At least read Nozick if you're into that kind of politics.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933263)

Nozick is a very good philosopher. You have no idea what you're talking about (as demonstrated by your OP). State, Anarchy, and Utopia is the closest you're going to get to an intellectually respectable defense of libertarian-esque ideas.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933277)

You have ethical obligations to other people. Deal with it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933295)

one of the basic ideas of Objectivism is there are no conflicts of interest between rational men. so if i follow my self-interest, it won't be fucking anyone over.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933299)

"one of the basic ideas of Objectivism is there are no conflicts of interest between rational men. so if i follow my self-interest, it won't be fucking anyone over."

Do you actually believe this? What kind of tortured definition of rationality are you using to attempt to make this statement true?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933314)

http://www.nowandfutures.com/large/On-the-Randian-Argument-Nozick.pdf

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933370)

(February 1963)

4.

The “Conflicts� of Men’s Interests

by Ayn Rand

Some students of Objectivism find it difficult to grasp the Objectivist principle that “there are no conflicts of interests among rational men.�

A typical question runs as follows: “Suppose two men apply for the same job. Only one of them can be hired. Isn’t this an instance of a conflict of interests, and isn’t the benefit of one man achieved at the price of the sacrifice of the other?�

There are four interrelated considerations which are involved in a rational man’s view of his interests, but which are ignored or evaded in the above question and in all similar approaches to the issue. I shall designate these four as: (a) “Reality,� (b) “Context,� (c) “Responsibility,� (d) “Effort. �

(a) Reality. The term “interests� is a wide abstraction that covers the entire field of ethics. It includes the issues of: man’s values, his desires, his goals and their actual achievement in reality. A man’s “interests� depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values—and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.

Desires (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests. The mere fact that a man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good, nor that its achievement is actually to his interest.

To claim that a man’s interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated—is to hold a subjectivist view of man’s values and interests. Which means: to believe that it is proper, moral and possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not. Which means: to hold an irrational or mystical view of existence. Which means: to deserve no further consideration.

In choosing his goals (the specific values he seeks to gain and/or keep), a rational man is guided by his thinking (by a process of reason)—not by his feelings or desires. He does not regard desires as irreducible primaries, as the given, which he is destined irresistibly to pursue. He does not regard “because I want it� or “because I feel like it� as a sufficient cause and validation of his actions. He chooses and/or identifies his desires by a process of reason, and he does not act to achieve a desire until and unless he is able rationally to validate it in the full context of his knowledge and of his other values and goals. He does not act until he is able to say: “I want it because it is right.�

The Law of Identity (A is A) is a rational man’s paramount consideration in the process of determining his interests. He knows that the contradictory is the impossible, that a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality and that the attempt to achieve it can lead only to disaster and destruction. Therefore, he does not permit himself to hold contradictory values, to pursue contradictory goals, or to imagine that the pursuit of a contradiction can ever be to his interest.

Only an irrationalist (or mystic or subjectivist—in which category I place all those who regard faith, feelings or desires as man’s standard of value) exists in a perpetual conflict of “interests.� Not only do his alleged interests clash with those of other men, but they clash also with one another.

No one finds it difficult to dismiss from philosophical consideration the problem of a man who wails that life entraps him in an irreconcilable conflict because he cannot eat his cake and have it, too. That problem does not acquire intellectual validity by being expanded to involve more than cake—whether one expands it to the whole universe, as in the doctrines of Existentialism, or only to a few random whims and evasions, as in most people’s views of their interests.

When a person reaches the stage of claiming that man’s interests conflict with reality, the concept “interests� ceases to be meaningful—and his problem ceases to be philosophical and becomes psychological.

(b) Context. Just as a rational man does not hold any conviction out of context—that is: without relating it to the rest of his knowledge and resolving any possible contradictions—so he does not hold or pursue any desire out of context. And he does not judge what is or is not to his interest out of context, on the range of any given moment.

Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one’s desires, there are two major ways of context-dropping: the issues of range and of means.

A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. This does not mean that he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts or contradictions between his short-range and long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all his values tomorrow.

A rational man does not indulge in wistful longings for ends divorced from means. He does not hold a desire without knowing (or learning) and considering the means by which it is to be achieved. Since he knows that nature does not provide man with the automatic satisfaction of his desires, that a man’s goals or values have to be achieved by his own effort, that the lives and efforts of other men are not his property and are not there to serve his wishes—a rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved directly or indirectly by his own effort.

It is with a proper understanding of this “indirectly� that the crucial social issue begins.

Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. The only difference is that he supports his life by trading his products or services for the products or services of others. And, in this process of trade, a rational man does not seek or desire any more or any less than his own effort can earn. What determines his earnings? The free market, that is: the voluntary choice and judgment of the men who are willing to trade him their effort in return.

When a man trades with others, he is counting—explicitly or implicitly—on their rationality, that is: on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.) Thus, when a rational man pursues a goal in a free society, he does not place himself at the mercy of whims, the favors or the prejudices of others; he depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work—indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his work by others.

It is in this sense that a rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved by his own effort. He trades value for value. He never seeks or desires the unearned. If he undertakes to achieve a goal that requires the cooperation of many people, he never counts on anything but his own ability to persuade them and their voluntary agreement.

Needless to say, a rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to the irrationality, stupidity or dishonesty of others. He knows that such a course is suicidal. He knows that one’s only practical chance to achieve any degree of success or anything humanly desirable lies in dealing with those who are rational, whether there are many of them or few. If, in any given set of circumstances, any victory is possible at all, it is only reason that can win it. And, in a free society, no matter how hard the struggle might be, it is reason that ultimately wins.

Since he never drops the context of the issues he deals with, a rational man accepts that struggle as to his interest—because he knows that freedom is to his interest. He knows that the struggle to achieve his values includes the possibility of defeat. He knows also that there is no alternative and no automatic guarantee of success for man’s effort, neither in dealing with nature nor with other men. So he does not judge his interests by any particular defeat nor by the range of any particular moment. He lives and judges long-range. And he assumes the full responsibility of knowing what conditions are necessary for the achievement of his goals.

(c) Responsibility. This last is the particular form of intellectual responsibility that most people evade. That evasion is the major cause of their frustrations and defeats.

Most people hold their desires without any context whatever, as ends hanging in a foggy vacuum, the fog hiding any concept of means. They rouse themselves mentally only long enough to utter an “I wish,� and stop there, and wait, as if the rest were up to some unknown power.

What they evade is the responsibility of judging the social world. They take the world as the given. “A world I never made� is the deepest essence of their attitude—and they seek only to adjust themselves uncritically to the incomprehensible requirements of those unknowable others who did make the world, whoever those might be.

But humility and presumptuousness are two sides of the same psychological medal. In the willingness to throw oneself blindly on the mercy of others there is the implicit privilege of making blind demands on one’s masters.

There are countless ways in which this sort of “metaphysical humility� reveals itself. For instance, there is the man who wishes to be rich, but never thinks of discovering what means, actions and conditions are required to achieve wealth. Who is he to judge? He never made the world—and “nobody gave him a break.�

There is the girl who wishes to be loved, but never thinks of discovering what love is, what values it requires, and whether she possesses any virtues to be loved for. Who is she to judge? Love, she feels, is an inexplicable favor—so she merely longs for it, feeling that somebody has deprived her of her share in the distribution of favors.

There are the parents who suffer deeply and genuinely, because their son (or daughter) does not love them, and who, simultaneously, ignore, oppose or attempt to destroy everything they know of their son’s convictions, values and goals, never thinking of the connection between these two facts, never making an attempt to understand their son. The world they never made and dare not challenge, has told them that children love parents automatically.

There is the man who wants a job, but never thinks of discovering what qualifications the job requires or what constitutes doing one’s work well. Who is he to judge? He never made the world. Somebody owes him a living. How? Somehow.

