Heroes and Villains in Western Philosophy
By Andrew Bernstein
The history of Western philosophy is essentially a struggle of the human mind to discover truth and the method for achieving it, the method of objectivity.
A number of leading philosophers struggled heroically to identify, define, and explain this method. In this context, a “hero” is an individual of outstanding ability who struggles against substantial impediments and/or antagonism in the pursuit of truth and the method of objectivity.1
Prior to the birth of philosophy in Classical Greece circa the 6th century BC, mankind’s efforts to explain natural phenomena consisted mostly of stories and literature. For example, in the 8th century BC, Homer wrote great works such as the Odyssey and the Iliad, and told stirring tales about a legendary warrior whose moral character rose to equal his martial prowess—and about a wily, courageous man who battled gods, monsters, storms, sirens, and men to return home to his son and beloved wife.
But these explanations of natural phenomena are mythical. A terrible storm rages because the god Poseidon is angry; a volcano erupts and destroys a village because Hephaestus is enraged; spring blooms with abundance at Demeter’s joy. Notice that such explanations are quasi-religious, referring to deities, but they are not otherworldly. The Greeks believed that these gods were of the natural world and should be accessible to sensory awareness—even if never observed. In myth, they appear to human beings; in real life, no one ever encountered them. Belief in such beings has no empirical basis. These are legends, not theories. Such stories are rooted in a desire of the writer (the subject) to provide some explanation of natural events for which men had no empirically supported explanation. Because such explanations are based on feelings, not facts, they are subjective, not objective.
The terms “subjective” and “objective” are used a great deal in philosophy and, for clarity, they must be precisely defined. Toward that end, let’s consider another example, also from Ancient Greece.
Ancient Greek Philosophy
The first hero of philosophy is the man generally considered the father of philosophy: Thales (620–545 BC). We have only a few fragments of his thinking. He thought that all things were composed of water; it was a crude belief, now obviously false. At the time, however, this was a reasonable and novel attempt to make sense of the world, and an important step in intellectual history. Consider the pattern of his reasoning. . . .
Thales observed that at some temperatures, water is liquid; at lower temperatures, it is ice; and at higher ones, it is steam. Water exists as solid, liquid, and gas—all three states of matter. W. T. Jones, a highly regarded expert in the history of philosophy, wrote:
Thales must have been impressed by the numerous physical transformations water is capable of . . . by such phenomena as evaporation, rainfall, the silting up of rivers at their mouths, and springs gushing forth from the earth. It must have seemed to him that in evaporation water “becomes” air, and in rain air becomes water. Similarly, in the formation of a delta, water becomes earth, and a spring represents the reverse process in which earth becomes water.2
Further, Thales observed that all life forms require water and, without it, they perish. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, two of the leading experts on pre-Socratic philosophy, wrote, “Thales could indeed have felt that since water is essential for the maintenance of plant and animal life . . . it remains still as the basic constituent of things.”3
What distinguished Thales from Homer and other Greek poets and storytellers of the age was that, when seeking explanations, he appealed to observed facts, not to a belief in nonempirical, make-believe deities. His method had borne fruit, too. The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that Thales predicted a solar eclipse.4 Aristotle reported that Thales foresaw a bumper crop in olives, rented all the olive presses, and made a financial killing.5 Thales’s reality-oriented approach—or, as Jones put it, his “disposition to observe natural processes”—was something new.6 His sedulous orientation to observable facts, even when he reasoned to erroneous conclusions, marked the first significant step toward objectivity in Western culture.
Objectivity, first and foremost, is a cognitive method, a way of using our minds. It is an orientation toward objects and only objects as the data of knowledge—or, in the iconic mantra from the old Dragnet TV series, “Just the facts, ma’am,” regardless of our hopes, desires, or feelings about them. Subjectivity, by contrast, is the approach to ideas in which a person (subject) treats his ideas or desires as paramount; if the facts clash with his ideas or desires, then so much the worse for the facts.
Nancy, let us say, provides her friend Rachel solid evidence that Rachel’s husband is unfaithful; but Rachel, refusing to face an agonizing truth, pushes the evidence aside. She places feelings above and before facts. In the words of the hero of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, she places an “I wish” above an “it is.”7 This is an example of subjectivity, of putting emotions over facts, one’s inner subjective experience over the observable, objective facts of the external world.
Conversely, if Rachel, despite the figurative knife wound in her heart, looks at the evidence, examines it, confronts the situation, investigates her husband’s behavior, discusses it with him, and finds the truth, even if painful, this is objectivity—treating facts as paramount, putting an “it is” over an “I wish.”
Prior to Thales, people certainly knew facts: They knew, for example, that if they stuck their hand in fire, they would get burned; that the Sun rose in the east and set in the west. But they didn’t explicitly grasp that all knowledge originates in observed facts. Experience taught them, often the hard way, that facts were ignored at one’s own peril. But much was mysterious, beyond their grasp, about which they yearned for understanding—What exactly is fire? Why does the Sun rise?—and no one had yet pioneered a method for answering such questions. So different cultures invented myths, quasi-religious beliefs that provided a primitive attempt at explanation.
Lacking an objective method, the ancients struggled and did the best they could. They did not—as many later did—ignore or deny a fact-based method that would have enabled them to do better. They could not evade objectivity, as no such method had yet been formulated.
Thales, like many Greeks, believed that gods were in all things. But his unique contribution, his appeal to observed facts for explanations, moved beyond the influence of his culture. He necessarily was a mixed case, but part of the mixture was a glorious step forward. His story highlights that every item of knowledge, whether about content or method, must first be identified by some original thinker. Thales was one such innovator; he was the first great hero of philosophy.
Despite this advance, Greek culture also gave rise to the first explicit theory of subjectivism in history, that of the Sophists. The Sophists were a band of traveling educators for hire. The English word “sophisticated” comes from them, meaning educated and cultured in a way that is worldly-wise and not naive. The essence of what the Sophists took to be educated and worldly-wise was a belief that there is no objective truth; rather, all beliefs are subjective. Protagoras, thought to be born around 500 BC, was their leading spokesman. Since Thales’s day, all prominent Greek thinkers had held that there is an objective reality that could be understood by the human mind. But Protagoras rejected this claim. Philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up Protagoras’s theories: “when men differ, there is no objective truth in virtue of which one is right and the other wrong.”8
The Sophists generally recognized that reason is grounded in sense experience, but they claimed that every sensory perception is tainted by the cognitive apparatus of the subject. Many held that this is true of any subject, whether animal or human. For example, let us say that a man and a bat perceive the surface of a table. The man, using eyes, perceives it as a rectangular brown patch; the bat, although possessing eyes, uses echolocation and perceives it in some different form, perhaps something similar to a blip on a sonar screen. Who has the accurate perception? What is the table really?
