KyaryPamyu

Apparently, this was one of Ayn Rand's favorite paintings. Salvador Dali, Corpus Hypercubus, oil on canvas, 29" by 23", 1954. Rand's favorite painting - she spent hours contemplating it at the Metropolitan Musuem of art. She even felt a kinship between her personal view of John Galt's defiance over his torture in Atlas Shrugged and Dali's depiction of the suffering of Jesus. (Jeff Britting- Ayn Rand) Remember that part where John Galt explains to his tormentors how to fix the torture device that had broken? I guess Rand really liked men who don't back down. While I was reading The Fountainhead, I distinctly remember starting to feel physically sick on more than one occasion. I felt as if the author wanted to subject Roark to every possible misfortune. Needless to say, reading until the end took some willpower. Consider here a moral man who has not yet reached professional or romantic fulfillment—an Ayn Rand hero, say, like Roark or Galt, at the point when he is alone against the world, barred from his work, destitute. In existential terms, such a man has not “achieved his values”; he is beset by problems and difficulties. Nevertheless, if he is an Ayn Rand hero, he is confident, at peace with himself, serene; he is a happy person even when living through an unhappy period. (...) A man of this kind has “achieved his values”—not his existential values, but the philosophical values that are their precondition. He has achieved not success, but the ability to succeed, the right relationship to reality. The emotional leitmotif of such a person is a unique and enduring form of pleasure: the pleasure that derives from the sheer fact of a man’s being alive—if he is a man who feels able to live. We may describe this emotion as “metaphysical pleasure,” in contrast to the more specific pleasures of work, friendship, and the rest. Metaphysical pleasure does not erase the pains incident to daily life, but, by providing a positively toned context for them, it does blunt them; in the same manner, it intensifies one’s daily pleasures. (OPAR, Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man) I can't say I'm too inspired by this "metaphysical pleasure," but I can say what I personally see in Dali's painting. Christ is liberated from suffering, without being liberated from the cross (which represents hardship). This is why he appears fixed to the cross, but not fixed at the same time; the four nails float in front of him, not making contact with their targets. In a certain sense, we are all on that cross, and we too can discover that we don't need to remove the cross in order to be happy.

No doubt. But Monart's question was specifically about Advaita. The majority of Indians belong to the superstitious Shaivite and Vaishnavite denominations of Hindu religion. By contrast, Advaita is less religion and more philosophy. Popular with seekers but not with the masses.

Advaita is less influential in India than Objectivism is in the West. It differs from Objectivism in that it's not a full "system", so no ethics or politics is involved. In other words, it's pure metaphysics. Further, it's not meant to amend any common-sense facts, but only to situate those facts into their wider context (the Absolute). I suppose you could say that Advaita Vedanta is practically useless, much like poetry is practically useless. But in a deeper sense, both are "useful" in that they enrich our experience of regular things. I'd say the "collection" part is crucial for differentiating Rand's position from others. No one (except Gorgias) disagrees that something exists. But they've been fighting for millennia over what exists.

According to David Hume, we cannot know with certainty whether the sun will rise tomorrow. But if the sun might not rise tomorrow, my plan to go to the beach will be ruined! That's what would hurt people (including Objectivists) the most: an unpredictable, fickle, undependable, untrustworthy world. If there was any way out of that uncertainty, we'd cling to it with all of our soul, just like Koalas grab onto trees. Certainty is one means to attaining peace of heart. One of the biggest obstacles to a predictable Reality is none other than God. If God exists, the behaviour of Nature is no longer predictable. In fact, Nature is as predictable as a capricious person. Oh no! It's hardly surprising that Objectivists are so keen on philosophizing about identity-this and identity-that. Thanks to our blessed and holy Identity, a potato's lack of vocal chords is sufficient for me to predict that no potato will ever sing in the next few millions of years. Nature is reliable again. Thank God Identity! (But that's not the only cool thing about Identity: we could say that, even if a God did exist, we'd be able to form some idea about what he can and can't do, simply by studying his nature.) With this background in mind, it's quite natural that (some) Objectivists vilify Kant. An Objectivist wants to assert the non-existence of God with the same certainty with which he asserts that potatoes will never sing. And Kant, that no-good scoundrel, wants to take that away from us. To be sure, Kant didn't claim that God exists, only that no one can establish this fact with immutable certainty. A few Objectivists also demonize Kant on the basis of a straw-man they got from reading Rand, namely that [W]e are in danger of getting killed because our sense organs systematically “distort reality.” This is suggested by the story of the astronaut landing on an unknown planet in Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982, 1–4). Because his confidence in his reason, his senses and his instruments has been weakened, he dies. Now some students draw from this story the suggestion that Kant would say: “That is no surprise, because you can’t be certain of what your consciousness tells you about space and time.” Or the suggestion that the astronaut was himself a Kantian. There is no doubt that if Rand had meant to suggest anything like this she would have been mistaken. For Kant said very clearly that “[t]his ideality of space and time leaves, however, the centrality of empirical knowledge unaffected, for we are equally sure of it whether these forms necessarily inhere in themselves or only in our intuition of them” (Kant 1933, B56). The Kantian astronaut, then, would be just as likely to survive as if the Objectivist theory of knowledge were true [...] (Source) This kind of thing is on a par with a Creationist's misinterpretation of Darwin. It's not a good look, but thankfully many Objectivists think on their own feet and don't base their judgements on "Rand wrote" or "Peikoff said". As for the thing-in-itself debate, here's my two cents. Objectivism, to my knowledge, doesn't entertain the possibility that finitude and infinity are epistemological, not metaphysical. I'll briefly explain this. Existential objects are finite in magnitude. By contrast, mathematical space can be infinitely divided. Together, this means the following: I can pick an existential object, e.g. a tomato, and (purely in my mind) zoom into this tomato forever and ever. I can zoom into its subatomic particles until said particles are as big as the current Universe, and I can keep going indefinitely. This doesn't contradict the finiteness of the tomato. Now, let's say that the mind-independent world was utterly devoid of magnitudes, and that cognition nevertheless divides experience into units which mutually delimit themselves. Where one unit ends, the next one begins. "Nonsense!" shouts the Objectivist. "The law of Identity means that existential things are of limited magnitude!" Nope. The law of Identity simply states that something is a certain way, as against another way. In accord with this holy law, we can say that, if the mind-independent world is free of magnitudes, then it is free of magnitudes (A = A). As a corollary, if the world is devoid of magnitudes, then the opposite cannot be true (A ≠ non-A). And we can say that either the external world lacks magnitudes, or it doesn't (A or non-A). My point is that establishing the relationship between consciousness and existence is not as easy as looking at some axioms. But that rabbit hole goes deep.