A European architect of my acquaintance was talking, one day, of his trip to Puerto Rico. He described—with great indignation at the universe at large—the squalor of the Puerto Ricans’ living conditions. Then he described what wonders modem housing could do for them, which he had daydreamed in detail, including electric refrigerators and tiled bathrooms. I asked: “Who would pay for it?� He answered, in a faintly offended, almost huffy tone of voice: “Oh, that’s not for me to worry about! An architect’s task is only to project what should be done. Let somebody else think about the money.�

That is the psychology from which all “social reforms� or “welfare states� or “noble experiments� or the destruction of the world have come.

In dropping the responsibility for one’s own interests and life, one drops the responsibility of ever having to consider the interests and lives of others—of those others who are, somehow, to provide the satisfaction of one’s desires.

Whoever allows a “somehow� into his view of the means by which his desires are to be achieved, is guilty of that “metaphysical humility� which, psychologically, is the premise of a parasite. As Nathaniel Branden pointed out in a lecture, “somehow� always means “somebody.�

(d) Effort. Since a rational man knows that man must achieve his goals by his own effort, he knows that neither wealth nor jobs nor any human values exist in a given, limited, static quantity, waiting to be divided. He knows that all benefits have to be produced, that the gain of one man does not represent the loss of another, that a man’s achievement is not earned at the expense of those who have not achieved it.

Therefore, he never imagines that he has any sort of unearned, unilateral claim on any human being—and he never leaves his interests at the mercy of any one person or single, specific concrete. He may need clients, but not any one particular customer—he may need a job, but not any one particular job.

If he encounters competition, he either meets it or chooses another line of work. There is no job so slow that a better, more skillful performance of it would pass unnoticed and unappreciated; not in a free society. Ask any office manager.

It is only the passive, parasitical representatives of the “humility metaphysics� school who regard any competitor as a threat, because the thought of earning one’s position by personal merit is not part of their view of life. They regard themselves as interchangeable mediocrities who have nothing to offer and who fight, in a “static� universe, for someone’s causeless favor.

A rational man knows that one does not live by means of “luck,� “breaks� or favors, that there is no such thing as an “only chance� or a single opportunity, and that this is guaranteed precisely by the existence of competition. He does not regard any concrete, specific goal or value as irreplaceable. He knows that only persons are irreplaceable—only those one loves.

He knows also that there are no conflicts of interests among rational men even in the issue of love. Like any other value, love is not a static quantity 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, assuming they have earned it. The most exclusive form—romantic love—is not an issue of competition. 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.

Such, in brief essence, are the four major considerations involved in a rational man’s view of his interests.

Now let us return to the question originally asked—about the two men applying for the same job—and observe in what manner it ignores or opposes these four considerations.

(a) Reality. The mere fact that two men desire the same job does not constitute proof that either of them is entitled to it or deserves it, and that his interests are damaged if he does not obtain it.

(b) Context. Both men should know that if they desire a job, their goal is made possible only by the existence of a business concern able to provide employment—that that business concern requires the availability of more than one applicant for any job—that if only one applicant existed, he would not obtain the job, because the business concern would have to close its doors—and that their competition for the job is to their interest, even though one of them will lose in that particular encounter.

(c) Responsibility. Neither man has the moral right to declare that he doesn’t want to consider all those things, he just wants a job. He is not entitled to any desire or to any “interest� without knowledge of what is required to make its fulfillment possible.

(d) Effort. Whoever gets the job, has earned it (assuming that the employer’s choice is rational). This benefit is due to his own merit—not to the “sacrifice� of the other man who never had any vested right to that job. The failure to give to a man what had never belonged to him can hardly be described as “sacrificing his interests.�

All of the above discussion applies only to the relationships among rational men and only to a free society. In a free society, one does not have to deal with those who are irrational. One is free to avoid them.

In a nonfree society, no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933377)

first page (249):

point 1, i agree. people shouldn't be like "Ayn Rand did it. done". learn from her and build on it. she did a lot but you don't like finish creating knowledge, you keep going.

point 2: ok sure

but then he wants to do everything by deduction, so i guess he's a rationalist. he says if he overlooked some other ways to make the argument work besides a bunch of rationalist deductions, someone else can supply it.

well ok so he doesn't understand Objectivism which criticizes rationalism and provides a different approach to the topic.

page 2 (250) is stuff that is not really recognizable as Objectivism. he just doesn't get what Rand is about. Peikoff or Rand would put it way better. e.g. in Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism he talks about some of this stuff and it makes way more sense than Nozick's version.

page 3 (251): holy shit learn to use paragraphs, what a wall of text. one paragraph for an entire fucking page.

252: he starts talking about suppose death is a great value. see this is pure rationalism, he ignores reality. you gotta look at reality not just make shit up.

take reality and what you already know and deal with problems with it and try to improve it and stuff, don't just try to make up a deductive philosophical system out of thin air. if you try to interpret Objectivism as rationalism, you aren't gonna understand it, it isn't going to work in that way.

257: he's trying to figure out why not to live as a parasite/moocher/looter, something Objectivism explains, but he just don't know the Objectivist ideas on the topic and is lost and tries to make up some rationalism and logical deductions and it doesn't work very well.

he divorces the analysis from the context of actual lives on Earth -- no worry of being jailed for being a thief, excluded from good social circles, and other penalties from people. and how if you take a person with a decent life and then they start being a parasite, it makes their life worse in all kinds of ways. or if they are young and they have these different choices, you have to compare alternatives, not just sorta theoretically assume being a parasite must be nice (it isn't).

and why would you want to be a parasite? because you don't think you can get values by production. so one problem there is it means lacking confidence and self-esteem. and how will you be a parasite? openly? honestly? no, you will lack integrity. so you start getting into all these places that being a parasite clashes with Objectivist virtues. and each of those virtues, you can learn about it and why it's important, there's a bunch of ideas there.

and if you're a parasite, now the dumber and more irrational other men are, the better for you. you fear their virtue and insight and stuff. so you end up with this very anti-mind anti-life mentality. and so on.

258, bottom of the page, not compatible with Galt's idea of suiciding if they were gonna torture Dagny. it's trying to take some Objectivist ideas as broad out of context principles instead of understand how they apply to different situations.

264 the conclusion basically accuses Rand of not meeting an impossible standard of proof and doesn't understand the purpose of her books (to help those who want to learn, learn, to portray heroes, NOT to come up with an airtight rationalist system that'll force everyone to be persuaded, which is an approach she rejects).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933369)

"[Philosophers came to be divided] into two camps: those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the [mystics] by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind."

Objectivism rejects both.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933431)

i reject most a priori reasoning, not all though

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933484)

Like Rand clearly argues for certain positions, and these arguments are subject to the criticisms Nozick lists.

Clearly deduction is a reliable and robust way to gain knowledge and reason, so wtf bro?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933497)

from Understanding Objectivism

Rationalism

We have covered some essentials of the positive approach to understanding Objectivism and how to chew it. Of course, we could multiply the issues; we could have an entire course, and more than one, just on what we’ve been doing, but the idea was to give you an indication of a method. Now I want to turn to the negative, to errors, basic misconceptions and wrong approaches toward understanding Objectivism and toward understanding philosophy as such. So we have a two-pronged attack, what’s right and what’s wrong by contrast. And the first thing we’re going to do, which is our subject for this evening and may spill over a little bit into next week, is rationalism.

Rationalism is a method of approach to ideas that, more than any single other error, wrecks intellectuals, particularly good intellectuals, because it operates by corrupting them via the best within them. It attaches itself to a man’s desire to be rational, to go by reason, to go by logic, to be objective, and using that, if he commits this mistake, it warps his thinking at the very root. So, more than any other error, in my knowledge, rationalism has negative effects on good people who go into the intellectual world. At the same time, it utterly alienates nonintellectuals and makes them decide that the intellectual world is a bunch of hot air, a bunch of floating talk that has nothing to do with life, and consequently, it has the effect of keeping those people out of the field altogether, so it becomes like a self-perpetuating monopoly of poor thinking.

