The Journals of Ayn Rand (128 page)

The emotionalist will be open to all the above kind of conflicts. Only the strength of his rational super-structure will guarantee whether he responds to the right values or not, according to his conscious standard or not. He will experience an emotion
ahead
of his full rational knowledge of that to which he is responding. He will do so by means of a “package deal”: since emotions are sums, he will respond to his first, vague,
generalized
perception of an object or to some particular “highlight” of an object. He will respond to the
total
of an object, person or event—without breaking it up into its parts or attributes. In his “emotional epistemology,” he will be in a position similar to that of a child who perceives entities, but has not yet learned to identify them by means of their attributes.

When his emotional response clashes with his later, rational identification of a given object, the emotionalist is left in an insoluble conflict: (1) He does not know how to untangle the emotional from the rational in his own mental processes; (2) He feels a tremendous reluctance against analyzing his emotions or their object, against breaking up the “package deal”; such an analysis is contrary to his basic metaphysics and his basic concept of himself; he feels as if he were doing violence to himself and his universe; (3) Even if he succeeds, by a painful, forced process of “old-fashioned will power,” in analyzing the object of his emotions, the conclusion made by his mind lacks full conviction to him, lacks the fire and certainty of conviction—because
the emotion, not the facts,
is his final judge of the value of reality, which does mean:
his final judge of reality.

The emotionalist is the man who says that “the cold hand of reason destroys emotions.” To a rational man, such a statement is incomprehensible.

Sub-basement premises remain in an adult consciousness in the form of
“
psychological epistemology
”—in the method of thinking (“front seat” or “back seat,” directed or contemplative), in the place which emotions occupy in a process of thought (reason as the active director, emotions as the passive result—or—emotions as the active judge, reason as the passive result) and in the nature of the emotional response (specifically particularized—or—vague and generalized).

Sub-basement premises are the methods of functioning of a consciousness
—they are specifically the field of
psychology
(as distinguished from philosophy)—they are the
workings
of a soul’s mechanism, not the content of its ideas.

Sub-basement premises are not
premises in the sense in which we use the concept philosophically. A rational adult with an emotionalist premise in his sub-basement
does not
hold somewhere deep in his subconscious the conviction that “emotions are superior to reason.” What he holds is an epistemological
method
which, if translated into a philosophical premise, would amount to “emotions are superior to reason.” He did not choose it in terms of a conscious conviction; he chose it in terms of an-inner method of reacting which, by the time he is old enough to identify it, has become automatic, appears to be an irreducible primary and is extremely difficult for his own consciousness to identify.

The same is true of the other crucial sub-basement fundamental: reality versus people. There may be other fundamentals pertaining to the sub-basement, which will need to be identified. At present, I am tracing only the influence of the two metaphysical fundamentals with which I started these notes: existence and consciousness. It remains to be seen (to be examined separately) whether these two cover the whole sub-basement or not. What I am certain of at present is:

(Note to Nathan
[
Nathaniel Branden, psychologist and associate of AR’s until 1968
]
:
I know that the above is very vague and generalized, but my stomach (and brain) is screaming that
this
is the right track. The “epistemological” methods that we have discovered so far (such as “back-seat driving,” etc.) are not the whole story—but I am sure that the role of psychology is to discover, identify and then be able to cure
all the essential
“epistemological” errors possible to a human consciousness. We will know that we have discovered them all when we are able to explain every basic aberration of a human consciousness. In the past, we have been identifying and detecting specific, individual bad premises in a patient’s mind, some of them fundamental, others fairly superficial, with no general plan of procedure, no systematic view of a cure. What I am glimpsing now is at least the first key to establishing the mileposts of a systematic road to analysis and cure; the mileposts themselves are still to be identified; this is only the first of them.)

 

 

[
In the following note, AR is discussing those who refuse to judge right and wrong because of their fear of opposing others.
]

Isn’t this the “Rose Wohl issue”? [
An unknown reference.
] She said she did not want to think that others were so wrong. I thought she meant that she would find it horrifying to live among evil creatures and, therefore, prefers not to know that they are evil; I took her motive to be: (
a
) a kind of good will, which makes her resist the necessity of hating and loathing others, a mistaken form of desire for a benevolent universe, which she thinks she can achieve by evasion; (
b
) a practical sort of cowardice, which makes her resist the idea that she might be living among monsters and in constant danger, and makes her prefer not to know it, on some grounds such as “what you don’t know won’t hurt you”—again on the principle of plain (“wholesome”?!) evasion, such as the evasion of a man who refuses to see a doctor in order not to find out whether he has a deadly disease.

What I see now is that she meant she does not
dare
think that others are wrong, she does not dare oppose them even in her own mind; they would
punish
her for
holding
such an opinion; it is dangerous not only to
act
against them, but even to
think
against them. (!!!) This amounts to a
voluntary brain-washing
as a basic policy of life. (Good God!)

