"Most people dismiss philosophy as irrelevant to life, but as Ayn Rand shows in novels like The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, living by the correct fundamental ideas is as crucial to human existence as food and water." Ayn Rand Institute
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CHOICE OF HOW YOU FORM YOUR PHILOSOPHY
A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy.
Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy
1. By a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation or
2. Let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of
Unwarranted conclusions,
False generalizations,
Undefined contradictions,
Undigested slogans,
Unidentified wishes,
Doubts and fears,
All thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a
kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-
doubt, like a bail and chain in the place where your mind's wings should
have grown…
TO GUIDE US IN ACTION TO GAIN THAT WHICH WE DESIRE
A similar contrast applies in the realm of action.
An animal acts automatically on its perceptual data; it has no power to project alternative courses of behavior or long-range consequences.
Man chooses his values and actions by a process of thought, based ultimately on a philosophical view of existence; he needs the guidance of abstract principles both to select his goals and to achieve them.
Because of its form of knowledge, an animal can do nothing but adapt itself to nature. Man (if he adheres to the metaphysically given) adapts nature to his own requirements.
A conceptual faculty, therefore, is a powerful attribute. It is an attribute that goes to the essence of a species, determining its method of cognition, of action, of survival. To understand man - and any human concern - one must understand concepts. One must discover what they are, how they are formed, and how they are used, and often misused, in the quest for knowledge. This requires that we analyze in slow motion the inmost essence of the processes which make us human, the ones which, in daily life, we perform with lightning like rapidity and take for granted as unproblematic…
AUTOMATIZING
Once a man has acquired a vocabulary of conceptual knowledge, he automatizes it, just as one automatizes the knowledge of spelling, typing, or any complex skill.
Thereafter one does not need a process of learning in order to grasp that something is a booklet portending an examination; the application of the relevant concepts is immediate and unhesitating.
Similarly, once a man has formed a series of value judgments, he automatizes them. He does not need a process of appraisal in order to decide that he values a high grade on a test; the application of the relevant judgments is immediate.
One's value-judgments, like one's past knowledge, are present in the subconscious -
meaning by this term a store of the mental contents one has acquired by conscious means, but which are not in conscious awareness at a given time. Under the appropriate conditions, the mind applies such contents to a new object automatically and instantaneously, without the need of further conscious consideration. To many people, as a result, it seems as if men perceive and then feel, with no intervening factor. The truth is that a chain of ideas and value judgments intervenes…
AN EMOTION
An emotion derives from a precept assessed within a context; the context is defined by a highly complex conceptual content. Most of this content at any time is not present in conscious awareness. But it is real and operative nonetheless.
What makes emotions incomprehensible to many people is the fact that their ideas are not only largely subconscious, but also inconsistent. Men have the ability to accept contradictions without knowing it. This leads to the appearance of a conflict between thought and feelings.
A man can hold ideas of which he is rarely or never aware and which clash with his professed beliefs. The former may be ideas which he has forgotten forming, or which he has accepted only by implication, without ever identifying the fact, of which he actively works not to know. If he then responds to an object in terms of such hidden mental contents, it will seem to him that his emotions are independent of his thinking and even at war with it. In fact, his emotions are still following from his conclusions, but he does not identify these latter correctly…
REASON AND EMOTION
Reason is a faculty of awareness; its function is to perceive that which exists by organizing observational data.
And reason is a volitional faculty; it has the power to direct its own actions and check its conclusions, the power to maintain a certain relationship to the facts of reality.
Emotion, by contrast, is a faculty not of perception, but of reaction to one's perceptions. This kind of faculty has no power of observation and no volition; it has no means of independent access to reality, no means to guide its own course, and no capacity to monitor its own relationship to facts.
Emotions are automatic consequences of a mind's past conclusions, however that mind has been used or misused in the process of reaching them.
The ideas and value judgments at the root of a feeling may be true or false; they may be the product of meticulous logic or of a slapdash mess; they may be upheld in explicit terms, or they may be subconscious and unidentified.
In all these cases, positive and negative alike, the feeling follows obediently. It has no power to question its course or to check its roots against reality. Only man's volitional, existence-oriented faculty has such power.
Feelings or emotions are not part of the method of logic; they are not evidence for a conclusion.
The fact that a man has a certain feeling means merely that, through some kind of process, he earlier reached a certain idea, which is now stored in his subconscious; this leaves completely open the question of the idea's relationship to reality.
To identify this relationship, one needs a process of validating ideas, i.e., a process of reason.
Although reason and emotion by their nature are in harmony, the appearance of conflict between them, as we have seen, is possible; the source of such appearance is a contradiction between a man's conscious and subconscious conclusions in regard to an evaluative issue. When this occurs, the conscious ideas may be correct and the subconscious ones mistaken. Or the reverse may be the case: a man may consciously uphold a mistaken idea while experiencing a feeling that clashes with it, one that derives from a true subconscious premise. In both kinds of case, however, the real clash is between two ideas. And the only way to resolve the conflict, to know which side is correct, is to submit both ideas to the bar of reason…
KNOW THYSELF AND THINE CONCLUSIONS
Man is a being of limited knowledge and he must, therefore, identify the cognitive context of his conclusions.
In any situation where there is reason to suspect that a variety of factors is relevant to the truth, only some of which are presently known, he is obliged to acknowledge this fact.
The implicit or explicit preamble to his conclusion must be: "On the basis of the available evidence, i.e., within the context of the factors so far discovered, the following is the proper conclusion to draw."
Thereafter, the individual must continue to observe and identify; should new information warrant it, he must qualify his conclusion accordingly.
Ayn Rand's Objectivist Philosophy
MY SUMMARY AND ADVOCATED POINT
One's believed thoughts cause emotion and feelings. In man, many beliefs and thoughts are incorrect and unquestioned, often formed in a haphazard unworkable manner, and accordingly need to be questioned to establish facts using reason to tie everything together into a correct context and content system. If we drive this system to a logical whole our lives will operate automatically in a workable way. But along the way, we must know that we do not yet have all the facts nor are our perceptions correct - so we must constantly ask and find better and better facts and conclusions.
The key is to form a coherent, well-thought out philosophy of life as early in life as possible, though it will be improved over time. The key is to have this context for life ready for constant guidance and for running our life. Without it we are jumbled and erratic, fumbling our way through life (though many might not notice that, since it blends into the background called "normalcy", through the process we call "the drift" in life).
