Boydstun
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The assertion that something exists does not have to serve as any sort of axiom to be meaningful and true. Russell was not taking that assertion as some sort of axiom when he disputed Bradley's claim that it was meaningless. Why, by the way, would Bradley be wanting to say that "something exists" is meaningless? If he permitted himself to comprehend Russell's assertion, he would be allowing himself to authentically question the truth of metaphysical idealism.
It is a curiosity for thinkers to try to find what are the widest, most comprehensive things. That is enough for pursuing that quest. As it happens, much can be said for taking the fact of existence to be the widest, most pervasive, indeed only thing. That there are diverse words in this text is evident, that this screen is not my keyboard is evident, that they both exist is evident. Perfectly sufficiently, however meager or erudite is my understanding of their operations, the operations of my fingers, or operations of my eyes. Also manifestly distinct from any of those would be the pain in my back and the perspiration under my arms. One thing all those things have in common is that they are in the same spatial neighborhood. Another is that they all remain constant or change during the interval of me making this post. Existence is a commonality of all those diverse particulars as well as of all occasions of such things, all loci in space, all intervals of time. Existence is a contraction, a reigning in, of the old widest-thing candidate thing: being. Existence is what had been known as qualified being.
Assertions like "Existence exists" or "Existence is Identity" have some traits of axioms we are familiar with in philosophy, mathematics, or axiomatized sciences such as mechanics or SR. But they do not have the fertility or productivity trait of axioms + posutlates + definitions in geometry. And other philosophers besides Rand, such as Spinoza or Wolff, have had distinctively philosophical (metaphysical) axioms, yet not given them the same mild function given them by Rand. I notice that axioms are selected in all these intellectual areas with conceptual dependency relations in mind, whatever the variety of uses one might try to make of such asymmetric relations.
In her 1957, Rand set out her fundamental wide categories of existents in the course of articulating her axiom "Existence is Identity." Showing that any proposed existent not falling under one or more of those categories leads one to self-contradiction is a way of showing that Identity, and in just those sub-divisions, necessarily attaches to anything that exists. Of course most of us go along fine thinking productively and making a garden or a living presuming that any existents are of diverse natures and have distinctive identities, and leave it to folks with the philosophical-curiosity bent to ponder further "Existence is Identity." One use of that axiom was to expose as empty the traditional via negativa approaches to characterization of God, should one dally in such stuff, which Rand did in her 1957.
There is nothing common between existence and nonexistence, as you know. The latter is only a lack of standing in the former, a mere lack noted by us, by us in and of existence (cf. Rand 1966–67, 58, 60–61; Branden [ca. 1968] 2009, 28).
The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) in the form “For every existent, there is a reason why it exists, rather than not” can apply at most to constituents or proper parts of Existence, not to that comprehensive standing Existence, the all, the whole comprising all actuals and their potentials, all those concretes and all their formalities. PSR in the form “Nothing happens without a reason” applies only within Existence, not to that all of alls Existence. PSR in the form “There must be a sufficient reason for every truth of fact” applies to the bare truth Existence exists only in the sense that there must be a sufficient reason for our knowledge of the fact, not for the reality of the fact (cf. Schopenhauer [1813, 1847] 1971, 13). Talk of reason for the fact that Existence exists is foolishness (cf. Heidegger in Braver 2012, 151–52; see also Nozick 1981, 141–42). None of these bounds on the various versions of PSR diminish by one iota the complete intelligibility of Existence.
To assert Existence exists is to remind oneself or another of that ultimate framing already known or to bring into full light what one or the other had known without previous articulation. Rand rightly held that it is incorrect to try to prove the existence of the external, perceived world (1961b, 28). The world’s existence is self-evident in perception. The existence of distinctive character and spatiality and action is self-evident in perception. To deny the existence of the world or to assert the possibility that it does not exist or that we have no way of knowing it exists is talking on empty (see too Heidegger in Braver 2012, 150–52; Jary 2010, 45–46, 86–88). Question or denial of the world’s existence or the existence of other persons attempts to reverse the embedment of meaningful assertions in world and living body. Denial or doubt of the world’s existence or of each other’s existence voids our common ground for all communicative utterance. Then too, “The world may not exist” includes the possibility that that text does not exist, that its originator does not exist (in the viewpoint of a reader, including the originator reading it). That notion of possibility is empty. It is not merely a zero probability of a specified possibility, such as the possibility that a random number from the real line will be a rational number. To hold forth existence of the world or of other minds as things not presupposed in rational, discursive proof would be vacuous.