It doesn't refer to "Existence", which Ayn Rand took to be the collection of all existents. The Absolute is what those existents have in common, i.e. their genetic origin. Here's an analogy. Ayn Rand looks at the world and says "Look, clay objects!" (existents); Advaita looks at the same world and says: "Look, clay!" (the Absolute). As for consciousness and intelligence, we can use the analogy of the color spectrum. At some point in the spectrum, the color red ends and the color orange begins. Objectivists look at the color orange and say "Look, here's where color comes into existence. Before orange came about, no other colors existed". By contrast, Advaita sees consciousness as a spectrum. The consciousness spectrum starts with mechanical causes (pressure and impulse), ascends to stimuli (plants), climbs up to first-person experience (higher animals) and culminates with conceptual consciousness (humans). From the ultimate standpoint, the Absolute has nothing to be aware of but its own self. Knower and Known are the same entity. Advanced consciousness represents the Knower as "mind-stuff" and the Known as "matter-stuff". Neither mind nor matter are real. To say that mind and matter are unreal is similar to saying that music doesn't really exist and that the ultimate reality is air molecules vibrating. Again, there's no evil demon tricking you. Mind (Knower) and matter (Known) are unreal only in the sense that Knower and Known are fundamentally the very same entity, separately represented only in consciousness. If you're wondering why there exists more than one knowing subject, it's because the consciousness of the Absolute is perspectival. An imperfect analogy for this is how the very same person can view himself as: a father, man, brother, musician, gourmet, young etc. All of these perspectives are partial, but do not contradict the unity of the person. In the consciousness of the Absolute, those "roles" and the relationships between each role are generated according to stringent laws. Of course, if one views consciousness as a "mirror", they'll probably scratch their heads at this concept; the Advaita view of consciousness is analogous to how a poem (conscious experience) can very exuberantly express something very plain (the Absolute).

Sex, cigars, and Jesus. What do they have in common? Leonard Peikoff says: "One schizophrenic in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital routinely equated sex, cigars, and Jesus Christ. He regarded all these existents, both in his thought and in his feelings about them, as interchangeable members of a single class, on the grounds that all had an attribute in common, “encirclement.”. . . Imagine studying cigars and then applying one’s conclusions to Jesus!" (OPAR, Definition as the Final Step In Concept-Formation) Just imagine! But wait a minute... "The units of the concepts “existence” and “identity” are every entity, attribute, action, event or phenomenon (including consciousness) that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist." (ITOE, p. 56) In other words, "existence" is not an entity, but a shorthand way of referring to sex, cigarettes, Jesus, and everything I left out due to space-related reasons. And yet, neither Rand nor Peikoff have any problem with statements like "existence is X', "existence is Y". This indicates that, in a certain context, applying your conclusion about cigars to Jesus is A-OK, and not schizophrenic at all. But how? Under which conditions is it possible to generalize from cigars to everything else? (Guys, I promise this is related to achieving happiness!) Let's start with the wrong answer: the basis of this wondrous generalization cannot be relations. Relations between what? I can see how one apple can be to the right of a tomato, but I can't envision a spatial "relation" without the apple and orange. Ditto for any other kind of relation. Let us continue with the proper answer: sex, cigars and Jesus must share some concrete quality. In another thread, I wrote about Spinoza's observation that: "two existents can't be classified into the same class (world) if they're radically different. For example, in popular culture we say that god is not situated on the Moon or in the Andromeda galaxy - he's located in another dimension entirely. That's an intuitive grasp of Spinoza's observation: god is too different to be classified into the same world as the objects we know. With this, a famous problem enters the philosophical scene. A basketball has weight, size, rigidity, and as a consequence it can hit or push other objects (that likewise have weight, size, rigidity). In contrast, the mind totally lacks any of those qualities, so it's impotent to hit or push material objects. Its impotence extents to the entirety of the vast material universe, with the sole exception of one's physical body." In other words, we can envision a basketball smashing a window, because the basketball and the window are fundamentally alike. Conversely, we can't imagine our minds smashing a window Jedi-style, because the mind has no weight, no rigidity, it cannot fly from one position in spacetime to another. The question then arises: how does the mind interact with physical existents? Harry Binswanger is on the right track: "Since your consciousness causes your voluntary action, and since the physiological cause of your action is a process in the brain, it follows that your consciousness has the power to change the physical state of your brain. This conclusion may appear to contradict the primacy of existence, since it means that consciousness alters the state of something in the physical world — the brain. But that worry is unfounded. The primacy of existence holds that a state of awareness neither creates nor alters its object." (H. Binswanger - How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation, ch. 1) Many Objectivists will seethe at Binswanger's separation of mind and brain; this is because they're under the false impression that Ayn Rand has condoned their own spiritually bankrupt materialism. But let's move on. Philipp Mainländer concurs with Rand that similar objects can be classified together - which simply means: to speak of one member of the class, is to speak of all others. However, unlike Rand (which is silent on this), he saw "similarity" naturalistically, as the offshoot of genetic development. Simply put: when two chemicals combine, what will result from that? That's right, another chemical. "Chip off the old block"; from chemicals, only more chemicals can emerge. So far, we can tell Mr. Spinoza that sex, cigars and Jesus can be classified togheter on the basic of genetic kinship: all three are derived from a small number of basic chemical elements. About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The complex mixture of chemicals in tobacco smoke includes carbon monoxide [oxygen, carbon], benzene [hydrogen, carbon] and others. Now, if the kinship between humans and cigars is explained by their reliance on the basic elements, then what about those basic elements themselves? Why do they look as if they were "cut from the same cloth"? That cloth is no more, replies the sober Mainlander. It's not rocket science: if two elements are needed to beget a third one, then a single, lonely element wouldn't have anything to combine with in order to generate the diversity in the world. The "cloth" had to break down, leaving behind those