The Journals of Ayn Rand (130 page)

The “stolen concept.”

Attila and the Witch Doctor. [
AR’s analysis of these two archetypes
—
the man of force and the man of faith
—
is presented in
For the New Intellectual.]

The contradiction of wanting “democracy,” “collective living and cooperation,” the “will of the people,” etc.—
and
the abolition of reason.
Reason
is the only means of collective communication.

The worship of suffering. (Observe that the whim-worshippers are always malevolent universers.)

The new obscurantism:
if it’s knowledge, it’s untrue—if it’s an absolute, it’s wrong (if it’s indeterminate, it’s true).

The meaning of the “anti-system-building premise”: anti-integration. (Philosophers as “garage mechanics.”) (Non-objective law.) (Treating symptoms and [attacking] anyone who looks for a cause.)

Epistemological advice:
do not take the blame for “failure to understand” [the stuff you are taught], the others do not understand it, either. Do not think: “It can’t mean what it seems to mean;” it
does
mean just that (the technique of the “Big Lie”).

Reason as “perception of reality”—the “new intellectual.”

The symptoms of today’s decadence: “I
feel”
and “It seems to me.”

(The strangeness of my position in addressing a modem audience is the fact that I have to speak of what everybody knows, and be shocking and new, for that very reason—that I am not addressing ignorance, but evasion—that I am not answering a desire to know, but a desire
not
to know—that the prevalent premises are “don’t dare identify what I am struggling so hard not to admit” and “don’t dare say that anything you say can make a difference, which means: that knowledge matters.” Well, that
is
what I am going to say. I am here to identify what you all know by the modern method of knowledge: by feeling.) [
This paragraph was crossed out.
]

Is the H-bomb to be [launched] by “faith”?

Do you want to know the H-bomb as it “
really
is”?—as a “thing in itself”? Do you want to grasp it by “direct perception,” without the effort of the “cold hand of reason”? Or to grasp it “with your whole person”?

 

 

[
The following passages were cut from the title essay in
For the New Intellectual.]

The abdication of philosophy is all but complete. To understand the extent of the collapse, one must remember that the task of integrating abstractions into wider abstractions, of integrating knowledge into theories and principles, of integrating theories and principles to their practical applications, of maintaining a constant unifying process between broad concepts and their concrete, perceptual roots, thus achieving and preserving a non-contradictory sum and frame of reference—is not an automatic task nor an easy one; it requires the highest, most demanding level of conceptual psycho-epistemology. It is the specific task of philosophy, which cannot be performed by any other profession. Philosophers, by the
proper
requirement of their task, are the guardians of man’s knowledge
and of his capacity to know.

Every society of men—from the most primitive tribe of savages to present-day America—has a certain cultural atmosphere which is determined by the kind of ideas that underlie the actions,
the mode of living,
within that society. Whether the majority actually believes these ideas or merely accepts them by default, no society and no men can exist without certain basic ideas to direct their actions, so long as they do have to act, that is: to deal with reality, with physical nature and with one another. Most men accept their ideas, not because they have judged them to be true, but merely because they believe that these ideas seem to be accepted by others. The unstated premise behind such acceptance is the desire to escape the responsibility of independent judgment and to “play it safe” by means of the evader’s basic formula of: “Who am I to know? Others know best.”

It never occurs to such evaders that most of those others accept their ideas in precisely the same manner, with no more thought, judgment or knowledge than their own. When men attempt to evade the responsibility of thinking, they become the victims of an enormous self-made hoax, each man believing that his neighbor
knows
that the ideas they share are true, even if he himself does not know it, and the neighbor believing that
his
neighbor knows it, even if
he
doesn‘t, and so forth. Where, then, do these ideas come from? Who sets the terms and the direction of a culture? The answer is:
any man who cares to.

For good or evil, whether such a man is a profound thinker or an ambitious demagogue, an idealistic hero or a corrupt, man-hating destroyer—those who choose to deal with ideas determine the course of human history. Those who formulate men’s thinking determine their fate. The makers of trends, the creators of cultures, the actual leaders of mankind are the
philosophers.

If you study history, you will be shocked to discover how few—how very few—of these philosophers were profound thinkers or idealistic heroes. But this should not be astonishing: when men attempt to escape the responsibility of thinking, it is not the thinker or the hero that they will attract to the role of their intellectual leader.

The old slogan of con men “You can’t cheat an honest man” is nowhere as applicable as in the field of the intellect. An honest mind may make errors, but will not be taken in. The trickiest sophistries of the con men of philosophy are impotent against a mind honestly concerned with the pursuit of knowledge. Such a mind will accept nothing until his own independent,
rational
judgment has weighed it and found it to be true. But the pretentious, half-conscious zombie, who wants to be intellectual without effort and who mouths fashionable formulas, with no idea of their meaning, source, or implications, feeling safe in the belief that some omniscient, infallible authority somewhere has proved them to be true and saved him the bother—is sure to be the victim of those whose purpose is to destroy the mind he has abandoned. An intellectual leader such as Aristotle does not seek blind believers and formula-reciters; a leader such as Immanuel Kant does.

There is one paragraph of Hume‘s, a single short paragraph, which has been working like a paralysis-ray on the brains of ethical theorists up to the present time, and which I should like to quote:

This, in terms of modem philosophy, is the issue of the “
is
” versus the “
ought.
” It purports to mean that
ethical
propositions cannot be derived from
factual
propositions—or that knowledge of that which
is
cannot logically give man any knowledge of what he
ought
to do. And wider: it means that knowledge of reality is irrelevant to the actions of a living entity and that any relation between the two is “inconceivable.”

 

 

[
AR made the following notes while attending a conference on “Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences
”
at The New School in New York City.
]

[
Speaker: Noam Chomsky,
“
Some Observations on Linguistic Structure.
”]

Noam Chomsky
(an expert social-metaphysical-elite witch doctor):

“Studies” should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Simple trees [
i.e., diagrams used in modern symbolic logic
]
:
is the manner of presentation always in mid-stream, assuming previous knowledge?

Pure
Rube Goldberg. [
Goldberg was an American cartoonist who drew absurdly complex mechanical devices.
]

How many trees would I need to build in order to understand
Atlas Shrugged—
and in how many volumes?

Is Chomsky trying to systematize all conceptual relationships in language?

[
Speaker: Paul Ziff,
“
About Grammaticalness.
”]

Paul Ziff
(a social-metaphysical hatchet-man):

“If a sentence is ungrammatical, then native speakers balk.” [This] as a test and criterion of grammaticalness!!! (Stolen concept!!)

“[There are] 7029 or possibly 7023 grammatical categories.”(!!!)

What
is the method?

[
Speaker: Nelson Goodman,
“
Commentary.
”
This talk addresses the goal of linguistic analysis.
]

Nelson Goodman
(a nervous, old-fashioned professor):

The whole damn thing is an attempt to escape from or by-pass the issue of
context
and
integration.