Part 34 (1/2)
Principles. A principle is ”a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.” Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one's long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.
The present state of our culture may be gauged by the extent to which principles have vanished from public discussion, reducing our cultural atmosphere to the sordid, petty senselessness of a bickering family that haggles over trivial concretes, while betraying all its major values, selling out its future for some spurious advantage of the moment.
To make it more grotesque, that haggling is accompanied by an aura of hysterical self-righteousness, in the form of belligerent a.s.sertions that one must compromise with anybody on anything (except on the tenet that one must compromise) and by panicky appeals to ”practicality.”
But there is nothing as impractical as a so-called ”practical” man. His view of practicality can best be ill.u.s.trated as follows: if you want to drive from New York to Los Angeles, it is ”impractical” and ”idealistic” to consult a map and to select the best way to get there; you will get there much faster if you just start out driving at random, turning (or cutting) any corner, taking any road in any direction, following nothing but the mood and the weather of the moment.
The fact is, of course, that by this method you will never get there at all. But while most people do recognize this fact in regard to the course of a journey, they are not so perceptive in regard to the course of their lite and of their country.
[”The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 144.]
Concrete problems cannot even be grasped, let alone judged or solved, without reference to abstract principles.
[”Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 3.]
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions-or a grab-bag of notions s.n.a.t.c.hed at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew....
You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it, to have to act on them without knowing what they are?
[”Philosophy: Who Needs It,” PWNI, 6; pb 5.]
Consider a few rules about the working of principles in practice and about the relations.h.i.+p of principles to goals....
1. In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.
2. In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.
3. When opposite basic principles are clearly and openly defined, it works to the advantage of the rational side; when they are not clearly defined, but are hidden or evaded, it works to the advantage of the irrational side.
[”The Anatomy of Compromise,” CUI, 145.]
When men abandon principles (i.e., their conceptual faculty), two of the major results are: individually, the inability to project the future; socially, the impossibility of communication.
[”Credibility and Polarization,” ARL, I, 1, 3.]
Only fundamental principles, rationally validated, dearly understood and voluntarily accepted, can create a desirable kind of unity among men.
[Ibid., 4.]
See also ANTI-CONCEPTUAL MENTALITY; COMPROMISE; CONCEPTS; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); PHILOSOPHY; PRAGMATISM; REASON; TRUTH.
Prior Certainty of Consciousness. Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): ”the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one's consciousness -which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception-which means: the indiscriminate contents of one's consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor's blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions-then of perceptions-then of sensations.
When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers' rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.
[”For the New Intellectual,” FNI, 28; pb 28.]
See also AXIOMS; CONSCIOUSNESS; EXISTENCE; IRREDUCIBLE PRIMARIES; PRIMACY of EXISTENCE vs. PRIMACY of CONSCIOUSNESS; SENSATIONS.
Production. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.
[”What Is Capitalism?” CUI, 17.]
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions -and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made-before it can be looted or mooched-made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.
[”The Meaning of Money,” FNI, 105; pb 89.]
Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification-which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.
[”The Nature of an Artist,” FNI, 140; pb 115.]
Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values.
[”Patents and Copyrights,” CUI, 130.]
The root of production is man's mind; the mind is an attribute of the individual and it does not work under orders, controls and compulsion, as centuries of stagnation have demonstrated. Progress cannot be planned by government, and it cannot be restricted or r.e.t.a.r.ded; it can only be stopped, as every statist government has demonstrated.
[”The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” NL, 140.]
See also CONSUMPTION; CREATION; CREATORS; ECONOMIC GOOD; ECONOMIC GROWTH; MONEY; PHYSICAL FORCE; PRODUCTIVENESS; PYRAMID OF ABILITY; REASON; STATISM.
Productiveness. The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man's mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man's unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-a.s.sertive-ness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. ”Productive work” does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man's ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 21; pb 26.]
Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to tive-that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others-that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human-that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay-that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live-that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road-that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the sc.r.a.p heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up-that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who a.s.sumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
[GS, FNI, 159; pb 130.]
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work-pride is the result.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 20; pb 25.]
See also AMBITION; CAREER; COMPEt.i.tION; CREATORS; LIFE; MORALITY; PRODUCTION; PURPOSE; PRIDE; RATIONALITY; REASON; VIRTUE.
Proof. ”Proof,” in the full sense, is the process of deriving a conclusion step by step from the evidence of the senses, each step being taken in accordance with the laws of logic.
[Leonard Peikoff, ”Introduction to Logic” lecture series (1974), Lecture 1.]
”You cannot prove that you exist or that you're conscious,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.
When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence -when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness-he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both-he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.
[GS, FNI, 192; pb 154.]
An axiomatic 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.
The first and primary axiomatic concepts are ”existence,” ”ident.i.ty” (which is a corollary of ”existence”) and ”consciousness.” 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 non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.) [ITOE, 73.].