kindred chemicals. (Henceforth, I will refer to the "cloth" as the Overbeing) Us humans are, in many respects, at the mercy of external factors. By contrast, the Overbeing was the sole existent; nothing else was around to set it in motion. It contained all motion within itself, so to speak. Therefore (regulatively speaking), when the Overbeing split itself up into parts, it merely followed the impulse within the innermost core of its own being. What does "speaking regulatively" mean? It means that we are in a situation where how we describe something is irrelevant. Suppose that someone turns on the TV, and the newscaster says: "A meteorite is heading toward Antarctica!" The viewer quips: "Well, actually! Its not heading toward Antarctica, like a human might head to Walmart. It's just following the laws of physics!" No, Mr. TV Watcher, at the most profound level, the meteorite is indeed heading toward Antarctica. This is not the time for nitpicking. To believe in your heart of hearts that the meteorite wants to go to Antarctica accords with existential fact. And now, good luck. As a reminder, we were talking about how the Overbeing disintegrated into parts, into a collective (i.e. what Objectivists call "existence"). In this collective, everything interlocks. Leonard Peikoff's, in his lecture titled Unity in Epistemology and Ethics, describes how a change in one atom ends up producing an effect in all other atoms, from one corner of the Universe to the other. Mainländer echoes: "Lichtenberg once said that a pea thrown into the North Sea raises the level of the sea on the Japanese coast, even though the change in level cannot be perceived by the human eye. Likewise, it is logically certain that a pistol shot fired on our earth will have its effect on Sirius, indeed on the outermost limits of the immeasurable universe; for this universe is always in the most violent tension and is not a limp, lame, pathetic so-called infinite." (P. Mainländer - The Philosophy of Redemption, Metaphysics) You, the reader, are just one individual among a finite, but unimaginably vast collective of individuals. Of course, you are not conscious of how every atom in the universe has an influence on you; this subterranean influence might feel as if an inexplicable, invisible hand is sometimes guiding you toward some things and away from others, as if fate is at play. Here's an area where religionists intuitively grasp something about their existence, but don't know how to explain it except by personifying nature into gods. For our next step, observe how bitterly people regret the mistakes they make, how remorsefully they hit themselves in the head over bygones. It doesn't require a genius to see that, had they known in advance what they were about to do, they would have instantly avoided that course of action, like one avoids the Bubonic plague. People do not voluntarily throw themselves into the fiery pits of hell, but do so out of ignorance and various conjectures. When people get burned to a crisp, they naturally learn their lesson, and have no need for snarky remarks from moralizing priests and Objectivists. In some cases, said individuals might even begin to overthink to the point of choice-paralysis. And overthinking is a common malady of our modern culture, stripping away people's will-to-live as we speak. In short, in the innermost kernel of our actual day-to-day lives (abstractions be damned), we are faced with something very strange: our own mistakes paradoxically happen to us. We can learn from our mistakes, and are quite eager to do so when things go south; but we are also, in all things and matters, guided by that invisible, supernatural hand (we are always speaking metaphorically). But what if this invisible hand chooses to make my life miserable? Well, Mainlander tells us to look at Christianity: according to its adherents, the Heavenly Father wants bliss and joy for his children, and the children want bliss and joy for themselves too! A happier concordance of desires could not be imagined. Thus, when things get messy, they are consoled by the thought that whatever the invisible hand (God) does, he does it in order to guide people toward a Kindom of absolute bliss, where everyone will be reunited with their friends and lovers, and there's going to be happiness and revelry throughout, and no existential crises will ever arise. What is the atheist Mainländer going to make of this? Well, those religionists are again intuitively grasping a profound truth, and yet again, they lack the means to explain it without inventing pretty delusions. If it wasn't clear from the preceding, people cling to Christianity because religion offers a coping mechanism; a way to deal with the blows of fate, contra Peikoff's talk of "suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible." Mainländer looked at Schopenhauer's philosophy, and thought: "wow, if this philosophy is purified from errors, it could provide people with that unwavering fearlesness that religion provides - but on the basis of knowledge, not faith." Let's see what he was up to. In our daily lives, we experience a more "colloquial" form of entropy. If we don't clean our houses regularly, things will get messy. If we don't drink water over and over again, we will die of dehidration. "we continually die, our life is a slow death struggle, every day death gains, against every human, more might, until it extinguishes of everyone the light of life." (P. Mainländer - The True Trust) It is no different for the Universe. Like us, the Universe is growing old; with each day that passes, it is growing closer to its ultimate fate: all life on Earth will vanish, the Sun's hydrogen supply will run out, stars and planets will be yanked out of their orbits, everything will decay until only black holes are left, and the last black hole will evaporate. The Universe will continue to expand further and further away, spreading sub-atomic particles so thin that they will never interact with another particle ever again. And then, just a cold, black void for eternity, as time loses meaning. Continuing: "Could such an organization of the things be possible at all, if in essence, man, in the primordial core of his being, would not want death?" (By "primordial core", he is referring to the Overbeing; the impulse of destruction originated from within it, resulting in its disintegration. [It will be a looong disintegration, lasting something like one googol (1x10100) years].) All of the matter composing our bodies was in the Overbeing, so that destructive impulse was metaphorically "our" impulse as well, in the "primordial core" of our being. "Ethics is eudaemonics or the doctrine of happiness: an explanation that has been challenged for thousands of years without being shaken. The task of ethics is to examine happiness, i.e. the state of satisfaction of the human heart, in all its phases, to grasp it in its most perfect form and to place it on a firm foundation, i.e. to indicate the means by which man can attain full peace of heart, the highest happiness." (Philosophy of Redemption, Ethics) In light of all of the preceding, what could bring us full peace of heart, the highest happiness? Before completing today's investigations, let's see if we can attune ourselves, for a moment, to Goethe's wavelength: "I have always been praised as someone particularly favored by good fortune; nor do I want to complain or