Although rationalism is a profoundly mistaken method, it’s not in and of itself evil or immoral. And I want to stress this at the outset. If it’s applicable to you or your acquaintances, it is not an issue of moral default to commit this error. I think I’ve indicated that I wrestled with this for many years, and I have every reason to believe that I was thoroughly honest in the process. Many highly virtuous people do it out of conscientiousness. Rationalism is an automatized, imperfect way of coping with confusion; it does not reflect on your seriousness or on your character. Particular rationalist philosophers may be dishonest, but people in this room, I feel safe to say, are not. What it comes down to is: How to deal with ideas is a special skill that none of us is taught, and people flounder when they get thrown without any guidance into something as abstract as philosophy. Rationalism—and also empiricism—are two ways of floundering, of trying to cope when you don’t know how to cope. They govern you without you even knowing that you subscribe to them. What happens is that rationalism operates to define for you implicitly what you take as logic or understanding or reality; you don’t even know that that theory is setting those definitions; and therefore, all you know is, “I’m trying to understand such and such, but I don’t understand�—you don’t realize that the very concept “understand� that you’re using is influenced by this particular theory. So when you are influenced by rationalism, you do so most often without even knowing it.

I’m using “rationalism� not exactly the way the term is used in the history of philosophy. As you know, there are two broad schools in the history of philosophy, the rationalists and the empiricists. The rationalists are those who advocate reason, in essence, and derogate the senses. The empiricists are the reverse; they advocate observation and derogate reason. But as I’m using “rationalism,� it’s a method used not only by avowed rationalists, but also by most of the official empiricists in the history of philosophy. So, the method of rationalism is often used unwittingly even by people who claim to reject all the tenets of rationalism. It’s used by those who call themselves empiricists, and it’s also used very often by Objectivists.

The best way I know how to handle this is to treat it as a syndrome, a collection of symptoms, and I’m going to enumerate a list of symptoms of rationalism.

Number one—this would be the descriptive essence of rationalism—ideas above reality. The rationalist regards ideas as a realm over and above reality (by “reality� I mean here the physical world). He sees ideas as a private world different from reality and superior to it. This means that he has a completely different concept of “ideas� than an Objectivist would. He does not regard ideas as a means of knowing the physical world; he regards ideas as essentially sundered from, separate from, the physical world. What philosopher is the archetype of rationalism? Plato. His world of Forms, or world of Ideas, which is a world of abstractions existing independent of and superior to this world is the true philosophy of rationalism, and is accepted even by people who claim to oppose Plato. It’s a world of floating abstractions, and by “floating� we mean disconnected from concretes, from the things in this world.

A rationalist is all in favor of abstractions. He is a highly conceptual person. He likes broad abstractions. And to that extent, he has a great virtue. But he has an essential error in his view of what an abstraction is for. He doesn’t see concepts as a means of grasping percepts. He sees two worlds, the world we perceive, and the world we conceive, and they are entirely sundered.

Many people have individual floating abstractions simply by default. For instance, many people on the street have no clear idea of what they mean by “freedom,� and if you ask them, they’re all in favor of freedom, but “freedom� to them stands for some dissociated image of running along the beach at night and positive emotion and a few things like that. They have no clear idea what actual governmental measures would advance it or detract from it. That would be a single floating abstraction. And if you have just one, that does not make you a rationalist per se; that could just be a default of chewing, a failure to connect that one concept to reality. A rationalist goes beyond this—he has a whole world of floating abstractions, a whole dimension that he goes off into, made entirely of abstractions disconnected from concrete reality.

I don’t want this to be a floating abstraction, so I’m going to give you a perfect example from an actual historical rationalist, the German philosopher Leibniz, in the late seventeenth century. I’ll give you just a bit of his philosophy. Leibniz starts (or the aspect I’m going to look at starts) with, “The world is full of things that are compound,� like tables, rocks, mountains, and so on. By “compound� he means a thing consisting of parts. That seems very innocuous, right? The world is full of compounds. Who could possibly deny a proposition like that? But from this point we’re going to see what this supposedly entails. If we keep breaking a compound up, Leibniz holds, that will be broken up into parts, and if we break the parts up into parts and so on, we can only go so far, and ultimately we must reach simple substances, substances that have no parts, the ultimate parts. And we have to reach this; otherwise, we have an infinite regress. So if there are compounds, ultimately there must be simples, things that have no parts. And those simple substances he calls monads, from the Greek word for “one.� So the universe is made up of monads, and now he’s going to see what those monads would have to be like. The first thing we can infer is that they can’t possibly be material or extended, spread out, three-dimensional, because if they were extended then they would have to be divisible, they would have to be capable of being broken into parts, at least in thought; if they were spread out in space, even if they were only an eighth of an inch long (for instance), we could separate the left side of the monad from the right side, so that would give it two potential parts, and it would no longer be absolutely simple. And yet we proved that there must be simple entities comprising the universe. Therefore, these ultimate entities cannot be extended; they cannot be material. If they cannot be material, then they can’t be in space, because only material things are in space. We’ve already found out that the essence of the universe is not material, but it must have some nature, these monads. What could they be—if it’s not material? There are only two things that we can conceive of that the ultimate elements of the universe be: matter or mind. If it’s not matter, they must be minds, right? What do minds do? (You see, we’re just all doing this by a process of reasoning.) Minds ultimately can only be aware; minds can only perceive things. So these monads must perceive. What do these monads perceive? And since monads are all that exist, the only thing they could perceive is other monads. If all of them are doing nothing but perceiving all the other monads, what is the difference? The only two ways that a mind could differ is in what it perceives and how it perceives; but what it perceives is the same, so they must differ in how they perceive. And how could they differ? Well, some of them must be clearer, and others blurrier.

Now then, we go on and on, and we finally reach the idea (I’m leaving out a lot of steps), the most confused monads are the ones that we call “tables� and “chairs,� and the clearest one is God, and so on and so on. I’ve just given you a taste; we could go on indefinitely (and Leibniz does). But you see the method. I’ve just given it to you in structure. “There are compounds, and if there are compounds, there must be simples; if there are simples, they must be indivisible; if they are indivisible, they must be nonmaterial; if they are nonmaterial, they must be nonspatial; if they are nonspatial, they must be mental; if they are mental, they must be perceivers,� and so on. That is a perfect example of rationalism. It’s not just one term detached from reality; it’s a whole series of them, a whole world of concepts, and when you enter into it, they have definite relations to each other. It’s Leibniz’s world, like Plato’s, and it has a whole complicated structure and rules on how you get from one to the other, absolutely none of it at any point connected to what we observe in this world. And if you tell him, “Look, here’s a table, and here’s a chair, and it looks material and to be in space,� he’ll say, “That’s ridiculous. I’ve proved that if it’s compound it must be simple, and so on, so all of this is illusion. We have another world, and I get to it by this series of concepts.�

It should be clear to you that you can do exactly the same thing with the right ideas. This is an issue of method, not of content. Leibniz happens to be what’s called an idealist; he doesn’t believe in matter. But you can be an Objectivist and get all your ideas from Atlas Shrugged, and then approach them this same way, in which case you are a rationalist in exactly the same way.

Let’s take the example that we used before, the type of Objectivist who says it’s wrong ever to take money from your parents to help you in college, and see how that would be reached by this same Leibnizian or rationalistic method. And the way I’ve heard it structured is like this: “If there are to be values, life must be the standard; if life is to be the standard, rationality has to be the supreme virtue; if rationality is to be the supreme virtue, independence must be a virtue; but since mind-body integration is an essential metaphysical principle, independence must apply both intellectually and materially; but parents are responsible only until maturity, and I am past the age of maturity; therefore, taking money from them would be anti-life.� That is the same thing as Leibniz did, only using more plausible ideas, Objectivist ideas. But it’s a whole series of inferences starting from what is supposedly an obvious foundation, with no references that point to the actual situation, context, or concretes; no reference to whether he is working hard in college, needs help legitimately, has a long-range plan or is a bum, whether his parents have to sacrifice—all of those questions are simply dismissed as being completely irrelevant. He’s got a series of abstractions, and then, in a void, a conclusion to which they lead, without any perception of concrete reality.