To Protagoras and the Sophists, there is no “truth” regarding sensory awareness. The bat, given its type of sensory apparatus, necessarily perceives the table (or any other object) as it does; the man, given his type of sensory apparatus, necessarily perceives the table as he does. If a Martian, for example, perceived the table through a form of antenna, the table, to the Martian, would be a series of antenna twitches. The Sophists concluded, first, that sense organs have an identity; second, that they enable us to perceive an object only as it appears to us, not as it actually is; and so, third, there is an appearance-reality gap, and all we perceive is appearance. Of course, human beings (generally) have the same sense modalities—sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste—but even so, our sensory capacities differ with age, illness, hunger, exhaustion, and so on. So, the Sophists pointed out, sensory appearances differ even within a species, all members of which have the same sense modalities. They concluded, as W. K. C. Guthrie, a scholar of early Greek philosophy, put it, “the way things appear to one man is the truth for him, and the way they appear to another is the truth for him. . . . Truth is purely relative.”9
The Sophists further concluded, this time correctly, that proper reasoning is about information acquired via the senses. But based on this, they claimed that rational conclusions are as subjective as the sense data on which they rely. As Jones wrote, “Protagoras argued, objective knowledge of a public reality is quite impossible.”10 Protagoras himself made this point. According to Plato, he was famous for having said, “Man is the measure of all things, alike of the being of things that are and of the not-being of things that are not.”11 In other words, each man determines what is true by reference to his own inescapably unique subjective experience, and each man’s judgment is as valid as any other’s.
The Sophists held that this is likewise true in the realm of morality. After all, if man is the measure of all things—and each man for himself—then it follows that this is as true in ethics as it is in any other field. As Guthrie summarized, “must we not suppose that justice and injustice, right and wrong, have an equally subjective and unreal existence? There can be in nature no absolute principles governing the relations between man and man. It is all a question of how you look at it.”12
So, there is no such thing as “the truth,” in ethics or in anything else, said the Sophists. There are simply value judgments made by individuals or groups of individuals; none is more accurate or “more right” than any other. One man’s (or society’s) beliefs regarding right and wrong is as good as any other’s. In 21st-century terms, If North Korean Communists believe it is right to enslave political prisoners, their judgment is as valid as that of Westerners who abhor such a practice.
Protagoras himself was a social conservative who thought it best to conform to society’s strictures, not because they were true or right, but because he held that it was expedient to do so. The laws maintained social order, and the man who obeyed could live peacefully while the man who disobeyed existed in incessant conflict. But some of the younger Sophists, notably Thrasymachus (known to us largely through Plato’s The Republic), pointed out that because no one’s moral commandments are universally valid, they are not binding on anyone else. Society’s laws, he said, are merely beliefs held by a group of people, no more necessary for a recalcitrant individual to accept or obey than if the state proclaimed we must embark on a quest to locate a cadre of winged fairies guzzling red wine on the dark side of the moon.
A violent home invader holds different moral principles than a homeowner defending his family. On the Sophists’ view, neither is more “right” than the other; they are simply irreconcilably different. They struggle; the stronger wins, the weaker loses. Might makes right is the only appropriate code of conduct in human life, said Thrasymachus. According to Plato, he stated, “I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.”13
This amoral, anything-goes code could lead only to endless violent chaos and warfare. Civilization needed a hero to stand up against this subjective assault on morality. Thankfully, one arose. His name was Socrates (469–399 BC).
Socrates did not address the Sophists’ attack on the accuracy of sense perception. His focus was at the conceptual, not the perceptual level of knowledge; he sought rigorous definitions of key philosophic—above all, moral—concepts. He never wrote anything; but his student, Plato, wrote brilliant philosophic dialogues, the best parts of which convey Socrates’s tireless quest for exact understanding of key philosophic principles.
For example, the question in The Republic is: What is justice? The question in The Protagoras is: What is virtue? The question in The Euthyphro is: What is piety? The question in The Theaetetus is: What is knowledge? The question in The Symposium is: What is love? And so on. The overarching questions were: Can we identify the qualities shared by all instances of justice, virtue, and so forth? And what characteristics are unique to each? If we can understand, say, “justice” in this rigorous way, then we can act more justly; we can teach its essence to our children, students, and colleagues; we can apply it as citizens to promote a more just society. As Guthrie wrote, Socrates “was trying to make e see that even if there are many and various examples of right action, yet they must all have one common quality or character by reason of which they are called right.”14
Socrates himself was a religious man but was rigorously rational in his approach to ethics, and he steadfastly opposed the relativism and emotionalism of the Sophists. Wilhelm Windelband, a leading historian of philosophy, wrote, “Regarded on the whole, the activity of Socrates, in that he set up the ideal of reason as against relativism, was an attempt to reform [man’s] life morally by means of science.”15
In fact, moral philosophy was born with Socrates—and he is a towering hero of the field.16 In addressing the Sophists’ moral relativism, he was the first thinker who attempted to find an objective basis of moral principles, to tie morality to reality by discerning the unchanging essences of moral concepts. For instance, in The Republic, Plato relays the view that justice lies in a harmony of reason, emotions, and bodily appetites, with each performing its proper function and none usurping the proper role of another—and critically, with reason as the ruling power.
This is an early attempt to explain numerous instances of justice, including a wide array of human actions in social settings, each instance sharing these exact characteristics. Let’s say a married man desires to have illicit sex with another woman; if he yields to the urge, he lets desire swamp his rational recognition of the act’s turpitude and behaves unjustly. Similarly, if the head of a business, envious of a more successful competitor, disseminates fraudulent advertising, he is letting whim dominate his knowledge of right and wrong, and thereby departs from the realm of justice.
Socrates is a hero of philosophy for “speaking truth to power,” for standing on his moral principles, for refusing to relinquish them even though the Athenian state executed him for doing so. Nevertheless, his most heroic achievement was in helping to pioneer an objective approach to moral philosophy, an exalted accomplishment that both undergirded his resolute personal stance before political authority and revolutionized ethics, perhaps the most important branch of human cognition, as it is concerned with right and wrong action.
Plato (427–347 BC) was Socrates’s foremost student. He employed the figure of Socrates as his main spokesman in most of his dialogues. Different sources, including Aristotle, credit Socrates with originating a quest for rigorous definitions. Beyond this, nobody knows which parts of Plato’s philosophy come from Socrates and which parts are original to him. Scholars get around the problem by referring to it as “the Socratic-Platonic philosophy.”
From his mentor, Plato learned to search for the essence of what it means to be any given thing—the universal, or the “Form,” as he called it. To take a simple example, what does it mean to be a dog? In pattern, Plato’s analysis is that particular dogs differ from one another—and that they come and go. But “dog-ness,” what it means to be a dog—the essence of this type of animal—never changes; it is both timeless and universal. Dogs are ephemeral, but dog-ness is permanent.