criticize the course of my life. But basically it has been nothing but toil and labor, and I can well say that in my seventy-five years I have not had four weeks of real pleasure. It was the eternal rolling of a stone that always wanted to be lifted anew." (Conversations with Eckermann) It seems like Goethe is saying that success is an uphill battle; and of course, he is right, because the natural tendency of the Universe is entropic (the dirty house!) and consequently nothing is secure: reputation, jobs, fame, social harmony and everything else are a ticking time bomb. Now, what if, unlike Goethe, you become thoroughly fed up with your distress? Is the answer not already obvious? Stop caring! Stop deriving your happiness from external conditions, whenever possible. Remember the Mesopotamian poem I quoted in the previous installment: good and bad alternate like flapping your legs when you walk; don't allow yourself to have "only four weeks of real pleasure", and shout: "I don't mind experiencing [bad outcome]!" "I don't mind missing out on [good thing]!" With those words, you're not saying that you want bad things to happen, but rather that you don't mind it if, in spite of your sensible efforts, they do. (I'm not placing Peikoff on the same level as Goethe, but his discovery of happiness at age 81 seems to be in the same vein. As for Rand: my view of her is that she can was like a raging storm, rather than a calm and blissful lake.) In this thread, I chose to bring up Mainländer's newly translated work because of: a) the Nietzsche-Rand connection, and b). the remarkable similarity between Rand and Mainländer's epistemology. The latter's immortal contribution (tongue-in-cheek, since he empathized the mortality of the universe) was his insight that philosophizing regulatively (yet based on real knowledge) can give religion a run for its money. And the idea of such philosophical poetry came from Kant, of all people, who was so rigid and dutiful to holy Reason that people set their clocks by his daily walks. This aesthetic and teleological bridging-tactic thereby emotionally super-charges the personal and social practice of natural scientific research by conferring upon it the collectively-felt solidarity of a coherent, meaningful, and intersubjectively valid rational enterprise. In this sense, Kant is the original discoverer of the aesthetics of science. (Hanna, Robert, "Kant’s Theory of Judgment", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Not illusory as in "evil demon is tricking you", but more like "underneath all of this breathtaking diversity there's just plain atoms/some basic unity". People at a more complete stage of knowledge accept both diversity and its underlying unity as non-contradictory perspectives on the same world. Advaita Vedanta echoes Spinoza's observation that two existents can't be classified into the same class (world) if they're radically different. For example, in popular culture we say that god is not situated on the Moon or in the Andromeda galaxy - he's located in another dimension entirely. That's an intuitive grasp of Spinoza's observation: god is too different to be classified into the same world as the objects we know. With this, a famous problem enters the philosophical scene. A basketball has weight, size, rigidity, and as a consequence it can hit or push other objects (that likewise have weight, size, rigidity). In contrast, the mind totally lacks any of those qualities, so it's impotent to hit or push material objects. Its impotence extents to the entirety of the vast material universe, with the sole exception of one's physical body. According to Spinoza, both mind and matter are in the same world, as against being separated in different dimensions (like we envision god and the world to be). So what is the basis for classifying mind and matter into the same world/class? Well, we could look at Nature and observe that from a physical object, there emerges other physical phenomena, e.g. from a candle there emerges fire, from hot tea emerges smoke. Now, if only we could extend this principle, and say that non-physical mind emerges from matter, just like physical smoke emerges from hot tea! It would certainly solve Spinoza's problem. Advaita Vedanta opts for a different solution: mind and matter are classifiable together because they are aspects of the same Absolute. For all intents and purposes, "mind" and "matter" are related to the Absolute as "woman" and "daughter" are related to Taylor Swift. They are aspects of the thing in question, not ingredients making it up. "Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature." ["Natur ist hiernach der sichtbare Geist, Geist die unsichtbare Natur"] - F.W.J. Schelling, Ideen

Why live at all? The canned Objectivist response to this question goes something like this: "A motive is a reason for doing something, and survival is the only reason for doing anything. If you don't want survival, motives are irrelevant to you." The number of real-world people who find this answer useful is probably slim to none, so we can move on with our investigations. Why live at all? I think Objectivism somewhat indirectly answers this question through its distinction between "motivation by love" and "motivation by pain". Let us quickly concertize both. "Why live at all?" Answers motivated by fear of pain: Dying is painful or scary; plus, a botched suicide might leave me in a disabled condition. I fear that dying is not truly the end, and a worse fate will expect me. It would pain me to bring sadness or disillusionment to my loved ones. Answers motivated by love of life: The suffering I am going through will soon end, then I'll be rocking a good life again. I'm having fun. There's still plenty of movies to see, lots of sex to have, many spiritual heights to unlock. My life is decent but I'm expecting a breakthrough. In the future, there lies the X I'm looking for: spiritual triumph over distress and dissatisfaction of all kinds. For now, I'll skip over the "motivation by pain" part and jump straight to motivation by love. As far as the latter goes, what can Objectivism do for: People for whom pleasure is no longer impressive or attractive enough to justify the purchase of an entire life. Individuals who feel like their accomplishments so far have not gotten them closer to happiness, but have merely changed the specifics of their lifestyle (and so it will continue). I'd say that there's not much the Objectivist ethics can do for such people, because ethics presupposes that: a). pleasure is blowing your mind, and b). you see the future with rose-tinted glasses. By contrast, if you think that pleasure is not all it's cracked up to be, or that the future is nothing special (when the dust eventually settles), you may start to feel as Fichte said: "Shall I eat and drink only that I may hunger and thirst and eat and drink again, till the grave which is open beneath my feet shall swallow me up, and I myself become the food of worms? Shall I beget beings like myself, that they too may eat and drink and die, and leave behind them beings like themselves to do the same that I have done? To what purpose this ever-revolving circle, this ceaseless and unvarying round, in which all things appear only to pass away, and pass away only that they may re-appear unaltered; — this monster continually devouring itself that it may again bring itself forth, and bringing itself