To give rationalism its due, there is a good element here. The rationalist wants to be logical, he’s appalled at the idea of going by emotions, he wants to be objective, he wants to have proof, he’s very conceptual, he loves broad principles—“If there are compounds, there must be simples; if life is the standard, you must be rational�—he loves that; he revels in broad abstractions. And that’s good, up to a point. But the trouble is he goes astray in his love of concepts. He goes astray because he doesn’t realize what a concept is. It’s true that if you’re going to be conceptual, you do have to be selective in your focus. A conceptual mind does have to be selective. What do we mean by “selective�? While it’s abstracting, a conceptual mind has to drop out of attention certain actual facts of reality. For instance, when you put together all the different tables under one concept “table,� you have to deliberately ignore the fact that one has four legs and one has five, that one is brown and one is white, and so on. You do have to drop out of attention many actual facts of reality and just focus on the common denominator. So it is true that inherent in a conceptual mind is selective focus, actually ignoring certain elements of reality.

The rationalist, unfortunately, goes one step too far—he drops reality as such. As a continuation of this same selectivity, he drops concretes altogether. Of course, in a way, you cannot focus on concretes when you think abstractly. This is what, in the nature of the mind, gives rise to rationalism. The essence of a concept is to enable us to hold a countless number of concretes without focusing on any one of them. The purpose of a definition is to enable us to focus on one attribute, and ignore the dozens of others that the crow epistemology couldn’t hold. So we do have to ignore many facts of reality when we think abstractly. But the essence of a proper method is to ignore while keeping the concretes implicit, potentially alive in your mind. The crucial necessity of proper thinking is: Focus selectively, drop the irrelevant facts, but always remember that they are there, they have to be capable of being recalled at a moment’s notice, and your abstraction is no use except as a means of bringing you in touch with data about these concretes. But the rationalist drops the concretes and just cuts them off. He doesn’t keep them potentially alive in his own mind. He enters his own world of abstractions, just like Plato, a world of universals.

You can do this very innocently by the very nature of what you do when you form concepts, if you’re not aware of it. And this is particularly true if you are young, you have no guidance, and you are exposed to a whole system of philosophy for the first time. You will then find that you have a mass of ideas you cannot digest, you do not know what to do with them, they’re whirling in all directions. Especially if you take a course or read a book where you’re given a dozen definitions and a thousand principles and a hundred arguments, and it’s just spinning in all directions, and you have a desperate need (many people do) to simplify, to make it graspable, and so they latch on to something that’s clear to them, in the same way that Leibniz latched on to “If there’s a compound, there must be a simple.� That much he knows, that becomes his anchor, and he’s going to hang everything on that.

That is understandable if you’re eighteen years old, plunged into a whole philosophy, including Objectivism—the sheer weight of it overcomes you, so you start to deal with a floating realm of principles untied to life. That’s why the only antidote to rationalism is detailed digesting in a proper way. If and when you can grasp the ideas in connection with reality, then there’s no temptation toward rationalism. Of course, this chaos does not have to lead to rationalism; it can also lead to empiricism, which is another way of remaining in control. That we’ll look at next time.

That is our basic description of rationalism. It contains, by implication, all the other points. But let us now name a second point, and that would be deduction as the basic method of knowledge.

If you asked Leibniz or any rationalist, “How do you know that your conclusion is true, that everything must be a monad?� or if you asked the Objectivist in the example, “How do you know that you shouldn’t take money from your parents?� the answer will be, “What do you mean? I proved it inexorably from my starting point—if this then this, if this then this—I have a whole chain, and my conclusion is therefore inexorable.� Rationalists love the expression “Q.E.D.,� quod erat demonstrandum, “I’ve proved it; this is it.� Their idea of what guarantees the conclusion, what validates it, what makes it incontestable, is not that you see that it corresponds to reality—a rationalist would never say that. What he would say is, “It has been deduced,� and you can’t beat that; that is the method of knowledge. And here again, it’s deduction, not as a means of grasping reality, but as a method of connecting ideas without relation to reality.

The contrast to deduction would be induction, which is the process of generalizing from observation. Induction is the attempt to grasp abstractions on the basis of observing concretes, and that is the antithesis of the rationalist’s whole approach. He regards induction as shaky, uncertain, confusing, disorganized. It might be helpful, like Plato says, to engage in a little induction when you’re young, to give you some preliminary ideas, but once you get the ideas, you’re past your baby clothes, you throw that out, and then you are just in a pure realm where you deduce one idea from another.

We saw these two different approaches on the topic of life as the standard. And you remember that the deductive approach, which I attacked over and over, would be the idea, “The way to establish life as the standard is, ‘value’ is defined as ‘that which one acts to gain and/or keep.’ By that definition, it must follow that there’s something that acts to gain, there is some ultimate goal, and so there must be an alternative. ‘Life’ is defined as ‘a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action,’ and that means it must be the thing that alone is capable of pursuing goals, and which alone is confronted by the alternative, and therefore, by those two definitions, it must follow that—� and you deduce the whole thing with no reference whatever to the facts of reality. If you ask that type of rationalistic Objectivist where those definitions came from, there is no answer whatever. Those are just the definitions; they strike him as okay, they’re in Atlas Shrugged, he’s got to start somewhere. And of course, you know the crisis that that leads to—the complete disassociation of those definitions from reality, and consequently such problems as how you distinguish a living thing from a statue. As against that, actual proof is not deduction, but induction; it’s observing actual living organisms, and observing the countless differences between them and the inanimate, observing all of those hundreds and hundreds of differences, and then merely conceptualizing, organizing, making explicit what your perceptions gave you. That would be an inductive approach, and completely opposite of the rationalist.

You can put the rationalist’s insistence on deduction the following way: He is not concerned with the relation of ideas to facts, but with the relation of ideas to ideas. He starts with certain ideas, and then he wants to show that the next idea follows from that idea, and the next one from that idea. So his eye is always on his little world of ideas to make sure that they cohere with each other, never on the relation of ideas to facts.

A true rationalist carries this all the way. He is not convinced by sensory observation. He feels a need to deduce even what he directly observes. And there are some Objectivists like this. They feel that if you just look at that table and say, “Therefore, it exists,� that’s unconvincing; how do you know the senses are valid? But, suppose you could give a deductive proof that the senses are valid, then you could accept the evidence of your eyes because you would have now validated it by reference to deduction. So, for instance, they’ll say something like this: “Science has proved that whenever we have a sensory experience, there must be an object causing our reaction, and therefore, whenever we perceive, we must be perceiving a real object; and therefore, if we perceive a table, there must really be an object there, and therefore, we can trust our eyes.� Therefore, therefore, therefore, that’s all deduction. Now observe: This type of person thinks, “I can trust my eyes because I’ve given a deductive proof.� And if you ask him, “How can we rely on what science has proved, if we can’t trust our senses? Where does science come up with its conclusions?� that doesn’t occur to him. He’s now incorporated the senses into a deductive framework, and once he’s done that, he’s happy.

We can put the point this way: The rationalist resents the real self-evident—that is, the perceptual level. He has his own substitute for it, as we’ll see in a moment. Now you could easily see from this account that if deduction is the only method of knowledge, what is going to be the favorite subject of a rationalist and his idea of the model of all human knowledge? That subject is mathematics, which has been the ideal of rationalists since time immemorial, starting with Pythagoras, who said, “All things are numbers,� through Plato, who, finally, in his old age, changed his universals into Pythagorean numbers, all the way through Spinoza, whose ethics was demonstrated “geometrically,� just like mathematics, right on through Bertrand Russell and Principia Mathematica, so it’s all the way to the present. Mathematics as the paradigm of knowledge.

I just want to comment here briefly that mathematics is not the proper model of knowledge. Mathematics is a profoundly untypical subject, and it is absolutely not typical of human cognition. It’s an extraordinarily abstract subject, which focuses on a single attribute of physical entities (namely, quantitative relations), and in fact, you can even make a case that mathematics does not even really have a content of knowledge; it’s basically a method, the way logic is.