But a question to be answered is: Where do we find it? When we search throughout the empirical world, we do not find dog-ness; we find only dogs. We do not discover universals; we encounter only particulars. And yet, in some sense, the universal or form must be real, for this is what we know; that is, when we define “dog,” we do so by reference to the essence of it, the characteristic(s) shared in common by all particular dogs of every diverse breed. So, Plato held, Forms or “Ideas” are real and preeminently knowable.
But, he claimed, they are not part of this world. Then where do the Forms reside? “Plato’s reply,” reports Jones, “was that beyond the world of physical objects in space and time, but standing in intimate relation to it, is another world—non-physical, non-spatial, non-temporal. This world Plato called the world of ‘Ideai’ [or Forms].”17 Because the Forms are not part of nature, they are not observable. They are known only via abstraction or reason. Plato gives several arguments to establish the existence of these universals in a transcendent realm. They are variations on a theme: Knowledge cannot be gained from the observational world, but human beings possess knowledge; therefore, knowledge must be discerned only in an ideal world transcendent to this one.
One of his arguments is known as “the Argument from the Possibility of Knowledge.” Some of Plato’s predecessors claimed that the world is a flux, filled with relentless change, making knowledge impossible. Why? Because change involves contradictions, they argued. A baby boy, for instance, weighs eight pounds at birth, but that same boy grows into a man who weighs one hundred eighty pounds. This is a problem. For he is the same individual, but he is eight pounds and not eight pounds; he is both x and non-x. Such contradictions make knowledge impossible, because we cannot identify the nature of a contradictory being. Identification requires identity—a permanent, enduring sameness; it is impossible to identify an endlessly fluctuating contradictory mass. Philosopher Leonard Peikoff summarized this view: “A world of constant flux, a world ceaselessly changing, is contradictory, and so cannot be known.”18 Knowledge of anything requires a world of permanent, unchanging, enduring things.
Yes, it does, responded Plato. But clearly, we have knowledge. So, given that knowledge is possible, there must be another realm of changeless, enduring identities—a realm that we somehow access in gaining this knowledge.
Relatedly, Plato argued that we have knowledge of exact concepts—“perfection,” for example, or “equality”—that cannot be derived from the observational world. Take as representative his argument in the Phaedo, wherein he claims that we have knowledge of the concept of “equality.”
Here is a further step, said Socrates. We admit, I suppose, that there is such a thing as equality—not the equality of stick to stick or stone to stone, and so on, but something beyond all that and distinct from it—absolute equality. Are we to admit this or not? Yes, indeed, said Simmias, most emphatically. . . . Well now s said, what do we find in the case of the equal sticks and other things of which we were speaking just now? Do they seem to us to be equal in the sense of absolute equality, or do they fall short of it insofar as they are only approximate to equality? Or don’t they fall short at all? They do, said Simmias, a long way.19
Put more simply, “equal” things in our changing world are never exactly equal, yet we have an idea of exact equality. This idea cannot come from the changing, imperfect physical world of sense perception; our mind could know it only from a transcendent world of ideas.
But who studies this transcendent world of unchanging Truths? Not Everyman and Everywoman: They are busy in this world making a living and caring for their children. Their focus is on the changing world of particulars, not on an ideal realm that transcends this one. Only the scholars, the intellectuals, the philosophers study the higher world. Plato makes this clear in his famous dialogue, The Symposium, in which the question is: What is love? Edward Whelan at the website classicalwisdom.com, wrote: “In the dialogue, Plato, vis-a-vis Socrates, argued that the highest love is the philosopher’s love of the truth, contained in the Forms.”20 The word “philosophy,” let us remember, means love of wisdom. According to Plato, wisdom is to be gained only via study of the transcendent Forms.
Such a theory has lamentable, although predictable, political consequences. For if truth—including and especially moral truths—is knowable only to an elite group of philosophers, who should govern the state? The philosophers, an initiated spiritual elite who devote their lives to studying a transcendent world, must hold unchallenged political authority. A dictatorship of the intellectual elite is necessary to ensure that the law of the land is in accordance with higher moral truths.
A related point is that, according to Plato, the form “manness,” not changing particular men, is the higher reality. The collective of men—man as a single unity rather than as a collection of many particulars—is closer to the universal than is a particular man. Therefore, what benefits the state as a whole, rather than any individual man, holds moral priority.
So, the essence of Plato’s political philosophy and its connection to his deeper philosophy is: A transcendent “Truth” necessitates the political rule of an initiated spiritual elite. The logic is clear: Belief that knowledge requires access to a transcendent world leads to a dictatorship of the “wise,” meaning, those who devote their careers to contemplating such matters.
Plato was a profound thinker who wrote brilliant dialogues, promoted the importance of philosophy, glorified Socrates, founded the Academy—the first superb university of which we know—and mentored Aristotle. He certainly did many great things. But, on the whole, he does not qualify as a hero because the essence of his philosophy is otherworldly fantasy, which leads to totalitarianism. Not surprisingly, he exerted a powerful influence on both Christianity and 20th-century collectivist dictatorships.
Plato’s philosophy is an arch-example of what Ayn Rand termed “intrinsicism,” the view that universals and values are embedded in reality itself, usually a transcendent form of it, and impress or imprint themselves on the human mind. She wrote, “The intrinsic theory holds that the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man’s consciousness.”21 But, as Rand points out, there is no transcendent world, and reason operates by means of sense perception and conceptual integrations based on sense perception. How, then, do intrinsicists gain their “insights,” Rand asked; “by what means do the moralists of the intrinsic school discover their transcendental ‘good,’ if not by means of special, non-rational intuitions and revelations, i.e., by means of their feelings?”22 In other words, she observed, intrinsicism is a form of subjectivism—methodological subjectivism.
Plato’s enduring legacy is: He injected methodological subjectivism, in the form of intrinsicism, deeply into Western philosophy.
Aristotle (384–322 BC), Plato’s leading student, arrived at the Academy from his native Macedonia, age seventeen, in 367 BC. Although he and Plato became good friends, in time, Aristotle would oppose every fundamental tenet of his teacher’s philosophy.
Plato upheld mathematics as the paradigm for all cognitive disciplines. According to legend, he had a sign over his school’s front gate that read, “Let none who are ignorant of geometry enter here.” Mathematics, of course, trains the mind in a rigorous kind of thinking, and Plato could not teach his students formal logic because the field did not yet exist (it was developed later by Aristotle). But Plato was enamored of math for another reason. As illustration, I will use a simple algebraic equation, even though the Greeks did not know of algebra (despite the Babylonians’ development of it much earlier): 3 x 3a = 9a. Does the accuracy of this equation depend upon what value we substitute for the variable “a”? It does not. We might be discussing pennies, shoes, or watermelons. The value substituted for “a” does not affect the accuracy of the equation. The variable is not a perceptual-level concrete; it is an abstraction, an idea, a universal that can represent countless concretes. We are thereby rising above the level of observable things and, in Plato’s analysis, getting closer to the transcendent world.
