Ayn Rand Philosophy: Who Needs It, is a compilation of Ayn Rand’s essays that she wrote between 1971 and 1975. Some of the essays she delivered were speeches and letters, whereas others were philosophical treaties directed at different problems in philosophy, capitalism and education. In total, there are eighteen essays.
Who needs Philosophy? That is the question Ayn Rand asks in her first essay, delivered as a speech in March 1974 to the graduating class of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The simple answer is that every man needs it. Philosophy is the core principle that drives every man about his existence. It seeks to ask basic fundamental questions namely; Who am I? Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? It is the foundation that builds man’s life to be compatible with reality, as it is. Ayn Rand notes, ‘Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, of man’s relationship to existence. As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, philosophy deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists.’
Philosophy has five branches. These are (1) metaphysics, which is the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of ‘being qua being’. It is the basic branch of philosophy. (2) Epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It studies man’s means of cognition. (3) Ethics or morality defines a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions – the choices and actions that determine the course of his life. Ethics applies to every aspect of man’s life: his character, his actions, his values, and his relationship with all that exists. (4) Politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system. (5) Esthetics, the study of art. It is based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. Art deals with the needs – the refuelling of man’s consciousness.
To study philosophy, man must use critical thinking to differentiate and decipher the absolute truth and lie. Man must think, as nothing is given to him automatically, Ayn Rand notes, ‘Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way of use of his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired – even the proper posture of his body.’
Man must use reason and logic to be objective rather than subjective driven by emotions. What is reason? “It is the faculty which perceives, identifies, and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.” Reason integrates man’s perception through forming abstractions or conceptions, thus raising man’s knowledge from the perceptual level he shares with animals to the conceptual level he alone can reach. The method which reason employs in this process is logic. What is logic? It is the art or skill of non-contradictory identification. It has a single law, the law of identity and various corollaries. ‘Emotions tell you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something.’ A man driven by emotions is empty and dead like a river that overflows and breaks its banks only to dry up in nowhere. Emotions lead to rationalization. What is rationalization? It is a cover-up, a process of providing one’s emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications – to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. Rationalization distorts, hampers and destroys one’s cognitive faculty. One is not able to perceive reality but rather attempts to make reality fit one’s emotions. This is dangerous and a source of suffering and frustration.
Any Rand’s Critique of Her Predecessors
In the history of philosophy, there have been false premises that have been outlined and propagated by influential philosophers like Kant and Hegel. Emmanuel Kant substituted the collective for the objective in the form of categories, creating a phenomenal world of mysticism. He created room for error in reasoning, criticising the premise of thinking and advocating for a law of contradiction. On the other hand, Hegel’s philosophy was based on the rationalization of the subjective, ‘For the power lust of an ambitious elite who would create a ‘noumenal’, non-material world (by means of establishing the brute force of an absolute state in the ‘phenomenal,’ material one.)’
Following his philosophy, those who were not elite could not contain his ideas, therefore, this gave way to the philosophy of pragmatism. What is pragmatism? This is the rationalization of the concrete bond, range-of-the-moment, and anticonceptual mentalities that long for liberation from principles and the future. This abstract set of ideas could not be tangible and cement the masses for long and this was eventually replaced.
Today, there is the philosophy of Linguistic Analysis. This is the rationalization for men who can focus on single words, but cannot integrate them into sentences, paragraphs, or philosophical systems, yet wish to be philosophers like B. F. Skinner. Still, in an actual sense, they are not. In short, they focus on the linguistic part of the language but offer no concrete philosophical ideas that can change the world.
The philosophy of Linguistic Analysis has been followed closely by Existentialism, which proclaims the supremacy of emotions in an unknowable, incomprehensible nauseating none world.
In all this, there was one great man, the father of philosophy, Aristotle, who laid the foundations of philosophy. In him, we find many axioms that do not contradict the basic laws of life. There are no errors in reason. What is true cannot be substituted with falsehood. We may choose not to accept it, but that doesn’t change its premise. If it is true, it remains so notwithstanding anything. We need to differentiate between the man-made and the metaphysically given. The man-made can be changed or altered, but that is not the case with the metaphysically given. For instance, if the sun is shining, you cannot change or deny that fact. To rebel from the metaphysically given is an attempt to negate existence. This is similar to the analogy of life and death. You cannot be alive and dead. That would be a contradiction and contradictions do not exist. We cannot escape from the Law of Identity which is a perception of reality, and that is reason. We cannot attribute the metaphysically given to mysticism. What is mysticism? “It is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s sense and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge such as ‘instinct’, ‘intuition’, ‘revelation’, or any form of just-knowing.”
Some men have made a grave error of substituting the Law of Identity with the premise of mysticism. They have tried to rationalize reality with the corollary of non-rational, non-identifiable means of knowledge of existentialism basing reality on subjective emotions. They have been wrong. These are the men who have set everything wrong with the world today. They cannot justify the irrational but take and accept it on faith. These are men who try to distort reality with whims. They do not take responsibility for their actions but attribute them to some higher mystical power. These are men who have ruined world governments and set policies of mooching and handouts breaking the core principles of Laissez-faire capitalism.