forth only that it may again devour itself?" (*, p. 53) ___ There is one further area in which the Objectivist ethics probably falls flat. Consider the words of the staunch atheist Mainländer: "One day, I witnessed how an old good lady visited an acquaintance, who had lost her husband a few days ago and was in a depressed state. As the old, withered, silver-haired lady said goodbye, she spoke: “Stay calm. God does not forsake the widows and orphans.” Not these words themselves moved and shook me: it was the sound of the voice, the tone of great determination, of the most unshakable faith, of unconditional trust; it was the glance of the blue eyes, that flashed light and then glowed calmly, brightly, mildly, peacefully again. (...) As religion gives the individual the marvelous trust, it gives it in the cloak of pretty delusion. It lures humans with a sweet image, which awakens in them the passionate desire and with the embrace of the marvelous illusion it crushes the fear of death away from his breast. He has contempt for the earthly life, to maintain a more beautiful heavenly life. (...) We live now in a period, where the blissful internalization by the continual decrease of faith becomes more and more rare, the unhappy groundlessness and peacelessness become more and more common: it is the period of inconsolable unbelief. Only the philosophy remains. Can she help? Can she, without a personal God and without a Kingdom of Heaven on the other side of the grave, give a motive, which internalizes, concentrates and thereby sprouts the blossom of the real trust, the unshakable peace of mind? Yes, she can; certainly, she can do it. She bases the trust upon pure knowledge, like religion grounded it upon faith." (*) Clearly, Leonard Peikoff does not agree with the words I bolded out, because in OPAR he says: "The ability to achieve values, I must add, is useless if one is stopped from exercising that ability—e.g., if an individual is caught in a dictatorship; or is suffering from a terminal illness; or loses an irreplaceable person essential to his very existence as a valuer, as may occur in the death of a beloved wife or husband. In such situations, suffering (or stoicism) is all that is possible." (Happiness as the Normal Condition of Man) So, it's safe to say that the Objectivist ethics does not advertise itself as something able to help you find happiness and meaning even at your worst. (For many people in the West and East, that aspect is still currently handled by religion.) Upon hearing about Leonard Peikoff's announcement that he has finally, after 8 decades of life, found true happiness, one member of this forum commented: "Peikoff describes himself as finally fully happy at age 81 (though I'm certain he must have enjoyed himself to some extent throughout his life), and he attributes this to having discovered what he "really wants to do in life" (as opposed to at least some portion of his work theretofore, which he "dreaded"). To me, in my life, such a thing is simply unacceptable. I would not want to wait until I'm 81 to be able to describe myself as "finally fully happy" and in fact I have not waited. Though I have challenges and setbacks from day to day, as I expect everyone must, and sometimes severe or lasting ones, I consider myself happy in all of the major areas of life." The takeaway of today's installment is that there are at least two areas where Objectivism openly does not promise much power: a). blows of fate, and b). overly-stringent personal criteria for happiness. Those whose ethics is based on the "pursuit of happiness" and "non-lifeboat scenarios", should remember the words of this Mesopotamian poem written 3 millennia ago: He who was alive yesterday is dead today. For a minute someone is downcast, then suddenly full of cheer. One moment he sings in exaltation, Another he groans like a professional mourner. The people's condition changes like opening and shutting [i.e. in a twinkling]. When starving they become like corpses, When sated they rival their gods. In good times they speak of scaling heaven When it goes badly, they complain of going down to hell. (*)

He's not trying; he's going full tilt. And yet, he thinks that teleology is false. That's a rather odd thing: he claims that something untrue is, in fact, true. It's quite unintelligible, from an Objectivist framework, why someone would ever want to do that. But temporarily switching to Mainländer's standpoint might remove some of that unintelligibility. I suspect that most people (but by no means all of them) would simply yawn if someone told them that atoms tend towards stability. This is because human beings are not computer chips; they are teleological beings, whose constitution is specialized toward value-based frameworks: "want", "avoid", "like", "dislike", "seek", "fight". Suppose we said, instead: "Atoms behave just like us. Humans work to make lots of money, to have a stable and comfortable life. Same for atoms: they too fight to become stable." It's probably safe to assume that many listeners would find themselves involuntarily drawn to this story - even if they never cared about atoms before. Now, consider the following: The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, And drinks and gapes for drink again; The plants suck in the earth, and are With constant drinking fresh and fair; (*) Here, it's quite obvious for all readers that the poet is not actually claiming that the earth is thirsty. Notice, however, that the poem is true all the same. Give some water to your plants, and you will observe that the earth is, truly: very, very thirsty. So thirsty! Equipped with this new standpoint, here is Mainländer - the philosopher whose metaphysics is teleological - lambasting someone who took teleology to be literally true: "You teach a teleology that cannot be thought of as more comprehensive and terrible. You assume millions and billions of miracles every minute, and you, cruel romantic, want to throw us back into the dark Middle Ages, i.e., forge us into the dreadful chains of the physico-theological proof of the existence of God. You philosophize as if Kant were yet to be born, as if we are not fortunate enough to possess the second part of his Critique of Judgment. Do you wish to be a serious man of science, an honest researcher of nature? Do you not know that absolute teleology is the grave of all natural science?" - Die Philosophie der Erlösung, Vol. II., p. 570) And now we can revisit Mainländer's claim that the function of the world is to destroy all useful energy. Does the world really pursue that goal, or in fact, any goal? Probably not. Does everything unwittingly contribute to entropy, as if the world pursued its own demise? Yes. The judgement is true, just as the earth is, in fact, thirsty. Long before I discovered Objectivism or Kant, I was spontaneously creating regulative explanations of the world for myself. At no time did I believe those explanations to be factual; their factuality was beside the point. They satisfied my soul -much more than any dry descriptions of facts. Briefly put, a regulative judgement does not merely communicate facts; it makes those facts sink deep into your skin. It can turn something like entropy into a worldview that makes people be at peace with tension and chaos, and more mindful of what's worth pursuing and what isn't. And that's one way philosophy can contribute to human happiness.