But Aristotle had no interest in transcending the world of nature. He conducted an impassioned lifelong cognitive love affair with nature. Aristotle spent twenty years at the Academy, presumably teaching most of that time; shortly after he left, he studied marine biology on the island of Lesbos in the eastern Aegean, where he worked for about two years. His work was so meticulous and groundbreaking that, today, he is considered the father of the science of biology.23 It is not a stretch to say that, for Aristotle, biology—that preeminently natural, observation-based, get-your-hands-dirty discipline—was the paradigm subject.24 In his view, observable facts were unquestionably the starting point of all cognition. Aristotle scholar John Herman Randall wrote that Aristotle “was impressed by the fact that although facts alone do not give understanding . . . facts are nevertheless far more certain than any theory.”25 Given that a number of Greek philosophers formulated abstract arguments devoid of observable facts, Jones commented, “Aristotle’s method was a healthy corrective to the over-rationalism of his philosophical predecessors, including Plato.”26 Aristotle characteristically sought copious amounts of data upon which to base any theory. The fact-oriented Macedonian himself wrote about the difference between his method and those of some of his predecessors:
The reason [they go wrong] is that their ultimate principles are wrongly assumed; they had certain predetermined views, and were resolved to bring everything into line with them. . . . As though some principles did not require to be judged from their results, and particularly from their final issue. And that issue . . . in the knowledge of nature is the phenomena always and properly given by perception.27
Aristotle was the father of logic and is justly famous for his identification of the syllogism, a form of deductive reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from two premises. Here is an example: All cats are carnivores; all lions are cats; therefore, all lions are carnivores. This argument is formally valid; that is, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. But how would we know the premises are true? By observation of facts, by extensive experience with all kinds of cats, including lions—and perhaps via dissections, examining the digestive system of all species of cats, comparing and contrasting, determining from which types of food they gain sustenance.
This, according to Aristotle, is how human beings gain knowledge: By logical, noncontradictory thinking about observable facts. Two criteria must be satisfied: first, a theory or explanation must be valid; its conclusion must follow necessarily from its premises. Second, the argument’s premises must be true; they must be either about observable facts or traceable back to observable fact. Universals and principles are not to be found in a higher dimension of reality but, rather, are derived from the facts of nature themselves.
Take as example an argument that would fail the second criterion. In Greek mythology, Athena sprang fully developed from the head of her father, Zeus. No conception. No mother. Just a miracle. Zeus, of course, has many offspring, but he shares the others with their mothers. Athena, by contrast, is his alone. He adores her. For a child to have such a loving parent is enormously beneficial; so, it is natural that she loves her father and is utterly loyal to him. Indeed, she is the only one he trusts with the universe’s most potent weapon: his thunderbolt. Notice that the reasoning following the mythical starting point contains no internal contradictions; it makes sense that the relationship between a daughter with only one parent, but a loving one, would be close and trusting. But the argument’s starting point is fantasy; it has no basis in observable fact. This is not how knowledge is gained.
It is not hyperbole, but literal truth, to say that Aristotle was the genius that, more than any other, taught mankind how to think. He formulated the field of rigorous logical reasoning—and he wedded it to observable facts. This is the essence of an objective method_._ This is not fantasy or mythology or emotionalism or faith-based religion. This is the method of rational philosophy, of science, of an empirical, logical pursuit of truth. Aristotle is the founder of a rigorously objective method—and because of it, he is the greatest hero of philosophy. Indeed, one criticism he directed against his beloved mentor, Plato, was that too often Plato gave us poetry, myths, and/or beautiful stories in contexts where we needed literal explanations of facts. Aristotle, by and large, did not make this error.
Medieval Philosophy
Tragically, however, many of his successors did. The methodological subjectivism of Plato, not the objective fact orientation of Aristotle, dominated most of the Dark and Middle Ages in the form of Christianity. “Knowledge” of God was considered important; knowledge of nature, vastly less so. How to gain salvation mattered, not how to gain Earthly knowledge, health, or success. Regarding such issues, Jones stated,
ascertaining the facts, which seems so important to us [and to Aristotle], was of less concern to men of the Middle Ages. It was overwhelmingly more important to them to know what was required for salvation. About things that did not touch one’s faith—about the properties of sapphires or the cure for leprosy, for instance—it did not matter a great deal whether or not one went wrong.28
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the gradual Catholic reconquest of Spain brought Western scholars closer to the great Islamic centers of learning in that country. A great deal of scientific advance wrought by Muslim thinkers was grounded in their study of Aristotle, most of whose writings were lost to Western intellectuals throughout the Dark Ages.29 Muslim scholars had translated the works of Greek thinkers, preeminently Aristotle, into Arabic. In the 12th century, Catholic Archbishop Raymond I of Toledo organized a movement to translate Aristotle’s works into Latin, the language of European scholars.30 Windelband wrote, “the matter of chief importance was that Parisian science [the University of Paris was a haven of Aristotelianism] became acquainted not only with the entire logic of Aristotle, but also with all parts of his philosophy that furnished material knowledge.”31
Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200–1280), a Dominican friar and bishop, was also an Aristotle scholar, a pioneer of zoology, and a careful observer who sailed the North Sea seeking animal specimens for his research. The philosopher William Wallace wrote,
Albert both helped to introduce Aristotle’s philosophy of science to the medieval world and challenged prevailing conceptions of nature. In response to the older Augustinian tradition, Albert criticized the notion that ideas in the mind of God . . . exist independently and provide the formal natures of sensible objects. . . . As a result, we are not compelled to rely upon knowledge of God for a knowledge of things. . . . Nature itself can reveal this order to us. With Albert, nature, which had too often been rendered mute by medieval intellectuals, would find its own voice. Once discovered and suddenly made articulate, its voice would gradually liberate science (and the arts) from theology.32
Thomas Aquinas, also a Dominican friar and a Catholic priest, exceeded even his teacher, Albert, as both an Aristotle scholar and seminal philosopher. To the extent that such an amalgamation is possible, he spearheaded a sweeping synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology that, although circumscribed within a predominantly religious worldview, revived the Greeks’ respect for nature, for man, and for the efficacy of reason. The central claim of Thomistic philosophy is that Grace perfects nature, meaning that the transcendent world of Christianity neither contradicts nor undermines nature; rather, it is a higher stage of development, an actualization toward which men can aspire by fulfilling themselves as rational animals in this world. Nature was to be studied by an exacting Aristotelian method, and earthly virtue involved human beings conducting themselves as rational animals, just as Aristotle had outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics. God gave man reason, Aquinas held—and, by God, He expects man to use it! Regarding matters of nature, Aristotle’s method of observation-based rationality is king. Aquinas held that the erring reason binds, meaning, as Peikoff explains, “Even if faith contradicts a man’s reason, even if he’s wrong, he must follow reason. Given man’s nature, you can’t ask more of him.”33 Thomas made the claim, remarkable in the Middle Ages, that if a thinker reasons conscientiously to a conclusion that contradicts Christian faith, he is, in fact, mistaken—but as a rational being he must accept the reasoned conclusion. A human being must follow reason wherever it leads him. This theory was a charter of liberation for reason in the medieval world.