The important thing is why the rationalist picks on mathematics, and if I put this pejoratively, it would be, mathematics is the easiest subject there is.* That’s not a friendly description, but it’s relevant to pointing out something about rationalism, because the rationalist is floundering and he needs something straightforward that he can grab on to. Contrast, for instance, the typical mathematical proof with what you have to do to validate the virtue of honesty. In a real cognitive situation, you have to pick certain elements out of a vast, complicated context; you have to delimit the aspect under consideration; you have the necessity of integration facing you in dozens of directions at the same time; you have all kinds of complexities that would make your head spin to try to know what you know, and what it rests on, and what context you are using, and so on. With mathematics, however, this is not necessary. You start off with a few delimited axioms, because you’re deliberately saying, “I’m not focusing on reality, only one attribute, and to hell with everything else,� and in mathematics, you just churn out the conclusions from those premises; there are no traps, pitfalls, weighing of evidence, and so on.

And this demonstrates an important point about rationalists: They cannot deal with intellectual complexity, or they don’t want to, they don’t know how to. Consequently, when they begin to feel that everything is swimming, their method is to grab some abstraction and say, “That’s my beacon, that’s my starting point, and I’m going to hang everything else on this.�

Periodically I get letters from rationalists denouncing Objectivists for celebrating Christmas. And they are almost invariably rationalistic. They all are some variant of the idea, “Christmas is the holiday celebrating altruism, and you’re supposed to give gifts and do things for others, and so on; therefore, it’s the opposite of Objectivism; therefore, it’s immoral to celebrate.� What I want to point out to you here is why this is an example of a rationalist mentality. The fact is that Christmas has a great many attributes. It is not simply a holiday for which you’re supposed to give gifts. There are many other things—Christmas is supposed to be a time of goodwill, it’s a time when you have a tree, it’s a time when you have certain kinds of decorations, it’s a time of protracted absence of work, it’s a time of office parties, it was a holiday begun by pagans and then taken over by Christians when they couldn’t stamp it out, it’s a time in which people are constantly denounced for being too commercial and in giving gifts not in the spirit of self-sacrifice but simply selfishly and materialistically and so on—now, this whole chaos is true of Christmas. The rationalist, however, decides—in this case, the Objectivist rationalist—that there is a feature he doesn’t like. All the rest is irrelevant, and he’s going to make his deductions on that basis.

It’s true that we do have to simplify a complexity. That’s why we need definitions, in order to know what we’re dealing with. So we have a valid need here—we can’t deal with the complex unless we simplify. But the rationalist seizes arbitrarily on something that he can deal with that makes it simple, and goes from there. So we have a world of ideas cemented by deduction, allegedly modeled on mathematics.

One corollary of this is that there is a strong tendency to determinism in rationalism. And the tendency comes about like this: Deduction is the proof that so-and-so must follow from the preceding—so a true rationalist thinks that anything he’s trying to explain follows of necessity from the preceding, which follows of necessity from the preceding, and so on. This “must,� in his mind, is incompatible (usually) with choice. He feels, given the starting point, the next step is inevitable, and the next and the next, and therefore, the whole thing couldn’t possibly have happened differently. The perfect example of this philosophy, of a determinism implicit in rationalism, was Spinoza. Spinoza is what was called a “logical determinist.� That is, he thought that everything in the universe was determined, not by atoms or by God or by Freudian desires or anything like that; he thought everything was determined by logic itself. The sheer necessity of everything flowing deductively from the starting point meant every aspect of everyone’s life had to flow inevitably from the starting points, and consequently there was no choice at all.

Now let’s turn to the third point—the rationalist view of the proper starting points of knowledge. And you can describe this as follows: The rationalist view is that the starting points are purely conceptual self-evidencies. Now let’s develop this point. A rationalist rests his whole case on his starting points, so he’s very high on axioms. But he does not get his axioms from observation, from sensory perception; as we’ve seen, he resents that whole approach. So where does he get his basic self-evidencies, on which he’s going to rest his whole deductive chain? He has his own version of the idea of the self-evident. His starting points, he says, are not self-evident on the perceptual level; they are self-evident strictly on the conceptual level. They are self-evidencies that you grasp only when you grasp concepts, not any way of looking at reality; you simply seize on certain abstract ideas; you say them aloud to yourself, or in your mind, and it strikes you—“Sounds good,� “Okay,� “Obvious,� “Common sense,� “Incontestable,� “I’ll buy that,� whatever it is, “Where there’s a compound, there must be a simple; who could deny it?� There’s no question of observing what’s around you. It’s just that you utter the proposition, and if it’s right, it reverberates in the mind. If not, then you say, “That’s no good; I want something that has that quality, and that then is my foundation.�

I gave an example of this made up by Miss Rand; it’s a perfect example to capture the rationalist approach to axioms. The rationalist will say something like this: “Man has only two eyes, so he should see only two things, one with each eye�; that would be an axiom. “An eye can see only one thing, one eye, one thing.� That sounds okay. And then, what will follow from this will be two schools. One school will say, “We have to accept the inference from that. Men do see only two things; everything else is an illusion.� And the other school would say, “Oh, that’s ridiculous. We see all kinds of things, but that’s because of all the hidden eyes we have.� This is the typical pattern—an alleged self-evident axiom, and then two schools that war with one another on the basis of it. And this is very common. One of these letters that come in periodically denouncing Christmas started with a whole series of axioms. One of the axioms was, “A holiday is a celebration of the exceptional.� That was listed as a self-evident proposition, “A holiday is a celebration of the exceptional,� as against the usual or daily or common. And the rationale seemed to be, “If it was usual or everyday or some common event, it wouldn’t be a celebration, and if it wasn’t a celebration, it wouldn’t be a holiday.� If you said to this sort of person, “What about Labor Day? That’s a holiday, and the purpose is to celebrate something that is common and ordinary and daily and taken for granted. What about Mother’s Day?� This person just never thinks of that possibility. It’s just that it sounds good, “A holiday is a celebration of the exceptional.� It just never would occur to them to look at reality and see if that’s what holidays are. You just infer “a holiday,� and see how that strikes you, that’s it. That is a typical rationalist approach.

Ultimately, since the rationalist does not get his axioms from sense perception, he has to get them from somebody else—he needs some kind of authority. So there’s a tendency of rationalists to be authoritarian. When they say, “This is obvious, this is commonsense, this is incontestable,� what they really mean in the last analysis is, “This is not debatable, nobody will challenge it, everyone agrees.� Sometimes authoritarianism is only by implication, and the rationalist will abandon it if you point it out to him. But sometimes rationalists are openly authoritarian. And the clearest example is the medieval theologians, who knew all their conclusions in advance from the Bible, and then merely concocted deductive arguments from alleged self-evident premises in order to validate what they knew in advance.

Let me now give you a different kind of example of the same rationalist approach. Imagine a group that starts a political movement on the idea “The initiation of force is evil� as an axiom, as a self-evidency, as a primary—you just know that it’s evil, and that’s it—which is basically what the Libertarians do today; that’s where they start, that is their equivalent of “A is A,� “The initiation of force is evil.� This rests solely on authority, in this case the authority of Ayn Rand, from whom they filched this idea; but in her, it is a late, late conclusion, on about the thirtieth story, of an entire philosophic system. And of course, for them, they just take it over. And there, again, you see the need to escape any complexity, to grab as self-evident something that strikes them, that they can take in and hang everything on that.

The most common form of these rationalist axioms is definitions, so this is a continuation of point three. A rationalist loves to start with definitions. Where does he get his definitions? From the study of entities in reality? No. Definitions, to him, are simply a string of words equal to another word. “Life� equals “self-sustaining, self-generated action,� and wherever you have “life,� you can strike it out and stick “self-generated, self-sustaining action.� Definitions are simply verbal, linguistic, unconnected to reality, as are all concepts. The rationalist’s focus is only on the relation of words to words, or concepts to concepts, not to reality. And you see again in this example why there is an authoritarian element in the rationalist—since he doesn’t get his definitions from observation, he can get them only from usage. It’s society that becomes his authority.

