Today's soundtrack is The Alan Parsons Project: I Robot.
This evening, I'm continuing Ayn Rand's Philosophy: Who Needs It; I'm now on the second chapter, titled "Philosophical Detection."
Rand begins the chapter by lamenting the decline of philosophy; she believes it has been abolished by Linguistic Analysis and Existentialism. She says that "the best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story," looking, as a detective, for clues about the truth of a philosophical system. The place to start, she says, is its foundation: the fundamental precepts of the philosophy. Will they hold? If not, Rand says, the whole system crumbles. What is the foundation? Rand believes that the foundation of any philosophy is made of metaphysics and epistemology. As I learned from the first chapter of her book, metaphysics is the theory of existence, and epistemology is the theory of knowledge.
Rand says that many people accept events without examining the cause of the events. She says that the simplest example is "the people who scream that they need more gas and that the oil industry should be taxed out of existence" (p. 17).
Ayn Rand believes that the only self-evident thing is "the material of sensory perception" (p. 17). She says that philosophy detectives must remember that "an irreducible primary is a fact which cannot be analyzed [...] or derived from antecedent facts" (p. 17). She says that we must ask of any idea or theory that we study, "Is this an irreducible primary -- and, if not, what does it depend on?" (p. 17). We must continue asking that same question until we do find an irreducible primary. And then we can say that if an "idea contradicts a primary, the idea is false" (p. 18). To break this idea down, Rand says that philosophy is like the fruit of a tree: we must not simply eat tasty-looking fruit; we must examine the tree that the fruit comes from to ensure the tree is not poisonous.
Rand says that it is important to take philosophical statements literally and to ask how your world would change if you were to apply the statement literally. If you believe a statement, you take it seriously; if you take a statement seriously, you live by it.
One of the reasons that few people take a hard look at what worldviews they do and don't (and should or shouldn't) accept and push onto others is "the acceptance of unearned guilt" (p. 23), which Rand says poisonous philosophers use to try to push their listeners into giving away more than they should, or to make them question what they see. We must not accept unearned guilt; we must use introspection to process reality. To process reality and decide on the right actions to take, we must assess the context, the motives, and the consequences.
On the opposite end of the spectrum from introspection is rationalization: making excuses for actions that we perform or have performed, giving them "spurious explanations and justifications [...] in order to hide one's motives [...] from oneself" (p. 24). "Rationalization is a prrocess [...] of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions" (p. 24). Rand says that "evil philosophies are systems of rationalization" (p. 25); she also says that "altruism is [...] the common denominator in the ethics of all these philosophies[, and it] is the single richest source of rationalizations" (p. 27). Rand asserts that "[w]hen a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet its advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction or an 'ideal,' but a rationalization" that we are dealing with.
Rand says that we must not be too eager to have an open mind; instead, we must have a closed (but not passive) mind! We need not give ridiculous claims value when we already know they are ridiculous. What we need "is not an 'open mind,' but an active mind" (p. 29). When we keep our minds active and conscious, we will be able to reject statements like Kant's "nobody can be certain of anything" (p. 28).
With an active mind, Rand says that people will be able to quickly ascertain the truth of philosophical statements, and recognize whether they rest on a firm foundation. If they contradict any of the essentials, then they are false. "The essentials are: in metaphysics, the Law of Identify--in epistemology, the supremacy of reason--in ethics, rational egoism--in politics, individual rights (i.e., capitalism)--in esthetics, metaphysical values" (p. 30). Rand says that "the day when these essentials become your absolutes, you will have entered Atlantis" (p. 30).