There is no ambiguity here: only living organisms can act in favor of a certain outcome, as against an alternative outcome. Further, being alive is the precondition of pursuing any outcomes in the first place, so no alternative is more fundamental than being alive or not. However, following this up with "matter is indestructible" is a non sequitur. Suppose that the quantity of matter gradually decreased, but very slowly. Or, suppose that half of matter is indestructible and the other half will eventually vanish. I reckon that, even in cases like these, it would still be absolutely true that only living beings are presented with alternatives. The part about the indestructibility of matter is completely irrelevant to her point. As a consequence, it can potentially confuse everyone, not just uncharitable readers. Although any deficiencies in the presentation do not diminish the value of the insight. I'm not familiar with Nozick, but I can speak from personal experience. In my case, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure arises when I get a specific impression: the impression that external reality is in perfect harmony with my own needs. So intoxicating is this feeling that, even if the aesthetic object is considered "stimulating," (erotic art, technological gadgets etc.) my natural appetites are instantly tranquilized and my mind is immobilized into a state of bliss. My interest in Friedrich Schelling's idealist philosophy is, in part, a response to the fact that he also traced aesthetic pleasure to the cognition of a harmony between the "I" and "not-I". This harmony could also be described as an organic unity between me and the world. Whether atoms partake in some grand teleological movement, I do not claim to know. The scare quotes are there because atoms are not conscious. In this context, I can make one observation: the gulf between many philosophies is, in principle, unbridgeable - because they define things very differently. Some examples: For Objectivists, to be "conscious" means to have first-person subjective experience of the external world. By contrast, in Advaita Vedanta, "consciousness" simply means "dynamic resposiveness to something external"; as a consequence, this definition encompasses atoms, plants reacting to stimuli, qualia-based awareness and the like. In Objectivism, to be "alive" involves pursuing certain things and fleeing from others. For Mainländer, "life" simply means that a chemical compound persists unless it encounters a situation that will break it down. Microbes are not more alive than sulfur; both represent different paradigms or plays on the same universal theme (persistence). According to Objectivism, free will means to regulate one's focus, to choose to think (and perhaps to be able to act "out of character"). Schopenhauer would quip that Objectivists merely think that their position is "free will", because they define things incorrectly; perhaps he'd say that Objectivists uphold some variety of compatibilism. In no other case is the "apples to oranges" saying truer than when comparing philosophies. "Altruism cannot be bad - how can helping other people be bad?" Every Objectivist must have heard this at least once, before proceeding to explain that helping others is not the same as being altruistic, so on and so forth. Experiences like this have thought me that whenever a philosopher seems to not see something blatantly obvious, he in fact does, and with gusto. If the above was a reference to Mainländer, he'd say that inspecting the parts of the locomotive without knowing what a locomotive does will always yield only partial knowledge. The function of the Universe is to destroy all useful energy. The thirst for life is the most effective means toward this goal. Or so he says. I also do not see Objectivism as an "optimistic" philosophy. Optimism is, plainly put, crude idiocy that is incompatible with reason or with a reality-oriented philosophy. Voltaire's response to Pope expressed this better than anyone.