You can do many, many things with definitions, and if you are familiar with St. Anselm (1033–1109), who was another famous rationalist in the history of philosophy, he’s an extreme example of a rationalist approach to definition. Definitions to him, so far from coming from reality, precede reality and give rise to it, and that is kind of the perfect rationalist approach. In his famous so-called ontological argument for the existence of God, he says, in effect, “Let’s start with a definition of ‘God.’ We don’t know whether there is one, but we’re going to start with the definition. God is ‘the being than which nothing greater can be conceived.’� And you say, “Maybe there is no such thing.� “Let’s not worry about that,� he responds, “it’s just a definition, and definitions, of course, are not related to reality, so you can just make one up. Now let’s imagine that God didn’t exist. I can think of something even greater than that—namely, something with all of His attributes, but He also existed. By definition, God is the being than which nothing greater can be conceived, so he must have every perfection including existence. Therefore, God exists.� Did you get that? It’s like: Look at these two pens, the one in my left hand and the one in my right (my right hand is empty), but Anselm would argue, “These two pens have every characteristic in common—they’re both six inches long, they’re both blue, they’re both sharp, they both have ink, and so on and so on. There’s only one difference between them—the one in my left hand exists, and the one in my right doesn’t. Which is better? Obviously the one in my left hand. So if the definition was ‘the pen than which nothing greater can be conceived,’ it would have to be the one in my left hand.�

This is the belief in words as having power over reality, definitions as being primaries disconnected from reality and you simply manipulate them, and periodically something pops up as a result. And that is the perfect example of rationalism.

There is a corollary of this rationalist approach to starting points, and that is what we can call monism, from the Greek for “one,� so it literally means one-ism. Monism is the view that whatever you’re trying to prove or explain, the ideal model of knowledge is that you should begin with only one starting point. Since your starting points are vulnerable, the fewer, the better. Ideally, therefore, if you are a full-fledged philosophic rationalist, you would like to have one insight from which everything else in the universe will follow. For instance, Plato had exactly that, and he called his supreme entity “The Form of the Good,� and everything followed from that. The medievals followed Plato, but they made it “God� as the single thing. Plotinus had the perfect name for expressing this viewpoint—he called his supreme single principle “the One.� The important thing about the One is that it is one; you couldn’t say anything about it, because if you said anything about it, that would bring in two aspects, so it was just One, and everything followed from that.

Some Objectivists have this monist mentality or approach. For instance, they cannot stand the fact that Objectivism begins with three axioms—existence, consciousness, and identity. Why should there be three? And so what they try to do is reduce them all to just one, and the way they reduce them is to say, “There’s really only one axiom, the law of identity, because if you deny existence you’re contradicting yourself, and if you deny consciousness you’re contradicting yourself, so we can literally prove existence and consciousness. Therefore, we’re just down to one, and that’s the law of identity.� This is completely wrong. You cannot prove existence without taking it for granted, and if you don’t take it for granted, how did you get the law of identity, and what is it a law of? This is an entirely rationalist attempt to prove everything but one axiom, in this case the law of identity. But the rationalist feels that until he’s got it down to one, there’s something wrong with him.

I have to confess to having this idea at an early stage of my development, and I had it in the following form: History comes from ideas, ideas come from philosophic ideas, philosophic ideas come from metaphysics and epistemology, and they come ultimately from certain axioms (or perversions of them), and ultimately I thought that you could work it out that there was only one idea central in all history, and that was the law of identity; therefore, if a major philosopher attacks the law of identity, all the rest will follow in terms of cultural trends, political trends, economic trends, and so on. That is a monist rationalist approach. And it’s obvious that no one error, however disastrous, will explain everything else. It’s a ludicrous construct. That’s what I would call “Objectivist monism.�

Point four: certainty with omniscience. When the rationalist has completed his deductive proof from his self-evident axioms, he claims certainty for his conclusions. “After all,� he says, “I’ve given an unequivocal proof, every step is necessitated, my axioms are not challengeable, and therefore, my conclusion is one hundred percent certain.� And this is very important to a rationalist—he cannot stand probability, “It’s a matter of opinion,� “Who could ever know?� He really wants to know. He wants to have the answer, and that’s one reason that he loves mathematics—because if you prove it in mathematics, it’s Q.E.D., unavoidable.

“But,� the rationalist goes on, “to achieve certainty on any question, we must be completely comprehensive. We must cover everything involved in that subject, everything, before we can claim real certainty.� One sign of a rationalist is an obsessive need for comprehensiveness. For example, if he is writing an article—keep in mind that an article has to be delimited; you can only do so much; even a book has to be delimited; even an encyclopedia has to be delimited; you have to leave out a tremendous amount—but a rationalist cannot stand omitting anything. He feels that if he omits something, “I didn’t prove my case. It isn’t unanswerable, it isn’t convincing, it is not absolutely certain.� Any of you who are teachers may recognize this; I certainly have had this example. For instance, some years back, I would not have been able to do what I did in the opening lecture of this course—that is, to say, “There is a mind/body dichotomy. I’m going to look at only three forms of it even though there are twenty-two others.� That would have killed me; I couldn’t have left out nineteen. Of course, it would have been extremely perverse to give twenty-two; you could never have held it all; from the crow epistemology, it would have been too many units to hold. But the idea would have been: If you just touch on three, you’re leaving out nineteen, you’re missing out most of the key elements in the subject, you just aren’t making it clear.

This can apply in teaching, it can apply in writing, and it can apply in thinking. In thinking, it takes the form, “If any one point is not fully clear to you, your certainty about the entire issue is destroyed.� It’s the idea, therefore, that you must know everything to really know anything about a given issue, and that’s the name for point four: “certainty with omniscience.�

What would explain this rationalist need for comprehensiveness, for omniscience, for constantly covering everything, which is essential to his approach? It’s an unavoidable consequence of his wrong way of holding abstractions. It’s because he holds abstractions as floating and detached from reality. His abstractions, as we’ve said, do not stand in his mind as integrations of concretes, but as ideas in another dimension unrelated to concretes. The unavoidable result of that is the feeling, “However wonderful your theory, however wonderful your principles and abstractions, they somehow miss out reality; they leave out issues, topics, facts of the world, of actual real life. And therefore, the only way to cover reality, since you can’t do it by concepts, is, in effect, by a concrete-by-concrete survey, over and above your broad abstractions.� The aim for comprehensiveness is really a desire to do on the perceptual level, by constant accumulation of concretes, what the rationalist cannot do on the conceptual level because his concepts do not stand as integrations of concretes.

Let me give you the same point in slightly different terms: Concepts are functioning in his mind improperly. Abstract arguments, therefore, are simply not convincing to him. He feels that they’re vague, generalized, empty, and he’s right—as they stand in his mind, they are vague, generalized, and empty. Consequently he feels he has to make up the deficit, and the only way he knows—since he can’t do it by abstract concepts—is to plunge in and go over every detail of the territory, try to take every little aspect or point of the topic and say, “See, I can deal with that, that makes it more convincing, and I can deal with that, that makes it more convincing, and I can deal with that,� and so on. And consequently, he is unable to delimit any topic in his own mind.