To an extraordinary degree, Aquinas succeeded in synthesizing Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology. Jones wrote, “Thomas’ relation, functionally, to medieval thought was roughly equivalent to that of Plato and Aristotle with respect to classical thought.”34 He is justly celebrated for integrating the key intellectual elements of a millennium. But his greatest achievement was conveying Aristotle’s objective cognitive methodology to a world starving for it.
For centuries, philosophy had been a mere handmaiden to theology, and reason a handmaiden to faith. Aquinas’s philosophy forcefully reintroduced Aristotelian content, and, above all, method, into a medieval world of zealous religion. His philosophy shattered the grip of faith on Western culture.
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are towering heroes of philosophy. They risked their lives against the power of the church to reintroduce into Western intellectual culture an objective cognitive method as against religious fantasies and the Platonic methodological subjectivism that underlay them. The reintroduction of Aristotle’s method and spirit led to a rebirth of fascination with nature and man—and, in time, to the Italian Renaissance and the broader European Enlightenment.
But they and their peers were Christian Aristotelians. Thomas Aquinas, for example, was the world’s leading expert on “angel-ology,” “knowing” more about angels than any man living. In other words, the projection onto reality of one’s religious fantasies was pandemic even among Christian Aristotelians. This is another instance of intrinsicism—the belief that concepts and values are inherent in reality—and, as Rand observed, it reduces to a form of subjectivism.
Modern Philosophy
In later centuries, well into the modern era, many Christian Aristotelians were known as Scholastics. Unfortunately, the Christian element dominated. They rejected Aristotle’s evidence-based method and clung to his specific content, treating it as a new dogma, just as they did the words attributed to Jesus and St. Paul. Aristotle, who (understandably) made many errors in physics, was regarded as an infallible source, and they faithfully clung to his every word, just as though he were a church father. As I wrote in an early article in this publication,
Galileo—though locked in a cultural death struggle with [Christian Aristotelians]—accurately hinted: Aristotle himself, with his overriding respect for evidence, would never have rejected the observational findings revealed by the telescope. But 17th-century Scholastics, clasping Aristotelian content in the death grip of a Christian method, would and did.35
Modern science was birthed in opposition to Aristotle’s content. Tragically, modern philosophy was birthed in opposition to Aristotle’s method.
René Descartes (1596–1650) was a post-Renaissance Platonist. He was a superb mathematician and the father of modern philosophy. He sought certainty and claimed to find it in his famed “cogito” argument—“Cogito ergo sum,” meaning, “I think, therefore I am.” Imagine, Descartes said, that an evil demon rules the world and delights in deceiving me. So perhaps my observations are delusions, my reasoning based on them mistaken, my logical propositions fallacious. I think these are real and true—but, in fact, the demon deludes me. Descartes held, we cannot be certain “that God . . . is supremely good and the fountain of truth. [He may be an] evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, o has employed his whole energies in deceiving me.”36 Philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “Descartes even admits . . . that the evil genius might be deceiving me ‘in those matters which seem to us supremely evident,’ such as mathematics.”37 However, even if that is the case, there is still something about which Descartes held we cannot be deceived. What? That we are thinking beings. Why? Because being deceived requires that we think something to be the case. In order to be deceived, we must be thinking beings. One cannot, for example, deceive a rock.
Descartes thereby dismisses any starting point to knowledge other than the existence of a thinking consciousness. He rejects as a foundation of cognition any conclusions induced via Aristotle’s observation-based method. And he does so based on a fantasy of an evil demon.
Descartes eschewed knowledge of observable facts as primaries. Rather, he started with knowledge of the self, the conscious subject. From this starting point, he “proved” the existence of God, and then, finally, of the material world. His method is known in the history of philosophy as “the prior certainty of consciousness,” because he held that certainty of consciousness comes prior to certainty about the existence of an external world—and consciousness, not reality, sets the terms for knowledge.
He held that any claim is to be proven by reference to the contents of consciousness, many of which were “innate ideas,” ideas inherent in our minds at birth. According to Descartes, a devout Catholic, those ideas were implanted in our minds by God. Plato, who originated the doctrine of innate ideas, had held that the soul learned them in a prior existence in a transcendent world. Both philosophers held that these supposed innate ideas are supernatural in origin.
Aristotle had repudiated a notion of innate ideas and held that all knowledge originates in observation of nature. At the dawn of the modern world, intellectuals rejected not just Aristotle’s erroneous scientific conclusions, but also his objective, observation-based method. This, on the part of Descartes and his intellectual heirs, was a terrible error. The philosopher John Herman Randall stated succinctly, “In the name of Descartes it was proclaimed that the Aristotelian world was dead.”38 They threw out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater.
In the history of philosophy, it is often noted that, in searching for truth, the ancients looked outward to nature; the medievals looked upward to God; and the moderns looked inward to the self. This is substantially accurate.
Nevertheless, Aristotle’s outward-focused method made a strong comeback in the thinking of John Locke (1632–1704). Locke showed that all ideas, no matter how complex, are derived from sense experience. He wrote,
All ideas come from sensation or reflection.—Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:—How comes it to be furnished? . . . Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.39
Locke showed that any idea conceived of by men, no matter how complex or even if imaginary, could be explained by the human mind repeating, rearranging, and/or combining “simple ideas,” which originate either in sensation or reflection.40 He wrote, “When the understanding is once stored with these simple ideas, it has the power to repeat, compare, and unite them . . . and so can make at pleasure new complex ideas.”41
Locke demonstrated that all human ideas have an experiential basis and thereby substantially refuted Descartes’s doctrine of innate ideas, just as Aristotle had substantially refuted Plato’s. According to Locke and Aristotle, knowledge is fundamentally of nature—that is, of the material world.
Here we can draw an important parallel. Just as each generation must fight anew for its liberty, so it must fight anew for its objectivity. And there is a relationship here: It is not an accident that Locke’s Two Treatises of Civil Government is a landmark work in the struggle for individual rights—or that the American founders studied Locke. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states,
John Locke . . . is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society.42
We have seen the logical relationship between otherworldliness and totalitarian politics. By contrast, recognition that all knowledge originates in sense experience liberates Everyman. How? Because Everyman—whether farmer, plumber, bricklayer, or nurse,—deals with observational reality in his daily life. If ideas and truths are gained by logical thinking applied to observable facts—and do not require specialized study of a transcendent realm or sustained reflection on ideas supposedly embedded in consciousness from that realm—then Everyman is equipped to do this. He knows observable facts, the building blocks of knowledge, and can integrate facts better than can the philosophers and clergy focused on a nonexistent “transcendent world.” Everyman has the brainpower to think about observed facts and arrive at true conclusions—but only to the extent that he is free to think for himself and act on his own judgment.