Everybody gets the blues once in a while. A few moments from Ayn Rand's life, as recounted by Nathaniel Branden in Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989): By the fall of 1958, it was apparent that Ayn was sinking into a deep and tenacious depression. Not the sales of her novel or the torrent of fan mail or any of the interesting people we were meeting seemed to cheer her for more than a few hours or evoke in her any desire to write again. The thought of another project—any other project—exhausted her. Every day, she sat long hours at her desk playing solitaire, the game becoming a metaphor for her sense of her position in the world. She did not read. She left her correspondence largely unanswered. Her body ached with numerous tension pains. She had written a novel about a man who stops the motor of the world; now it was as if her motor had stopped. She saw herself as trapped in a swamp of mediocrity, malice, and cowardice. She had found admirers but no champions. . . I thought she was experiencing a delayed letdown after thirteen years of high emotional intensity while writing Atlas full-time. Ordinary living could hardly compete. In many of our discussions, from the summer of 1958 and for the next two years, she would begin to cry while describing her perception of the world and her own place in it, and she confided that she cried almost every day. This struck me as shockingly out of character, and I realized that I had underestimated the depth of Ayn’s struggle, with which I felt enormous and painful empathy. We had long conversations on the telephone every day. I visited her two or three evenings a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barbara, so we could discuss how we might better interpret the events that were such blows to Ayn’s ambition, energy, and enthusiasm. These sessions typically lasted until five or six in the morning. Her suffering was devastating to watch. [...] Ayn’s depression persisted relentlessly. “I’m ashamed of myself for crying so much,” Ayn said one evening. “The Collective would be shocked if they knew. You don’t tell them, do you?” I told her I did not. “Galt would handle all this differently. Somehow, he would be more untouched by it. More realistic. But I don’t know how or in what way. I would hate for him to see me like this. I would feel unworthy, as if I had let him down.” I was used to hearing her discuss Galt as if he were a real person; all of us did that. I said, “I look at it differently. If I were knocked down and hurt badly by something that had happened to me, so that I was crying a lot or devastated or whatever, I think I would say, ‘All right, look at me. I’m in a bad way. So what? In a little while, I’ll pick myself up again. Meanwhile, this is reality. Why pretend it isn’t?’ ” She chuckled unhappily. “You’re quoting my own philosophy back to me. Only, for once, I can’t seem to apply it.” (ch. 11) Her view of depression, if accurately told, was interesting: When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression had a biological basis, she answered angrily, “I can tell you what causes depression. I can tell you about rational depression, and I can tell you about irrational depression. The second is mostly self-pity, and in neither case does biology enter into it.” I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, given that she had never studied the field. She shrugged bitterly and snapped, “Because I know how to think.” (ch. 15) I suppose she would have scoffed at Schopenhauer's claim:

With this, I certainly disagree. What Mainländer has observed is not incorrect: energy ends up in a form that's harder to use, due to spreading out or becoming less dense. Consider a wooden log. If you burn it, you get: ash, heat, light, and the release of CO2 and water (as gasses which will expand and be released). Now it's harder to use the same energy and matter from that log. Ash doesn't burn well, and has very few use-cases. Whether Mainländer correctly identifies the reason for why this happens is utterly irrelevant for his goal: to see what this constant decrease in usable energy means for the Universe. This is hardly "useless", regardless of how much better scientists are than philosophers. Mainländer never claimed to be better than scientists, and claimed that the philosopher's task (as far as those issues go) is "to sift through the material collected by natural scientists and bring it under general aspects." Standing desk, not armchair. Per the contemporary Heat Death hypothesis (or Big Chill/Big Freeze), energy will dissipate to the point where there won't be any usable energy to produce changes. The Universe will be completely still and at uniform temperature. All lights will go out as stars run out of fuel. No stars will form anymore, black holes will evaporate due to Hawking radiation, and black dwarfs will explode due to quantum tunneling. Specifics like this are irrelevant for Mainlander; he is concerned with two things: a) the entropic course itself, and b) the existence of life. About the entropic course, he says: entropy is not a "sickness" or malady of the Universe; rather, the Universe is the process of entropy itself. And about the existence of life he suggests: living organisms are not an inexplicable "protest" against the entropic course; life is the mechanism through which Entropy takes place! Lastly, he tells us: the history of the world does not start with energy spreading out and becoming useless, but with a Singularity to whom entropy was essentially foreign, and who was therefore under no external compulsions to disintegrate itself. I'm not exactly sure what this is in response to, but I can say how it relates to this: The rationalistic fiction is not the "smallest particle" itself, but rather its indestructibility. It was in this rationalistic vein that Democritus posited an indestructible smallest particle, likewise the ancient Indians. In our current times, there is a basic particle which we call "atom", but it can definitely be smashed into bits, and this proves Mainländer's point: if an indestructible particle exists, this will be settled by empirical means, not rationalism. My claim is that there's many more emergent properties, besides life, which come into being, then cease to exist. Nowhere did I claim that said properties are life-like or that they involve teleological self-organization in any way, shape or form. Here's an example: the majestic fractal patterns in snowflakes are not the design of a deity, but occur naturally. When the snowflake melts, those fractals exist no longer. Is the aforementioned emergent property identical with matter, or distinct from it? If one answers "it's identical with matter", then life, too, is identical with matter. Sure, a process is not identical with matter, it's something that matter does. But processes are still actions of physical entities, unless Objectivism is sympathetic to Process Philosophy. This is not a universally valid claim. Here is Ayn Rand, in a 1962 radio lecture she gave (and published as The Objectivist Ethics) The concept “value”. . . presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible. I quote from Galt’s speech: “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms (...)" She did not say "I quote myself", but "I quote from Galt's speech" - yet she did not induce any circuity of thought.