Take honesty as the example. We discussed it as an abstract principle, but the principle was chewed with a few examples, a specification of the context, a definition, and so on. And we were able to say, “We understand this now, no matter what example comes, because we see the relation of the principle to reality.� There were many, many things, though, that we didn’t discuss, but we didn’t have to, and we didn’t have to feel, “We’re not really sure,� because the principle, as far as we went with it, was related to reality. But a rationalist, approaching honesty, would hear the abstract argument, and he would feel, “Yes, that’s fine, I like abstractions,� but at the same time it’s not enough. It just doesn’t convince all by itself. He feels, “There are so many things about honesty I don’t yet see, and any one of them threatens my broad principle, because my principle,� he knows, “is somehow floating.� So he has this need: “Let’s jump in, let’s take every possible question about honesty that you could dredge up; we have to know everything.� And of course, if you’re going to try to know everything about any one thing, you have to know everything about everything. He can’t delimit. As soon as you say “honesty,� he says, “Yeah, I see it in theory, but what about the used-car salesman? I don’t see how it would apply. What about white lies? What about social lies? What about if you’re a doctor and you have a patient who’s sick—how sick does he have to be, what diseases?� And there are hundreds of thousands of questions that flood into his mind with the feeling, “Until I understand this, I don’t understand honesty.�

The correct approach is to stay away from those examples like the plague, as we did; take the simple examples to grasp the principle, and then use the principle, if and when necessary, to untangle some of these complexities. But the rationalist can’t do that. For him, the principle is simply a floating generality (and in his mind, it is), so he has to supplement it by grabbing every concrete form of lie and studying that particular one as well as he can, and it becomes an endless process of multiplying, and if he leaves one out, he feels, “I’m not being conscientious; I don’t really understand; I don’t have the answer to the next example; I have to write a whole volume on honesty, and even then I’ve just scratched the surface, because every example brings up ten thousand other concepts that I don’t really understand, and those to others,� and pretty soon, it’s the typical rationalist syndrome, the thing sprawls everywhere, and he feels that he can know nothing.

There’s another aspect involved in this point of “certainty with omniscience,� a very important consequence of his approach. We’ve said that the rationalist ends up trying to do on the perceptual, concrete level what he can’t do by means of abstractions. He’s reduced to an enormously detailed concrete-by-concrete survey, without benefit of broad abstractions. But how can you hope to know all of these concretes without abstractions? How can you deal with these thousands of examples of honesty without abstractions? Obviously, you cannot. The whole idea of an abstraction is to enable us to put an endless number of concretes together into a unit. Without those, we would just be swamped; the crow epistemology would make us expire; you’d look at five examples and your mind would just wipe itself out.

The rationalist is in this exact position. He throws out abstractions when he wants to be absolutely certain, and he starts studying all the examples, but he feels completely swamped by all those examples; he feels the tremendous pressure of, “How am I going to deal with it?� His solution is: “This is just too much to deal with, so for now, I’m going to focus on just one example and forget everything else. I’m going to ignore all the other examples. I’m going to take just one detail, one topic, one point, and I’m going to, on principle, say the hell with all the rest of it, I’m just going to study that one until I really, really get it, until I’m completely satisfied. And then, when I’ve got that, tomorrow I’ll take the next one, and I’ll work just on that until I really have that,� and so on. Of course, he has one problem with this: How does he get one? How does he really grasp it without concepts? The only way you can grasp what’s wrong, for instance, with white lies, is by reference to the principle of honesty. But he decides, “That’s too vague; now we’re going to study white lies as a special subject. And I’m going to really get that before we look at black lies.� But how can he do it? Well, he feels, “White lies is a huge subject. There are so many different kinds of white lies, and so many different motives, and so many different people. Maybe white lies is too broad a subject. Maybe we should study just white lies told to close relatives.� And of course, that doesn’t work, and so he gets more and more concrete, more and more disintegrated. He takes a stab at white lies for close relatives, and then a stab at used-car salesmen with Chevrolets, and so on, and if you tell him, “You’re not getting anywhere this way; you’ve got a whole bunch of disconnected items, and none of them prove anything, because you haven’t connected it all and seen the principled overview,� he feels, “Oh, no, you’re just taking me back into this world of generalities, and I’ve got to know everything.�

So he is, in effect, in a world of disconnected concretes on principle, as a means of trying to become omniscient. And that approach we call compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is basically antagonism on principle to integration. It’s deliberate disintegration, the deliberate separation of one item of knowledge from all others, and particularly from all wider abstractions that could explain or clarify. It’s the idea of making every item a separate watertight compartment without relation to the rest of knowledge; the refusal to connect one area, or item of knowledge, to another. And the basic cause, as far as rationalists are concerned, is this (to recapitulate): First he has floating abstractions, then he throws them aside with a fervent commitment to study one narrow point until he “really gets it,� and then he discovers that he can’t get it, so he narrows his focus even more, and he ends up staring at a concrete-bound point that he cannot get, and then another one, and another one.

I’d like to give you an example to show you how compartmentalization is a necessity of floating abstractions. “Man sees that the laws of the government are ruining the oil industry.� That takes an intelligence to observe, and to this extent, if he really sees it, he has abstractions that are tied to reality, that are not floating. “Government� stands for something to him; “law� stands for something to him—he knows what laws he’s talk-ing about in regard to the oil industry; “oil industry� stands for something—he knows what enterprises, and so on, are involved. Now, let us say, he comes to the clothing industry, or the medical field, or the banking industry, and he wants to know, “Why are the laws passed by the government bad in this field, too?� If you tell him, in essence, “Controls as such create destruction in any industry, whether it’s oil or medicine or banking or whichever,� he says to you, “That’s too vague. It’s too generalized, too empty. You can’t talk,� he says, “about ‘controls as such,’ because it depends what kind of controls. And you can’t talk about ‘industry as such,’ because oil differs from medicine, which differs from money, and so on and so on.� That is like a confession on his part. To him, “controls as such� is a floating abstraction disconnected from reality, and so is “industry as such.� It’s too broad, it’s not connected to concretes in reality, and therefore he experiences it as vague, generalized, empty. He can keep his concepts tied to concretes up to a certain point, but beyond that level, he can’t; his concepts start to float. He does not have the conceptual apparatus to tie X and Y industry into one unit. He can’t grasp that the laws governing medicine, and the laws mandating price controls in the oil industry, come under one unit—namely, “controls.� So he has no option, given his mentality, given the way he holds concepts, but to treat each of these industries as separate, unconnected entities, because he doesn’t have the means to connect them. So, for him, the oil industry is one compartment of his knowledge, and the medical industry is another compartment. If he were to write a book, he would have a chapter on oil without any reference to medicine, and a chapter on medicine without any reference to oil.

All of us have to separate; we have a totality of experience; we can’t just sit and stare at everything. We have to separate; we have to say, “I’m going to focus on this, and not on all the rest of it.� What prevents rational separation of fields from becoming compartmentalization? Realizing it and being able to connect what you separated back to the rest of your knowledge. And by what means do you connect? By means of broad concepts. But they will function only if they are not floating. If they float, they cannot serve to connect. You can think of a compartment, in the bad sense of the term, like this: A compartment is a separation gone bad. Separation is legitimate, for specialized focus, but only on the premise of reconnecting it to the total by means of abstractions, which are broad enough to grasp what’s in common between it and the rest. But a compartmentalizer is somebody who simply can’t do that; his concepts float, and therefore he has to break things up into a compartment and stare only at that. When a rational mind separates, there’s always the feeling, “This is temporary.� A rational person, not a rationalist—feels that it’s important to see the relationship, the connection, between the separated element and the rest of what he knows; but to do this requires broad concepts that actually are connected to reality.

The person with an impaired or inappropriate approach has no inner need to connect his separation, to complete it, by connecting it back to the rest. To him, separation is an end in itself; you separate out white lies and study them, and next week or next year you study used-car salesmen, and next month you study another type, and it’s just a number of types, so you study the coal industry, or the oil industry, or the medical industry, or if you’re not that abstract, you wouldn’t even get there—if you’re a newspaper columnist, you study strip mining laws, or you study strip mining laws in Tennessee, or you study strip mining laws in Tennessee in 1981, or you study foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, or you study the invasion of Grenada—however it is, if that is your topic, it’s not just that you focus on it and then connect it; it’s on principle disconnected from everything else. That is the compartmentalizer. And a rationalist is one of the real exponents of this. He demands certainty, his method doesn’t enable him to get it, he decides that he must know everything, and then he plunges in out of helplessness to start compartmentalizing, and then he can’t reconnect his compartments because his concepts all float. And you see the paradox—here is a rationalist, who idealizes wide-scale vision, broad concepts, general theory, and he ends up by the logic of his method being a concrete-bound, disintegrated gazer at this item and this item and this item. He reaches the very opposite of his intention. And therefore the paradox is that in practice, in many cases, you cannot tell the rationalist from the empiricist. The empiricist is busy going around studying the disintegrated concretes, and so is the rationalist. The reason is, since he loves concepts (the rationalist), but he disassociates them from reality, and therefore he’s helpless to deal with reality and is thrown back. He has no alternative but to try to deal with it without concepts, which makes him concrete-bound. So he’s led to the opposite of his ideal by the unavoidable necessity of his approach.