This shows the immense value of Locke’s work in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and politics: An objective cognitive method is the fundamental basis of individual rights and political liberty. Thinking rationally and grasping truths is the basis of guiding one’s own life. Locke’s observation-based epistemology provided a new and substantial foundation for the cause of human liberty. This is why Locke is a towering hero of philosophy.
But he is a flawed hero, part Aristotelian and part Cartesian. Like Descartes, he held what are known as the causal and representative theories of knowledge. The causal theory claims that we do not know objects but, rather, the perceptions or ideas of them that they cause in our minds. The representative theory claims that the ideas in our minds are accurate representations of the objects, that they are good likenesses of them. So, for example, when we observe a table, we do not know the table but, rather, our perception of the table, which represents the table in the way that a good portrait represents the figure portrayed. The problem is that if we do not know the objects, how could we know that the ideas are a good likeness of them? We could not.
Despite Locke’s orientation toward the objective world, he ends up a subjectivist. Although he argues that the ideas we hold are caused by objective reality, the logic of his premises leads to the conclusion that we can know only the ideas inside our own minds, not reality itself.
David Hume (1711–1776) carried the Cartesian-Lockean subjectivism further. We know only impressions and ideas, he explicitly claimed. Impressions are direct and vivid sensory experiences or bodily sensations. Ideas are merely faint copies of impressions. Further, he said, we know only particulars, a stream of disparate sensations. For example, take several events: Event A is we stick our hand into a fire; event B is we get burned. The relation here is temporal—event A transpires before event B. But do we have reason to believe that event A caused event B? Hume says: No. A causal relationship requires a necessary connection between A and B. We experience two discrete events, A and B. We have no experience that B must follow A. We do not experience a “must”; we don’t hear or see or otherwise perceive one. So, belief in a causal relationship between A and B (or between any other events) has no basis in fact, according to Hume. He wrote,
The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession; but the power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body. We know that, in fact, heat is a constant attendant of flame; but what is the connexion between them, we have no room so much as to conjecture or imagine . . . external objects as they appear to the senses, give us no idea of power or necessary connexion.43
Hume held that belief in causation is a convenience. It has utilitarian value; it is helpful for us to believe that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow, that planting crops in the spring will empower us to harvest them in the fall, and so forth. Belief in causality enables us to make sense of the world. Causality is “true” by custom; it is a psychological mechanism by means of which we seek to bring order to the teeming world of impressions. But it is a subjective construct that we apply to the world, not a demonstrable fact gained from the world.
Hume’s ethical theory is similar. We have no impressions of “the good.” We cannot touch or see or hear it. Supporting oneself by hard work is good, let us say. Hume points out that although I observe someone working, paying bills, and so forth, I have no experience of the “good” in this. He concludes that we cannot derive values from facts; just as there is no “must” from an “is,” so there is no “ought” from an “is.” Moral judgments, he avers, have no basis in facts. Rather, they are subjective pronouncements of a person’s emotional preferences.
Hume’s version of subjectivism set the philosophic table for Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant accepted the entirety of Hume’s analysis, including his conclusions about causation, value judgments, and more. What we get in experience are mere fleeting sensations; we have no factual basis for entities, selves, causation, or value judgments. Nevertheless, Kant concluded, such things are much more than convenient human preferences. They are hardwired not into the objective world but into our subjective experience—and no volition is involved.
Our cognitive faculties, including both our sense organs and our brains, have a definite identity. The human mind forms an elaborate network of filters—“categories” in Kant’s terms—that impose a specific structure on incoming sense data. For example, the mind contains a causality filter, an entity filter, and so on. He named twelve such categories. The mind imposes these categories or filters on sense data so that human beings inevitably apprehend a world of entities ordered in causal patterns. Kant wrote, “Now I maintain that the categories, above cited, are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience. . . . They are fundamental concepts by which we think objects in general for appearances.”44 In other words, our minds deploy these inbuilt categories to organize sense data into objects or entities; or, the way the world appears to us is a consequence of the structuring activities of the categories.
We create and thus can thoroughly understand the subjective world—what Kant calls the phenomenal world; but by imposing a human structure on input from the objective world—what Kant calls the noumenal world—we render it forever unknowable. Aristotle and others had thought that the mind conforms to the world. Kant claims that the world conforms to the mind—but that the unfiltered original is cognitively inaccessible.
Kant’s epistemology was the culmination of two historic trends: First, it elevated to a systematic epistemological theory the Sophists’ claims regarding sense perception; and, second, it represented the full triumph of Descartes’s subjective approach to knowledge, for the human intellect now had its own mind-created world to study—and the intellect was limited to the study of that world. The Sophists had argued that the identity of a sense organ determines the form in which a conscious being experiences an object; Kant expanded this claim to the mind, as well. Descartes had claimed that knowledge begins with subjectivity; Kant concluded that knowledge begins and ends with subjectivity.
Because all human beings are equipped with the same cognitive apparatus, held Kant, we structure our world identically. The world known by Western Europeans is the same as that known by Eskimos and/or anyone else—and science can understand it all. Jones stated,
Kant not only maintained that there are but twelve structuring categories; he also took it for granted that all twelve categories are used by all minds everywhere—by the infant as well as the adult, by the caveman as well as the eighteenth-century philosophe.45
In other words, our knowledge is collectively subjective, a product of the human mind in general; the world we experience is created by mankind’s collective consciousness.
Regarding ethics, Kant made a similar claim. Just as filters within our minds impose causality on our experiences, so, too, they impose a moral filter or “category,” what Kant refers to as “a categorical imperative”—a moral commandment supposedly proceeding from our rational nature. This commandment is a sense of duty—an unchosen obligation—that prescribes human beings to repudiate acting on their personal desires or inclinations. We generally refer to this moral filter as a “conscience”—and it is the voice of our rational nature giving us moral commandments, said Kant. Driven by selfish urges, we can and often do flout these requirements of moral duty, but all human beings experience such an internal moral compass.46 Jones writes of Kant’s ethics, “duty is the central concept of Kant’s ethical theory. In Kant’s view, only a good will is morally valuable; and a good will is simply one that (1) knows what its duty is . . . and (2) does the dutiful act because it is dutiful.”47 So the human mind imposes moral law on our behavior in a way analogous to how it imposes causal law on our sense experiences. And this moral law prohibits action based on our self-serving passions.
What Kant did, in essence, is intrinsicize__subjectivism. He held that a feature of metaphysical reality—an unchanging and unchangeable human nature—necessitates a subjective epistemology, with knowledge detached from objective reality. Locke had claimed that we knew only perceptions in our minds—but at least had held that external reality causes the perceptions that resemble it. Despite himself, he staggered haltingly into subjectivism. Kant charged full throttle into subjectivism, proclaiming that the external world is utterly, inherently unknowable.
