Part 40 (1/2)
Love, friends.h.i.+p, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person's virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one's own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a s.l.u.t. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 29; pb 31.]
The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.
A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule-alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.
Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.
[”The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 96; pb 82.]
See also ALTRUISM; AMORALISM; CAPITALISM; CHARITY; COLLECTIVISM; CREATORS; ”DUTY”; EMOTIONS; GOOD, the; HAPPINESS; INDEPENDENCE; INDIVIDUALISM; LIFE; LOVE; MAN; MORALITY; NIETZSCHE,FRIEDRICH; ”PACKAGE-DEALING,”FALLACY of; PRIDE; PRODUCTIVENESS; RATIONALITY; REASON; RESPONSIBILITY/ OBLIGATION; SACRIFICE; SECOND-HANDERS; SELF; SELF-ESTEEM; SELF-INTEREST; SELFLESSNESS; STANDARD OF VALUE; TRADER PRINCIPLE; VALUES; VIRTUE; WHIMS/WHIM-WORs.h.i.+P.
Selflessness. Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.
[”The Soul of an Individualist,” FNI, 94; pb 81.]
[Peter Keating is] paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness-in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy-all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego that he's betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish....
Isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.
[”The Nature of the Second-Hander,” FNI, 78; pb 68.]
When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it 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.
[”Playboy's Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 7.]
See also ALTRUISM; LOVE; SECOND-HANDERS; SELF: SELFISHNESS; SELF-ESTEEM.
Self-Sacrifice. See Altruism; Sacrifice; Selflessness.
Sensations. The lower of the conscious species possess only the faculty of sensation, which is sufficient to direct their actions and provide for their needs. A sensation is produced by the automatic reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus from the outside world; it lasts for the duration of the immediate moment, as long as the stimulus lasts and no longer. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which a consciousness can neither seek nor evade. An organism that possesses only the faculty of sensation is guided by the pleasure-pain mechanism of its body....
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 peyreptual reality confronting it.
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 9; pb 18.]
Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual-epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage.
Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation. As far as can be ascertained, an infant's sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos. Discriminated awareness begins on the level of percepts....
Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident. The knowledge of sensations as components of percepts is not direct, it is acquired by man much later: it is a scientific, conceptual discovery ...
(It may be supposed that the concept ”existent” is implicit even on the level of sensations-if and to the extent that a consciousness is able to discriminate on that level. A sensation is a sensation of something, as distinguished from the nothing of the preceding and succeeding moments. A sensation does not tell man what exists, but only that it exists.) [ITOF,5.].
Sensations are the primary material of consciousness and, therefore, cannot be communicated by means of the material which is derived from them. The existential causes of sensations can be described and defined in conceptual terms (e.g., the wavelengths of light and the structure of the human eye, which produce the sensations of color), but one cannot communicate what color is like, to a person who is born blind. To define the meaning of the concept ”blue,” for instance, one must point to some blue objects to signify, in effect: ”I mean this.” Such an identification of a concept is known as an ”ostensive definition.”
[Ibid.. 53.1 See also CONCEPTS; ENt.i.tY; INTEGRATION (MENTAL); OSTENSIVE DEFINITION; PERCEPTION; PLEASURE AND PAIN.
Sense of Life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man's emotional responses and the essence of his character.
Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him-most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally pa.s.sive and merely react to events (i.e.. merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discreet conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion-an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.
[”Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 31; pb 25.]
If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it.
But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values-and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist.) The emotional response to that painting would be instantaneous, much faster than the viewer's mind could identify all the reasons involved. The psychological mechanism which produces that response (and which produced the painting) is a man's sense of life.
(A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.) It is the artist's sense of life that controls and integrates his work, directing the innumerable choices he has to make, from the choice of subject to the strbtlest details of style. It is the viewer's or reader's sense of life that responds to a work of art by a complex, yet automatic reaction of acceptance and approval, or rejection and condemnation.
This does not mean that a sense of life is a valid criterion of esthetic merit, either for the artist or the viewer. A sense of life is not infallible. But a sense of life is the source of art, the psychological mechanism which enables man to create a realm such as art.
The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a ”sense” or a ”feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: ”This is what life means to me.”
Regardless of the nature or content of an artist's metaphysical views, what an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects is: ”This is life as I see it.” 'The essential meaning of a viewer's or reader's response, under all of its lesser elements, is: ”This is (or is not) life as I see it.”
[”Art and Sense of Life,” RM, 43; pb 34.]
A sense of life is formed by a process of emotional generalization which may be described as a subconscious counterpart of a process of abstraction, since it is a method of cla.s.sifying and integrating. But it is a process of emotional abstraction: it consists of cla.s.sifying things according to the emotions they invoke-i.e., of tying together, by a.s.sociation or connotation, all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same (or a similar) emotion. For instance: a new neighborhood, a discovery, adventure, struggle, triumph-or: the folks next door, a memorized recitation, a family picnic, a known routine, comfort. On a more adult level: a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, pure colors, ecstatic music-or: a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colors, folk music.... The subverbal, subconscious criterion of selection that forms his emotional abstractions is: ”That which is important to me” or: ”The kind of universe which is right for me, in which I would feel at home.”, . . .
It is only those values which he regards or grows to regard as ”important,” those which represent his implicit view of reality, that remain in a man's subconscious and form his sense of life.
”It is important to understand things”-”tt is important to obey my parents”-”It is important to act on my own”-”It is important to please other people”-”It is important to fight for what I want”-”It is important not to make enemies”-”My life is important”-”Who am I to stick my neck out?” Man is a being of self-made soul-and it is of such conclusions that the stuff of his soul is made. (By ”soul” I mean ”consciousness.”) The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.
[”Philosophy and Sense of Life,” RM, 33; pb 27.]
A given person's sense of life is hard to identify conceptually, because it is hard to isolate: it is involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a ”personality.”
Introspectively, one's own sense of life is experienced as an absolute and an irreducible primary-as that which one never questions, because the thought of questioning it never arises. Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression-on very short acquaintance-an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it.
This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be a.n.a.lyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression-of oneself or of others-is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one's mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience : it is the integration of mind and values.
There are two aspects of man's existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.
[Ibid., 39; pb 31.]
A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life-an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture's dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.
Thus Western civilization had an Age of Reason and an Age of Enlightenment. In those periods, the quest for reason and enlightenment was the dominant intellectual drive and created a corresponding emotional atmosphere that fostered these values.
Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
[”The Age of Envy,” NL, 152.]
A nation's sense of life is formed by every individual child's early impressions of the world around him: of the ideas he is taught (which he may or may not accept) and of the way of acting he observes and evaluates (which he may evaluate correctly or not). And although there are exceptions at both ends of the psychological spectrum-men whose sense of life is better (truer philosophically) or worse than that of their fettow-citizens-the majority develop the essentials of the same subconscious philosophy. This is the source of what we observe as ”national characteristics.” ...
Just as an individual's sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation's. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger-no matter how good his subconscious vatues-so is a nation.
This is the position of America today.