The Journals of Ayn Rand (133 page)

After the publication of The
Fountainhead,
I met a woman, by chance, in a beauty parlor. She heard my name and she approached me to tell me how much she admired my novel. She was not gushing; she spoke quietly, intently and, to the best of my judgment, sincerely. It was the sincerity that made me take notice when she complimented me on my courage and added, with the faintest note of despair in her voice, referring to the spirit of my book: “Many of us feel that way, but we don’t have the courage to say it. We’re afraid.” “Afraid of what?” I asked. She could not answer; she merely sighed and spread her hands out in a gesture of hopelessness, as if she were thinking of something intangible, too vast to identify. I tried to question her, but got no further clue. I truly did not know what she was talking about. I never saw her again. But the incident remained in my mind because I felt it was a clue to something either evil or very, very wrong, which I had to understand.

A brilliant young man [Leonard Peikoff] whom I met when he was seventeen (and who since has become one of my best friends), asked me, on our first meeting: “Is Howard Roark moral or is he practical? He seems to be both—yet I have always been told that it’s one or the other.” This choice was deeply disturbing to him, because he took moral issues seriously and because the same people urged him—at different times—to choose alternate sides of this dichotomy. It did not take me long to convince him that this was a false dichotomy, caused by the irrationality and impracticality of the mystic-altruist ethics, and that this was one example of why man needs a rational code of ethics. But I wondered—as I had wondered often, before and since—about the psychological state of those who maintain that dichotomy. What are moral values divorced from practice? And what is it that one chooses to practice, if it is divorced from moral values?
[This paragraph was crossed out.]

In the early days of
The Fountainhead’s
history, when its success was still uncertain, I noticed the peculiar attitude of an editor of my acquaintance: his conviction that my novel was a great value and his emotional commitment to it were unquestionable, he had demonstrated it, in action, on many occasions—and yet, whenever I consulted him on any action to be taken on its behalf, his answers were vague, almost forced and singularly half-hearted. Then, one day, I asked him: “Tell me, you believe that
The Fountainhead
is great and, precisely for that reason, you believe that it is doomed, don’t you?” He answered in a low, unhappy voice: “Yes.”

The instances of men who paid me extravagant, unsolicited compliments at private gatherings, but never stated it in print or on public occasions, are too numerous to count. I do not mean the usual sort of gushers. Those men were prominent literary or professional figures who had no reason to flatter me; in many cases, they did not even say it to me, but to others, without knowing that I would ever hear about it. If such were their views, they had no reason to be afraid of expressing them publicly. Yet they kept silent.

The final clue was provided by a very perceptive friend of mine. He said he had observed a strange quality in many people’s enthusiasm for
The Fountainhead:
it was a furtive, secretive, subjective quality, almost like the reluctant confession of a guilty love. “They talk as an unhappily married man would talk about his secret mistress,” he said. “Their marriage is to the Establishment, to conventional values and the ‘accepted’ intellectual positions. But
The Fountainhead
is their passion.”

What I felt was something like a cold shudder.

What I grasped was that this was deeper and worse than simple cowardice or conformity. For whatever complexity of reasons—whether out of fear, or bewilderment, or discouragement, or repression, or years of conditioning by altruism’s vicious dichotomy between the moral and the practical, with the consequent feeling that the good is impractical, and the practical has no place for values—those men were consigning their values, the things they loved or admired or enjoyed, to the airless dungeon of subjectivism, as private fantasies or fragile, private treasures unfit for the sunlight of reality.

 

 

At present, main work should be “Philosophic Revolution Plan.” The reading period from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. should be given to order—cleaning up the organization of the house. The period after dinner should be elastic—including dates or talks with Frank. Once a week (Monday) should include attending to hair and wardrobe, or shopping (also—health). Sunday should be totally free—“whim-worshipping.” Saturday—should have secretary for mail.

Overall assignments:
Time scheduie—“pleasure epistemology”—learning to read—algebra—diet.

16

In the decade after Atlas Shrugged, AR made notes for a non-fiction book on Objectivism and for a novel entitled To Lome Dieterling. She did not get for in planning either book
;
the notes here represent in total a few days of work on each, spread over a period of years
—
what AR referred to as “work in small glances.”

 

 

I apologize for the subtitle of this book: it is the intellectual corruption of our age that made it necessary. If men were taught how to speak, it would be obvious that the word “living” refers to man; that man lives on earth; that “philosophy,” being the science of the nature of existence, is concerned with discovering the knowledge man requires for living; and, therefore, that the only words necessary are: “A philosophy.”

But since “philosophy” is the one concept which, today, has been all but destroyed, there are reasons why modern men cannot achieve a state of conceptual precision prior to acquiring the knowledge here to be presented. The purpose of this book is to make its subtitle redundant.

“Cosmology” has to be thrown out ofphilosophy.
When this is done, the conflict between “rationalism” and “empiricism” will be wiped out--or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.

What, apparently, has never been challenged and what I took as a self-evident challenge (which it isn’t) is Thales’ approach to philosophy, namely: the idea that philosophy has to discover the
nature
of the universe in cosmo-logical terms. If Thales thought that everything is water, and the other pre-Socratics fought over whether it’s water and earth and fire, etc., then the empiricists were right in declaring that they would go by the evidence of observation, not by “rational” deduction—only then, of course, the whole issue and all its terms are [thoroughly confused]. The crux of the error here is in the word
“nature.”
I took Thales’ attempt to mean only the first attempt at, or groping toward, a unified view of knowledge and reality, i.e.,
an epistemological, not a metaphysical,
attempt to establish the fact that things have natures.

Now I think that he meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a
metaphysical
attempt to establish the
literal
nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal “stuff.” If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some non-scientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered.
[AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]

In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales’ time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales’ approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be “rationalists,” i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of “innate ideas,” and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. They did not realize that the Thales-Plato school was merely a case of “arrested empiricists,” that is, men who “rationalized” on the ground of taking partial knowledge as omniscience.

Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity—which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology—by the whole nonsense of the “moving spheres,” “the immovable mover,” teleology, etc.

The real crux of this issue is that
philosophy is primarily epistemology
—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness—a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge. Observe that all philosophers (except Aristotle) have been projecting their epistemologies into their metaphysics (or that their metaphysics were merely epistemological and psychological confessions). All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies or corruptions. “Existence exists” (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics.
All the rest is epistemology.

Paraphrasing myself: Philosophy tell us only
that
things have natures, but
what
these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy’s task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.

 

 

The philosophy which I now will have to present is, in essence, the “rules of thinking” which children should be taught in the proper society (which the Wet Nurse needed). It is fundamental epistemology—plus psychological “epistemology.” All the evils of philosophy have always been achieved via epistemology—by means of the “How do you know that you know?” Consider the fact that the first and greatest destroyer, Plato, did it by means of the issue of “universals vs. particulars.” Mankind as a whole seems to be caught in the trap of the nature of its own epistemology: men cannot think until they have acquired the power of abstractions and language, but having done so, they do not know how they got there and are vulnerable to any attack on their means of knowledge. Like the discovery of “A is A,” their epistemology is implicit in their thinking, but unidentified. This will be the main part of my job: my theory of universals—the hierarchical nature of concepts—the “stolen concept” fallacy—the “context-dropping” and the “blank-out” (the
refusal
to identify)—the “Rand’s razor” (“state your irreducible primaries”)—the rules of induction (and definitions)—the “integration into the total sum of your knowledge”—the proof that “that which is empirically impossible is also logically impossible (or false)”—etc.