After Kant came an Orwellian switch in the meaning of the concept “objective.” The proper meaning of “objective”—an orientation to observable facts, rather than to features of consciousness—was pushed off of the philosophic scene. Kant and his followers used “objective” to refer to what is more properly called the collective subjective. Following Kant, the meaning of the term “objective” was circumscribed within human consciousness; reference to an independently existing objective world was now abandoned. After and because of Kant, the term “objective,” as against “subjective,” came to mean the will of the majority as against the will of an individual.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), the most influential philosopher of the 19th century, agreed that the subjective, phenomenal world is the only world we directly experience. But he pointed out, if the noumenal world is unknowable—as Kant claimed—then Kant can’t know it exists. So, Hegel jettisoned belief in an independently existing world: The phenomenal world—the mind-constructed world—is the only one that exists.
But Hegel didn’t stop there. He also shattered Kant’s monolithic theory of the phenomenal world. According to Hegel, the fundamental concepts by means of which men construct their world differ from era to era and culture to culture. They evolve. For example, primitive men believed that the world was governed by jealous gods, whose whims must be placated by sacrifice of living beings, often human. Medieval Christians believed that the universe was created and ruled by a loving God, who responded to simple faith and sincere prayer. Modern man believes that the universe is a system of natural laws intelligible to human reason. The world, shaped by men, evolves over time and across cultures. Jones commented, “Kant’s conception of mind was largely static; Hegel’s was developmental. Moreover, Hegel took account of the evolution of the mind from earliest times down to his own day.”48
Hegel claimed that reality is an Absolute Mind that begins in a state of ignorance and evolves toward knowledge in a complex process that he termed “dialectic.” Because we are all part of the Absolute, the Absolute gains knowledge as we do. As human knowledge evolves, the Absolute—reality itself—evolves. At a high point of development, the Absolute realizes that differences between human minds exist only at a lower level of understanding. At the highest level, they are merged into one. There is a oneness of humanity—and a unity of it and the Absolute. Philosopher Bertrand Russell said of Hegel, “From his early interest in mysticism, he retained a belief in the unreality of separateness; the world, in his view, was not a collection of hard units, whether atoms or souls, each completely self-subsistent.”49 Hegel himself wrote,
To consider any specific fact as it is in the Absolute, consists here in nothing else than saying about it that, while it is now spoken of as something specific, yet in the Absolute . . . there is no such thing at all, for everything is there all one.50
Hegel’s theory is a brilliantly psychotic version of religion.51 Subsequent thinkers generally repudiated his notion of an Absolute Mind but retained important aspects of his philosophy. Especially influential were his theories that basic concepts, by means of which men shape their world, evolve over time; that reality is constructed differently in differing societies; and his quasi-Platonic belief that “manness”—our understanding that humanity construed as a single unity, rather than as a collection of individuals—represents a higher stage of intellectual development.
Politically, Hegel’s theories birthed the most virulent collectivism of history. The totality of “manness” is, supposedly, that in which personal identities are synthesized into one unity, and distinctions between and among individuals are obliterated. The state is the one true individual, closer to the Absolute, the whole, than any individual. Hegel’s politics is one of state worship in which individuals are mere fragments and owe the state unquestioning obedience. Nor did Hegel flinch from the logical conclusion of his theory. He wrote, “In any case, individual persons are subordinate, and must dedicate themselves to the ethical whole. Therefore, if the State demands an individual’s life, that life must be given.”52 The logic of Hegel’s politics leads to the conclusion that a collectivist state of a National Socialist or Communist ilk is a higher manifestation of the Absolute than an individualistic capitalist society—and it is right and proper that human politics evolves in that direction. Hegel’s philosophy, including his political theory, was widely and deeply studied across the Western world, especially in his native Germany.
The Nadir of Subjectivism
One German philosopher who studied Hegel assiduously was Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx rejected Hegel’s spiritual metaphysics, his belief that reality is an Absolute Mind, and claimed that all things are physical material or matter. Factors of economic production—materials, available tools or machinery, and the way production is organized in a given society—he claimed, were the driving force of history and the foundation of human culture. Thus, history must be understood in economic terms and by reference to economic material. Its essence, he said, is an inherent struggle between the owning class and the working class. On this point, Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, wrote, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”53 Marx accepted from Hegel a statist politics, from Kant and Hegel the theory that the group creates its reality, and from Hegel that diverse groups do so differently.
This is true not merely from society to society, Marx claimed, but also of groups within societies. Economic classes construct their worlds differently. For example, the owning class construes the world in terms of free will, individual rights, private property, and the economic mobility of industrious individuals to rise by their own initiative. But the working class thinks in terms of different basic concepts—the role of birth and class, of social determinism, of impoverishment, of exploitation, of class struggle, and of revolution. Marx’s theory of polylogism—meaning, many logics—held that the thinking of different classes, the very logic each uses, is markedly different, so that the resulting worldviews were also necessarily different. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, stated succinctly, “Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes.”54
Such postmodern philosophers as Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and Richard Rorty (1931–2007) pushed the theories of the German triumvirate—Kant, Hegel, and Marx—to their logical conclusion. Marx understood human society in terms of two groups, the oppressor and the oppressed, which he narrowly construed in terms of economic classes. Postmodernists broadened Marx’s claim regarding oppressor and oppressed groups: In their view, whites oppress nonwhites, men oppress women, straights oppress gays, and so forth. They agreed with Kant that human beings structure their world; they agreed with Hegel that differing groups structure it differently; and they agreed with Marx that there is no dictionary of translation by means of which warring groups can understand each other. Force, said the postmodernists, echoing Thrasymachus, is the final arbiter of human disputes. And it is morally imperative to side with the oppressed in their ongoing struggle with the oppressor. Philosopher Stephen Hicks describes these postmodernist claims: “Our current social context . . . is characterized by oppression that benefits males, whites, and the rich at the expense of everyone else.”55 Hicks adds, “Postmodern themes in ethics and politics are characterized by an identification with and sympathy for the groups perceived to be oppressed in the conflicts.”56
Here is the final logical result of modern philosophy: Descartes’s claim that truth is subjective was collectivized by Kant, fragmented by Hegel, weaponized by Marx, and transmuted into a seething culture war by postmodernists. Toxic rampant subjectivism is the leitmotif of contemporary intellectual culture. There was a life-and-death need for a towering hero of philosophy to arise and definitively establish the validity of an objective method.
The Pinnacle of Objectivity
Fortunately for mankind, that hero arose. Ayn Rand (1905–1982) forthrightly took on the Cartesian-Kantian philosophy.
For one, she refuted the Sophist-Kantian argument regarding sense perception, making a number of important points regarding this most basic source of knowledge.