I want to continue with a couple of last points on the topic of “certainty without omniscience.� I think you can see why a rationalist is driven into mysticism. Concepts fail for him; they don’t give him the understanding he wants, so he tries the perceptual level, of being concrete-bound. But the purpose of concepts is precisely to explain what you can’t cover perceptually. So the rationalist is in this position: He wants to have a large-scale vision and understanding of reality, his concepts can’t do it because they float, and his percepts can’t do it because nobody’s percepts can do that, so he ends up necessarily with the idea, “I get this large-scale vision somehow, by some means other than percepts or concepts. If I diligently study enough percepts and enough concepts, somehow I’ll have the illumination that transcends all of them.� And all the major rationalists in history did exactly that. However much they were in favor of deduction from axioms, at the climax of their theory of knowledge was: You get a mystic vision, and that explains everything. Plato said that, Spinoza said that—it’s throughout the rationalist tradition.

The people in this room would not, I’m sure, have a tendency to look for one all-encompassing mystic vision. You might, however, experience this issue of “certainty with omniscience,� by constant swings on a given subject. And this would be a test of whether you have a rationalist problem or not. Do you find on a given topic that part of the time some aspect of it is unclear to you, and you feel, “I don’t understand that subject at all; I’m simply ignorant, I don’t get any of it�? And then you get the answer to that one point, and now nothing suddenly seems confusing, and you feel, “I understand everything, this is completely clear to me, I know it all�; and then a week or a month or a year later, some point comes up that you can’t answer, or you forgot some point that you had known before, and suddenly you say, “I really don’t get this topic, it’s completely confusing to me.� It’s typical of a rationalist to swing from “I know everything� to “I know nothing.� Properly speaking, your attitude should be that you know what you know, even when you realize that there are things about that subject that you don’t know. For instance, if you know that capitalism is correct, and you know that in a reality-oriented fashion, you should not be shaken if somebody brings you some example from the nineteenth century that allegedly proves the evil of capitalism and that you can’t answer. You do not have to be omniscient; you do not have to know the answer to every piece of concrete example or lunacy that someone could bring up, to know your principle or why it is correct. But if you feel, when you hear the principle, “Now I know everything,� and then, two weeks or two years later when this example comes up, “I don’t understand it at all, I’m completely thrown, I don’t even know if capitalism is right,� that is a rationalist idea—the goal is omniscience. So long as you feel that you have it, you’re certain, and as soon as you don’t have it, you’re wiped out.

In the moment of feeling omniscient, the rationalist feels as though he’s had the revelation. He knows everything. He doesn’t need to specify, “I know it within this context, up to this point, in this framework�—none of that is relevant; he knows everything. And then, as soon as he loses his conviction, it’s gone altogether: “I can’t know�; he becomes in practice a skeptic. So he alternates between a dogmatist who thinks he has the absolutes without any context, and then a skeptic who’s uncertain.

Now point five—the concern with order, or system, a very special kind of order or system. That, of course, is implicit in what we’ve been saying, and in the very fact that mathematics is the ideal. There is a certain virtue in this attitude—the rationalist detests chaos. He always goes in a step-by-step fashion. When you follow his thinking, you always know where you are. His thoughts are always systematically connected. And to this extent, that is good, that’s a virtue. It’s much better than just a hash of jumping from one thing to the other when you don’t have any idea why. He’s very big on logic and structure and order. But he has, unfortunately, several vices on this topic. First and foremost is the fact that the order that he cherishes is actually arbitrary, because it is detached from reality. His axioms, which are his cherished starting points, are themselves arbitrary, out of context; he just plunges in wherever he feels like (such as in the Leibniz case of “compounds require simples�), and he just yanks out of them by deduction whatever he can, and the whole thing is a floating castle in the air. Consequently, you can say that he is a staunch advocate of order, but it is order apart from reality. It is not order dictated by the facts of reality; it’s an order arbitrarily imposed on a world of concepts. So his order is artificial, and you can see that very clearly in the fact that the typical rationalist is obsessed with things like symmetry and neatness, which is like order apart from any reality reference. For instance, Kant, who is a mixture of everything bad—he’s a rationalist, an empiricist, an intrinsicist, a subjectivist. But in this regard, he certainly is a rationalist. And if you know his Critique of Pure Reason, he’s trying to work out the a priori endowments of the mind, and he works it out to four sets of three each in each set, and he is going to have four sets of three absolutely no matter what. There&acir

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933526)

Sounds like you're just really pissed about counterfactuals.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933427)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933485)

you don't even know what rationalism is but think objectivism is trash. maybe you should learn before you judge

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933515)

you have to do more than read a few things in highschool to understand this stuff fully.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933531)

and also Ayn Rand is more popular than most of those academia haters :)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933551)

http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=1629599&forum_id=2#17861490

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933433)

no flame

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933461)

anyway off to bed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26933509)

she goes too far in not addressing market failures but from her perspective that doesn't matter because capitalism is good not because of its results but because of the inherent right to free choice.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26936127)

also in light of the edelman guy, i saw some commenters arguing "buyer beware" as he signed the receipt--in my mind, we all should be able to agree to upfront rule so we don't have to be constantly on guard against fraud (or even something less than fraud--like not wasting time showing up in person because of bait and switch ads), so can say implement a regulation that says you have to clearly state prices and abide by those prices. So a regulation can increase transparency, trust, etc. (correcting a market failure--"information asymmetry") in a way that is more efficient in the aggregate.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26936575)

problematic monopolies are caused by government. see e.g. the cable companies.

not all monopolies are necessarily a big deal, because there are substitute goods. every author has a monopoly on his book. no one else can sell that book. it's ok though, because there are substitute goods.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26936630)

but in any event, free men might rationally choose something a little less than free exchange to bind them all. like basic regulations. even welfare transfers akin to private insurance.

as for monopolies, i was just saying that sometimes coordinated state action is better than free markets.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26940168)

freedom means you can set up walled gardens and controlled marketplaces (e.g. the appstore) and also more free-for-all ones and people can go where they want, their choice. that's fine.

how is coordinated state action ever better? anti-trust is a godawful mess. look at apple being sued regarding ebooks while amazon has 85% marketshare.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26940191)

like if allowed free pharma ads

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26940304)

there are lots of ways to deal with this kinda issue, like going to stores with good reputations and refund policies, or choosing TV stations that don't allow shitty advertisers or buying an ad free package. or read amazon reviews before you buy something instead of relying on subjective claims from the manufacturer. or if something doesn't give out enough info, don't buy it, buy from a company that offers more transparency and warranties.

note this is an issue today too, it's not like govt has solved it. there isn't really like a perfect answer, trade has transaction costs, you can't expect everyone to be exactly on the same page and communicate perfectly, but trade is worth it anyway.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26940332)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26942524)

i'd rather have fucking yelp go inspect them than the government

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26942533)

You already have both government regulation and reputation at work (and only recently via something like Yelp where user experiences can be shared en mass, where before the internet your assumptions about reputational constraints were even more far-fetched). You think the problem will actually be improved by removing one of the two mechanisms?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26942549)

Rand hated milton friedman because he was a traitor to capitalism. opponents of capitalism are one thing. people who say they are on the capitalist side, and establish a reputation like that, and then betray capitalism ... ugh. as one example, he advocated a tax funded minimum income.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2756810&forum_id=2#26940572)