Right on the money. Also, your take on the "constitutive vs. regulative" issue is interesting, because this is rarely talked about in Objectivist literature. Mainländer suggests his own, non-Objectivist, solution to this problem. He thinks that the history of philosophy has always struggled with a false alternative: a) Life has no special significance. Out of pieces of dead matter following laws of physics, there arose entities capable of painting the Sistine Madonna and pondering moral questions. b) There is a demand in Nature, and life arises to fulfill it. After a series of unsuccessful prototypes (species of animals), the highest being (man) is finally produced and the goal is fulfilled. Because ancient people explained natural phenomena in life-like terms (e.g. Zeus wielding thunderbolts), the need for a sharp distinction between life and non-life arose, as a first step to acquiring reliable scientific knowledge. Hence, the first alternative described above. On the other hand, suppose that the Laws of Physics were such that no life could ever arise. Just as no gold can be fashioned from metals, no life can arise in the Universe in principle. Would life arise? A rhetorical question, but it illustrates why teleology (the second alternative) is seductive to people. (That the Laws of Physics are rigged to yield life is undeniable. However, self-conscious scientific people cannot permit themselves the extravagance of saying that the world is "rigged", because only living organisms can rig a game in their favor. "Teleology is a sin!" they cry.) To recapitulate, the false alternative Mainländer posits is between: a) Denying that the world is rigged to produce life, and b) Saying that the world is rigged to yield life, perhaps by a god, or World-Spirit, or Schopenhauer's Will. How does Mainländer overcome this alternative? As early as the first chapter of his system (Analytics, i.e. epistemology), he traces all the developments of the world to a Singularity. That is: the Singularity existed before the first atoms were formed, before the laws of physics started to apply, before things like spacetime, causality and life became a thing. (He was ahead of his time, as the Big-Bang theory only came about 51 years later). Mainländer starts by showing why the Singularity cannot be cognized using the human cognitive faculty. The purpose behind this is clear: throughout history, people have engaged in extraordinary, fantastical speculations about a being who is beyond time and space, beyond individuality and limitations. But this is precisely what the Singularity is - and Mainländer wants to show: 1). That such flights of fancy are pointless, and 2). That the Singularity is in the past, not in the mind-independent realm, as Schopenhauer thought. Next, Mainländer says that we can nevertheless describe the Singularity in regulative terms, a nod to Kant. His goal with this is to overcome the false alternative described above. In this enterprise, he will be inspired by Schopenhauer, for whom the Will is "a blind striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. [Schopenhauer's] paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, that when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. . . within the world of appearances that we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. (Source) Schopenhauer believed that there is a single, unified Will beyond space and time. Cognition splits this Will into individuals, after which those individuals proceed to fight to the death. Mainländer completely changes this: the unified reality is placed before history, in the Singularity. Furthermore, the split into individuals occurs for real, in the "Big-Bang". Individuality is not just an illusion of cognition. Several things are worth noting here: Individuality is absolutely essential for destructive conflict. Only individuals can eat each other, hinder each other, and so on. On the other hand, individuality did not originally exist in the world, in the Singularity. The limit to what people can, and cannot do, is largely dictated by external circumstances. It's just part of life. However, for the Singularity there are no external circumstances, thus it is limited only by its own essence/identity. The Singularity was incredibly peaceful. It lacked predators. It lacked hunger to incite it to hunt, and there was nothing to hunt either. Further, it was not constrained by anything external, only by its own identity. Could we say that the nature/identity of the Singularity was to explode into individuals? Not so fast! That's the safe, Objectivist-friendly answer. We must remember: no one can cognize the Singularity, so we can't determine which answer is true or not. So why pick such a hand-wavy answer? No, this is a golden opportunity to fix that false alternative that has been plaguing philosophers since time immemorial. Let's say I build a clock. Do I violate any laws of physics by building it? No. Will the clock's components show the time before I build the clock? Again, no. Lastly, after the clock is finished and running, will it show the time all by itself? Certainly. We now have the tools to tackle this problem. When the Singularity fashioned itself into the "clock" (the post-Big-Bang world), it did not defy any law pertaining to its essence/identity. The law of identity was still in full operation. Therefore, Objectivists are right to say that we live in a naturalistic world, where no miracles occur. They are, however, patently wrong when they say the world is not thoroughly purposeful, or that such purposefulness is restricted to the biosphere. Before individuality came onto the scene, death was eo ipso impossible. The invention of individuality was the invention of death itself. New laws of nature followed from this invention, the ones still operative today. If the purpose of the clock is to show time, what is the purpose of our World? Mainländer gives a very German answer: the function of the post-Big-Bang universe is to completely evaporate out of existence. Everything is unconsciously working toward the World's demise. To understand this bold claim, we must first clear something up: like Schopenhauer, Mainländer believes that everything is alive. For example, the atom, to the chagrin of many self-conscious "naturalists", is a rudimentary life-form, more rudimentary than the most basic microbes. For those who consider this claim to be extravagant, consider this: do you expect starfish or clams to have brains? Are you puzzled that sponges don't have hearts? And yet, you are so wide-eyed when you hear that a class of living beings can be so simple as to lack even metabolism and organs. Before eating can come into existence, there are many more preliminary stages to pass trough. Rome wasn't built in one day. We are now faced with a weird fact: atoms try to reach the most stable (lowest-energy) state they can. They "want" to become stabler, not weaker, as Mainländer claimed. So which one is it: do atoms want destruction, or do they want stability? The answer is simple: atoms want stability, if this stability is the better means toward their goal. Here, we see Schopenhauer's Will-to-Life getting turned on its head: life is the servant of death. It doesn't matter whether stability is achieved through chemical bonding (for atoms) or eating beef (for humans), the principle is the same: life is a struggle, stability is sought, and its attainment occurs at the expense of other individuals. This is what is slowly, but surely, leading the World to its doom. If we substitute Mainländer's law of weakening of force with the law of degradation of energy, we can perhaps see something of merit here. Regardless of what someone calls life - an emergent property, a hologram of matter, an emanation etc. - my point is that Galt's claim is incredibly bold: out of the entire list of emergent properties in the Universe, life is the only one that is able to cease existing?

It seems like Galt is suggesting that life is an emergent property of matter, with the property being wholly distinct from what gave rise to it (matter). However, we could say that all the emergent properties in the world come into existence and cease to exist, depending on the state of their substratum (matter), so this is by no means restricted to life alone. That was my point.

I've always been puzzled by this particular claim in Galt's speech: The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action." It seems like Galt is contrasting inanimate matter to its opposite, animate matter, a.k.a living organisms. However, Galt never seems to address this point: inanimate matter can go out existence just as well. When inanimate matter converts into a living organism, that chunk of inanimate matter is no more; it has vanished, has completely upgraded itself to being alive. For a while, of course. Put differently: if "going out of existence" is defined as "a state of matter going out of existence - because it transitioned to another state", then Galt's claim that "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms." does not hold, because many more things go out of existence, although not all of them have a choice in the matter. When a snowflake ceases to exist, due to melting, its remains continue fine! Contrast this to the epistemology outlined in the previous post, which carefully pre-empts this problem.