Let’s recur to the bat, the human, and the table. All three—and everything else—are what they are. The cognitive interaction between the bat’s echolocation and the table is subject to the law of identity: Given the nature of the table and the nature of the bat’s perceptual mechanisms, the bat apprehends the table as it must, as, we might imagine, something like a specific type of blip on a sonar screen. The outcome is causally necessitated by the respective identities of the interacting entities. The same goes for the man apprehending the table via eyesight.
Rand makes a three-part distinction between object, means, and form of perception. In this case, the object perceived is the table; the means are the specific sense modalities of the subject (sight, touch, echolocation, etc.); and the form is the bat’s “blip on the screen” or the man’s perception of a rectangular brown color patch. So, the table is the object perceived by means of sense modalities in a form necessitated by its nature and the natures of the differing sense modalities. There is no departure from objective reality in this process, and no possibility of it. For anyone who understands the Law of Identity—that a thing is what it is—it is clear that there is no dichotomy between x as it is and x as it is perceived by our senses.57
We can contrast Rand with the Sophists, who claimed that the nature of a conscious being’s sense organs disqualifies his perceptions from being awareness of reality because the means by which the subject perceives an object distorts the data, causing a dichotomy between appearance and reality. In response, Rand says, in effect, to perceive is not to distort but to perceive. The means of perception doesn’t invalidate perception; rather, it is what makes perception possible. To perceive without a means of perception would be impossible. The object is the thing perceived. The subject is the perceiver. And the subject perceives the object in a form necessitated by the natures of each. Every perceiver—bat, human, Martian if there were such a being—perceives reality in a form appropriate to it. There is no split between object as is and object as known.
As with the higher animals, sense perception gives us awareness of particulars. But universals or concepts are distinctive to man. Rand rejected the claims that universals exist independently in a transcendent world, or that they are innate ideas embedded in our minds by God, or that they are subjective categories that we apply to sense data to construct the world we perceive.
Rather, she observed that, in reality, many things are empirically similar to each other. Take a simple example: We may observe a variety of animals with different color fur, sizes, temperaments, and so forth. But closer examination reveals characteristics they have in common. They possess claws, not nails. The claws are retractable; their paws are padded, enabling silent movement; they are hunters; their digestive system is such that they gain sustenance from meat, not vegetables; and so forth. A four-hundred-pound African lion and a ten-pound house cat share these same qualities. The qualities differ merely quantitatively—their height, their weight, their strength, the length of their stride, their speed, the amount of meat they consume, and so forth. They possess many of the same observable characteristics—but in differing amounts. And we form the concept “cats” to refer to all animals that have these qualities, whatever the degree or quantity of these qualities may be.
This is true not merely of concepts referring to entities, but also of ones regarding properties, activities, and relationships—and of more complex concepts, as well. Rand wrote, “A Concept [or universal] is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s) with their particular measurements omitted.”58 Peikoff wrote, “Ayn Rand’s seminal observation is that the similar concretes integrated by a concept differ from one another only quantitatively, only in the measurements of their characteristics. When we form a concept, therefore, our mental process consists in retaining the characteristics, but omitting their measurements.”59 Therefore, any valid concept is grounded in observable facts; it is a mental integration of our perception of what exists in nature, in the objective world; it is not a subjective manifestation, neither an idea innate in our consciousness from a transcendent world nor a category inherent in our minds that we impose on experience. A properly formed concept is an objective identification of a fact of reality.
As we move further away from concepts referring to such perceptual-level concretes as cats, our concepts become more abstract and more sophisticated. For example, we form such concepts as “career,” “marriage,” “love,” and “justice.” The concepts are more advanced, but the process is identical: We mentally isolate shared characteristics and omit considerations of quantity or degree. Rand explains the process by means of which we form abstract concepts. Here is her example of forming the concept “thought.” She wrote, “the concept ‘thought’ is formed by retaining the distinguishing characteristics of the psychological action (a purposefully directed process of cognition) and by omitting the particular contents as well as the degree of the intellectual effort’s intensity.”60 Mental effort cannot be measured in the way a sack of onions might be, but however we dice it, my effort to solve a multiplication problem is less intense than to master a differential equation. Yet both are mental effort in some degree.
Rand showed that values, too, are objective. In an earlier essay, I provided a succinct explanation of Rand’s theory of values:
Understanding the nature of the good or of value always requires an answer to the question, “Good or of value to whom and for what?” d observed that living things must achieve certain goals in order to sustain their lives, and if they do not, they will die. Plants need water and sunlight. Lions need meat and shade. Man needs values such as food, water, shelter, and freedom. Values derive from the requirements of an organism’s life.
In a lifeless world, there would be no values; no good, no evil. After all, good or evil to whom, or for what? If we grind a rock (or any inanimate object) to dust, what has it lost that it previously strove to maintain? Nothing. A rock takes no steps to maintain its rock form as distinct from a pile of dust particles—nor does it take steps to maintain or sustain anything at all. Living organisms, on the other hand, engage in processes to sustain their lives. Plants, for example, grow their leaves toward the sun to engage in photosynthesis to support their lives. If we kill the plant, it has lost something that it took steps to sustain—its life. The particular form or shape of a rock is of no value to the rock, nor is the rock’s existence of value to it. But an organism’s life is of value to the organism—and its life is the precondition and ultimate goal of all of its other values.61
What applies to other organisms applies equally to man. Rand wrote that man “is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means. . . . That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice.”62
The nature of an organism and the factual requirements of its continued life form both the basis of valuing in general and the values specific to that particular type of organism. Values, therefore, are based in fundamental facts of reality; they are objective, not subjective or determined by whim; nor are they intrinsic, hardwired into the world or our minds without reference to the requirements of life. Rather, bona fide values constitute a real-world relationship between living beings, given their nature and the factual requirements of their lives, such as nutritious food and shelter. Regarding human beings, Rand wrote, “that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.”63 Both concepts and values are objective, thus the name of Rand’s philosophy: Objectivism.
Great philosophers have struggled heroically for twenty-five hundred years against both concerted opposition and the intractable nature of philosophic problems. Building on each other’s achievements, and culminating in Rand’s, they have succeeded. They have demonstrated that sense perceptions are of the objective world, that universals are mental integrations of units ultimately grounded in sense perception, and that values are objective.
We are the beneficiaries of their achievements. We can ensure that our principles are supported by a wealth of observational evidence and noncontradictory, logical thinking about that evidence. We can certify that the values we embrace are, in fact, supportive of human life. We can strenuously uphold capitalism, the system based on the principle of individual rights—and the only system that enables the widespread creation of life-supporting values.
The development of an objective method in both epistemology and ethics may be the most life-giving achievement of the human mind. It is certainly one of them.
The heroes of philosophy from Thales to Rand—and preeminently Aristotle—have provided us with a priceless gift. We can say to them, “Thank you—well done—and in pursuit of our own lives, we will not squander the immense intellectual wealth that you have created and bequeathed to us.” In sundry forms, heroes support human life. Nowhere is this truth more powerful than with the heroes of philosophy.