Posted on 06/11/2002 10:12:35 AM PDT by thinktwice
Edited on 04/14/2004 10:05:12 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
In your June 7 editorial on the moving of the Ayn Rand Institute to Irvine ["Ayn Rand in O.C.''], you stated that you took issue with some of Ayn Rand's positions, including her ardent atheism. In today's world of terrorism and conflicts fueled by ardent religious beliefs, it would seem appropriate that you would take issue with ardent religious people, not with any atheists.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
....and our rights came from who........Ayn Rand? Tell me, please.
Don't disappoint me, thinktwice........1500 posts and counting.
Judging from the conclusions you make, I would liken it more to the secular equivalent of a hit from a crack pipe.
An irrational statement.
You can be Capitalist and Fascsist.
An irrational statement.
You must be anti-transcendent God and transcendent moral law.
Indicating you are pro-transcendent God and pro-transcendent moral law, and -- again -- irrational.
Let me ask you ...
What specifically characterizes a human being from all other animals?
Answer -- the ability to reason.
Use it or lose it, it's up to you.
The concept of inalienable rights presupposes ...
The existence of a Supreme Being.
That man was created in the image of that Supreme Being; man is related to God, so to speak.
Would you say those are rational assumptions?
My earlier post provided premises for the religious concept of inalienable rights. Let me add to that ...
America's founders defined man's inalienable rights -- the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness --as "self evident" truths.
The founders used secular and rational truths, the primary one being man's right to life.
What a nice choice of words -- "Self evident." Might I also add that Ayn Rand's fully developed and published Ethics is founded in man's self evident right to life?
Your statement contains non-contradictory points inherent in Objectivism's approach to truth, a three step process that I'd summarize as follows ...
1. Reality is that which exists -- that which "is" as you say it.
2. Truth is the recognition of reality -- the individual realizing that which "is."
3. Reason is man's standard for knowing truth -- the individual deriving truths of reality from perceptions that are evaluated using reason.
We can use reason to determine certain truths, however reason can not create truth.
Close, but not quite right ...
Man has the ability, using the rational faculty of reason, to create art, literature, buildings, inventions -- things that are not yet real and cannot, as yet, be recognized as real; i.e., not true now, but recognizable as truths of reality (it exists!) upon creation.
Reason/logic define validity, not truth. Unless you already know that all the premises you base your conclusion on are true, and that your conclusion is valid, reason can't make an assertion that a specific conclusion is true.
You seem to be confused about the relationship between reason and logic. Logic requires the use of reason, but reason can be used for more than logic; creating a beautiful work of music, for instance; or recognizing important "self evident" truths as America's forefathers did.
Reason/logic define validity, not truth. Unless you already know that all the premises you base your conclusion on are true, and that your conclusion is valid, reason can't make an assertion that a specific conclusion is true.
I've read that Ayn Rand would often end conversations with the words ... "Check your premises."
Wrods mean things, so the best thing to do is get a comprehensive dictionary and use it to communicate with others. Man is the only creature we know that has reason and rational powers; and reason itself is under attack by those seeking power over human minds.
Older dictionaries -- forty years old or more -- are preferable because linguistics analysis (a philosophy based on language, not reality and reason) folks are working hard to confuse human mental processes (Note -- see the recent CyberCowboy777 posts defining "fascism.").
Meanwhile, the term "linguistic analysis" is not in any of my old dictionaries (help is requested please someone, look it up and post it), but the word linguistics has changed just enough over time to give you a clue ...
1936 Webster's Collegiate 5th ed. -- linguistics, ... the study of human speech including the origin, structure, and modification of language ...
1963 Webster's Seventh New Collegiate -- linguistics ... the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language ...
1984 Webster's New World -- linguistics ... the science of language, including phonology, morhology, syntax, and semantics.
The words "reason" and "rational" are worth looking at, too; but their definitions are too long to include.
The founders used the term "self evident," but Ayn Rand improved on that in the "Objectivist Ethics," writing ...
To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?
"Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept "value" is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.
Ayn Rand goes on to discuss the importance of life to living organisms, and humans in particular, saying ...
In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living organisms exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do.
A brilliant piece of work, twenty two pages long -- chapter one in "The Virtue of Selfishness."
That title, by the way, was chosen specifically for its shock value because today's world considers seflishness evil. Rand writes that ... " The exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word "selfishness" is "concern with one's own interests."
How about that? Ayn Rand's ethics holds that taking care of one's family first is not evil.
The human right to life is the primary inalienable right, and that right is what Ayn Rand works up to in the passages I cited. She uses reason to show that Man's right to life is a natural right, and then bases her rational ethical system on that one right.
In your dictionary quotations for selfishness, I detect the connotation of evil in each of your three definitions. That connotation is probably a result of the popularity given the philosophically socialist ethical system of altruism.
I just noticed that my "1936" dictionary was copyrighted in 1936 and printed in 1946, and it defines selfish as ...
selfish ... Caring unduly or supremely for oneself regarding one's own comfort, advantage, etc., in disregard, or at the expense of, that of others. -- selfishness, n.
And yes, that does differ from the unevil definition that Ayn Rand gives for selfishness, but -- for sure -- a natural concern for one's own self interest is not evil.
So now I wonder what eighteenth and nineteenth century dictionaries would say ... In those eras when America was founded and before the socialist ethics of altruism swept round the world.
From "The Objectivist Ethics" -- passages I've highlighted.
Aristotle did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it, and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.
The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life.
The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man -- and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness -- serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong, course of action, that something is impairing the proper function of its body, which requires action to correct it.
Consciousness -- for those living organisms which possess it -- is the basic means of survival.
Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answeres to all these questions -- but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on this earth -- the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge -- man is the only living entity born without any quarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man's particular distinction from all living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.
Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice to "focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious" or not. Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.
Consciousness -- for those living organisms which posess it -- is the basic means of survival. For man, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as "hunger"), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest need without a process of thought.
But man's responsibility goes stlll further: a process of thought is not automatic nor "instinctive" nor involuntary -- nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results.
Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self starter, and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action.
A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil.
What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics.
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy -- nor a social convention --nor a dispensable, subjective luxury. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival -- not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.
The Objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value -- and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.
I'm tired of typing, so the above is an incomplete overview of the rational approach underlying the Objectivist ethics. Objective readers should get the drift in it
One caution ... there may be some typos.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.