The question “What is Existence?” is sensible if we are asking for the most fundamental character and compass of Existence in itself or in its relations to us, a part of it. The question is not sensible, however, if by it we are seeking: to cleave an existent in two by whether it is sensed or thought; or to disqualify some existents as truly existent or as fully existent (such as attributes, alterations, situations, potentials, or formal relations vis-à-vis concrete Randian entity or Aristotelian substance); or to penetrate deeper than existence, go behind or beyond existence (so portraying Being, the mind, the Good, the One, or God). Answers to the sensible versions of the question would be broad characterizations of Existence: the patent everything-everywhen around us and in us as we sense it or think it ordinarily and in science; or the most basic thing constituting and provisioning cognition; or the most basic thing whose most basic categories are those discerned by Aristotle, Whitehead, Rand, Lowe, or oneself; or the universe, spacetime and mass-energy.
The questions “Why do existents have definite character, or definite nature, or why are there concrete existents having potentials and formalities?” are not sensible. That these broad propositions are true of and most fundamental to existence is, upon reflection, self-evident. Their denial, as in denial of the principle of noncontradiction, stands one in performative self-contradictions (see also Braver 2012, 130).
My meaning of the self-evident is the usual one: the manifestly true requiring no proof. Truths accepted as self-evident are sometimes defeasible as to truth, such as occurred with the old view that heavier bodies fall faster. (See also Summa Contra Gentiles 1.10–11, in Aquinas [ca. 1259–68] 2014, 13–15.) An axiomatic self-evident truth in metaphysics should be fundamental and necessarily true. Its denial leads to bumping into the widest frame. I notice that susceptibility to performative self-contradiction upon denial is not the source of a proposition’s truth (the source is fact). Leonard Peikoff characterized Rand's axioms as perpetually evident. Fair enough.
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My Ethical Theory and Rand’s
Perception of mind-independent existence is fundamental to human consciousness, though not the whole of what is fundamental in human consciousness. “Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
No one understanding the statement “Existence exists,” whether uttered, signed, or written, has such an occasion of consciousness without co-referential history and ongoing context of his or her language and intellectual community. The reader is not without the writer, and the thinker addresses a standing audience of others, however unspecified, as well as self. Co-reference precedes the one-word stage of language acquisition, and ever after the acquisition of language, the standing suitability for co-reference attends every thought that something is the case. Co-referential potential of thought, and the mutual recognition of intentional being that requires, is a condition of one’s existence as a thinker in language. Indeed, pronominal other person is in and with oneself as existence is in and with oneself. In one’s conscious and subconscious existence is resonance with existence in general, resonance with living existence, and special of the latter, resonance with other person.
“Existence exists” is registration of existing among other existents. Further, the act of grasping the statement “Existence exists,” I observe, implies performance of and grasp of acts, not only acts of consciousness, but acts of living body. There are no acts of and grasps of consciousness without acts of and intentional grasps with one’s living body. There is no grasp of the externality of existence to subject without grasps of externality to one’s body. If one observes one’s consciousness, one is acquainted with one’s living body and one’s actions with it. Moreover, one knows in any episodes of post-linguistic observational consciousness others of one’s acting and conscious kind. Then too, one had always (in a practical sense of always) known Mother or other caregiver.
“Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
There is normativity in that most basic metaphysical frame (mine, not Rand’s). We are given, dedicated to grasping reality in awareness concerted with other and in coordinated acts with other. This is automatic animal engineering-performance-norm of operation. We are given, already loving truth, truth-getting, act, self, and other.
With later education, we learn that life ends, that it requires maintenance, and in our human case, that it requires production and education and social cooperative conventions. We learn that those means to life require a waking state and adequate sleep. Going beyond the original grasp of life in breath and cry and suckle, learning more of life and its requirements requires some focused effort. The plenty and exuberance of human life of today required individual creativity, initiative, and freedom coordinated at the large social scale by moral- and rights-constraints on treatments of others.
Human moral life arises in the milieu of learned character of life, all within and ever with the basic frame “Existence exists, we live.” In learning life beyond the basic knowing, we can grasp the concept of “alternative” mined by Ayn Rand: Only with advent of the ends-getting organized matter that is life do alternatives enter nature.
I observe, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I wrote in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born.
In moral life, we elect to keep life going, including to keep going life known in the basic frame. Once we have the developed powers, we elect to keep thinking, coordinating, creating, and producing. The moral virtue of truth-telling is rooted in the basic frame, constantly at hand. Life known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
The preceding is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence.
Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions.
That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism.
To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course.
I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running.
Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous.
The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or in seeking specialized skills from others.
Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story.
Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway.
Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives.
Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self.
Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue. One failing to have it is in human failure, including moral failure.
