identifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previously known, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he did not create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming it to be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoods except by his permission. He ran copyright the book in which he presents his discovery and he can demand that his authors.h.i.+p of the discovery be acknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit for it-but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrights pertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of a specific object which did not exist in nature-an object which, in the case of patents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in the case of copyrights, would never have existed.
The government does not ”grant” a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift, privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it-i.e.. the government certifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner's exclusive right of use and disposal.
[Ibid.]
Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue.... In the case of copyrights, the most rational solution is Great Britain's Copyright Act of 1911. which established the copyright of books, paintings, movies, etc. for the lifetime of the author and fifty years thereafter.
[Ibid., 132.]
As an objection to the patent laws, some people cite the fact that two inventors may work independently for years on the same invention, but one will beat the other to the patent office by an hour or a day and will acquire an exclusive monopoly, while the loser's work will then be totally wasted. This type of objection is based on the error of equating the potential with the actual. The fact that a man might have been first, does not alter the fact that he wasn't. Since the issue is one of commercial rights, the loser in a case of that kind has to accept the fact that in seeking to trade with others he must face the possibility of a compet.i.tor winning the race, which is true of all types of compet.i.tion.
[Ibid., 133.]
See also CREATION; GOVERNMENT; INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS; PROPERTY RIGHTS.
Peace Movements. Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictators.h.i.+ps; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.
Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictators.h.i.+ps. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate-in the name of love for humanity.
[”'The Roots of War,” CUI, 35.]
It is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate-in the name of peace.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relations.h.i.+ps. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
[Ibid., 37.]
It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a dynamite bomb or an old-fas.h.i.+oned club. Nor does the number of other victims or the scale of the destruction make any difference to him. And there is something obscene in the att.i.tude of those who regard horror as a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream against the danger to the tribe itself-and more: who are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless victims, but march in protest against wars between the well-armed....
If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force-outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace-those who do love man and do care about his survival-realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed.
[Ibid., 42.]
See also CAPITALISM; DICTATORs.h.i.+P; FOREIGN POLICY; GENOCIDE; PACIFISM; PHYSICAL FORCE; RETALIATORY FORCE; SELF-DEFENSE; SOVIET RUSSIA; STATISM; WAR.
Perception. The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A ”perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of ent.i.ties, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual a.s.sociations, but it can go no further.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 10; pb 19.]
Man's senses are his only direct cognitive contact with reality and, therefore, his only source of information. Without sensory evidence, there can be no concepts; without concepts, there can be no language; without language, there can he no knowledge and no science.