This issue is the reason why of any depravity, the one I’ve always loathed most is the slogan “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But again, I thought of it in semi-rational terms, i.e., I thought it meant the advice to fake the terms of others
in action
and beat them at their own game. But here I think I had a “stomach-sense” of the truth, because this slogan made me much more indignant and horrified than any rational interpretation warranted; I sensed something much more evil in it. Now I see that it means the surrender of one’s consciousness, in the sense of: “If you can’t beat them,
don’t think”
—it is meant to apply, not to
action,
but to
thought,
not to the realm of existence, but to the realm of consciousness, not in the sense of accepting values you do not really believe for the sake of some “practical” advantage, but in a sense unspeakably worse: in the sense of discarding your capacity to agree and replacing it by uncritical
obedience
—thus making obedience take metaphysical and epistemological primacy over acceptance or rejection, truth or falsehood, which means: over one’s judgment.

 

 

The “emotional” epistemology of the “perceptual” level [mentality] works as follows: instead of storing conceptual conclusions and evaluations in his subconscious, a man stores concrete memories plus an emotional estimate. Example: instead of conceptual conclusions in the form of political principles, he stores specific memories of concrete events of his own experience, with the memory that these things or events were “bad” (“painful”). Thereafter, when he has to consider any new political event, his epistemology works as follows: first, a strong negative emotion—then, the emotion, acting as selector, revives or brings out of his subconscious a lightning-like montage of memories of other political events, all of them painful—then his conclusion is that the new event is and/or will be painful, hopeless, and generally negative.

Any specific judgment that he utters, in such cases, is completely accidental or irrelevant: it is dictated, not by a rational conclusion, but by random or chance association and is, in fact, intended by him only as an approximation (though not consciously). Any conceptual conclusions, principles, or sentences he may have accumulated through the years on that particular subject are stored as loose concretes along with his memories of events, almost as accidental, undifferentiated rubble or barnacles clinging to the events. In effect, the ideas are also stored as concrete facts, as memories of something he has heard, read, or thought, not as ideas or concepts. Therefore, he does not exercise any selectivity or discrimination when he utters a comment.

His comment is approximate, because it is intended to stand for the total montage, the “gestalt,” that his emotion brings out of his subconscious. The only thing he really intends to communicate, his actual judgment, is: “This is painful.” Translated into words, his judgment would be: “This is painful, because of all the similar events I remember as painful.” Thus his memories serve as the proof or the validation of his judgment, performing, in his consciousness, the function performed by logical, conceptual evidence in a rational consciousness. This is the process by which emotion takes precedence over logic; in fact, it does not take precedence—it substitutes for logic. (Logic is a conceptual tool—it cannot operate by means of percepts, it cannot deal with unanalyzed, undifferentiated, “irreducible” concretes.)

This method, of course, is as near to a perceptual level of epistemology as a conceptual, human consciousness can come. It consists of treating memories as percepts, as “package-deal” irreducible primaries, and of forming value judgments by a primitive, animal-like standard of “pleasurable” or “painful,” these two standing for “good” or “bad,” without any further analysis or understanding, without any knowledge of why something is good or bad, why something was pleasurable or painful. This is exactly what an animal’s “pleasure-pain mechanism” would do. In the case of an animal, this mechanism works as an immediate response to immediate concretes and is assisted by memory. An animal’s memory is purely associational, and thus an animal can be trained by a repetition of pleasurable or painful experiences, of rewards or punishments (the repetition makes the animal memorize or associate).

In the case of a man, this method becomes the issue of “stale thinking.” When a man claims that he cannot separate his emotion from his perception of the event to which he is responding, that he feels as if the two come simultaneously (which means that he evaluates something before he has grasped what it is, yet he is epistemologically unable to take time to perceive the event fully), his consciousness, in fact, is reacting to past events, to memories called out of his subconscious by his first glimpse of some accidental resemblance or association between the present perception and the events of his past. (It is in this sense that he does not actually perceive the present event and cannot identify it or think about it; and it is somewhat inaccurate to call his memories “stale thinking”—they are not his old conclusions or conscious value-estimates, they are merely unanalyzed “gestalts” of concrete events and automatic emotional reactions.)

A man whose epistemology functions in this manner, by accidental associations of “pleasure” or “pain,” has no way of knowing whether his judgment (his emotional response) is or is not relevant to the present event or the facts confronting him or the immediate reality with which he is dealing, but which he has not actually perceived. He has no way of knowing whether his judgment (his substitute for judgment) is right or wrong, true or false, nor why.

The terrible consequence of this method for a human consciousness is the fact that it does make a full perception of reality impossible, that it does make a man epistemologically unable to take time to perceive. Since man needs a system of symbols to deal with the enormous complexity of his experiences, since he has to condense and simplify every new event by means of its essentials, since he cannot treat every new event as if it were an undifferentiated, unprecedented first in a baby’s blank consciousness, but must integrate (or at least relate) it to the context of his past knowledge, this method substitutes an emotion for the perception and selection of an essential.