Although my account builds on a social nature of human individuals running deeper than social nature as characterized by Rand, I land in much agreement with Rand on general characterization of life as self-generated and self-maintaining action and as teleological action (even for vegetative actions such as gravitropic plant roots) and with life as the phenomenon among existents with which such things as function, needs, alternatives, problems, and solutions enter the world at all. All of those features are in stark contrast to inanimate matter in our ordinary experience and as in our modern science. In the case of human selves and lives, all of those glories are reached in coordination with others, living or long deceased, and humans have greater choice than other animals in shaping longer arcs in their lives. As with Rand's ethics, Rationality remains the overarching human virtue, although, into my reasons for that there is not only the instrumental value of rationality (solo and in cooperation) for successful continuation of life, but the inherent value of rationality to human self and life, including joint participation of rationality in lives and selves. Rationality is inherently self-directed, so independence in a social environment (in thought and in making a life) remains a virtue, as with Rand. Creativity and productivity and integrity and benevolence and voluntary association are also part and parcel of my broadened notion of rational human nature.
There is an additional distinctive feature in Rand's general characterization of life I'd like address: Life is an end in itself. I endorse that characterization also, although what constitutes individual human life is deeper in its connections to others, than in Rand's characterization of it, and that is so, even though in maturity choice is a factor in which relationships are instituted. Rand had the circumstance that life is an end in itself in a beautiful dual role in her ethics. (i) Directed to one's general moral conduct in all circumstances, it has one rightly treating oneself as an end in itself; self-interest is the ultimate criterion for any decisions or actions. (ii) Directed to one's conduct towards others, Rand adds that they too are ends in themselves and that conformance to individual rights correctly has each treated as an end in himself and makes possible each continuing self-direction all together in coordination.
The second (ii) is correct within my system. The first (i) is not, because self-interest (or other-interest) are inadequate moral criteria stemming from inadequate understanding of human nature.
Life known in my basic metaphysical frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specifications. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue.
- whYNOT, StrictlyLogical and tadmjones
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CORRECTION: "As with Rand's ethics, Rationality remains the overarching human virtue, although, into my reasons for that there is not only the instrumental value of rationality (solo and in cooperation) for successful continuation of life, but the inherent value of rationality to human self and life, including joint participation of rationality in lives and selves."
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On 1/18/2020 at 5:19 PM, Boydstun said:
2/16/08
Rand observes that “the choice of the beneficiary of moral values . . . . has to be derived and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system” (VoS x). Rand offers arguments and a conception of morality in support of the conclusion that “the actor must [should] always be the beneficiary of his action” (VoS x).
“Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man’s survival,” and this is the case “by the grace of reality and the nature of life” (VoS 23). “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose” (AS 1017).
Rand argues that “man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge” (VoS 20); that conceptual thought is an activity of individual minds (AS 1017); that “thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness” (VoS 20); that “the act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional” (20–21); that “the men who choose to think and to produce . . . . are pursuing a course of action proper to man” (23); “that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself . . . and, therefore, that [each] man must [should] live for his own sake” (27).
The individual’s own life “is the source, not only of all his values, but of his capacity to value. Therefore, the value he grants to others is only a consequence, an extension, a secondary projection of the primary value which is himself” (VoS 47).
Furthermore: “Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate, and contradict the fact of its own existence . . .” (AS 1014 [hb], boldface added).
As noted earlier in this thread, Robert Hartford contributed a paper last spring to The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 8(2):291–303. The title of his paper is “Objectivity and the Proof of Egoism.” In this paper, he argues that “the foundation of an objectively verifiable ethical system is the [voluntary] acceptance and use of the principle of holding one’s own life as the motive and goal of one’s action” (302).
Robert argues that if one rejects Rand’s principle of holding one’s own life as the motive and goal of one’s action, then one is contradicting a fact about the very mind rejecting the principle. That fact is the biological role that the mind has in human life. “The mind has unsurpassed power to select action that results in pursuit and achievement of values, pursuit and achievement of that which benefits one’s life” (300). If one selects an action that is known—known consciously or subconsciously—to be harmful to one’s life, then some aspect of one’s mind is implicitly acting in a way at odds with the fundamental role of the mind in human life. The mind is then in a contradictory state. It strives to achieve what benefits the life of the person whose mind it is while at the same time, in the particular choice, it strives to harm that person. Therefore, one should always select one’s action with one’s own life as the motive and goal of the action.
I would say that the biological role of the mind is not only to enable the survival of the individual whose mind it is, but to enable the survival of other members of the human species. So I don’t think Robert’s proof works. The faulty premise in Robert’s argument is appealed to in the complex weave of Rand’s argument as well. How wide are the ramifications of this flaw in her argument? I wonder.
On 1/18/2020 at 5:28 PM, Boydstun said:3/3/08
A Rejection of Egoism
Concerning animals and plants, we correctly think that “whatever stunts their growth or threatens their lives is bad for them. They are the sorts of things that can be healthy or diseased, and it is good for them to the healthy, bad to be diseased, to be stunted, to die before they mature. To determine what is good for some living S, we need to know what sort of thing S is—whether it is a human being, a horse, or a tree. If there are things that are good for all human beings, their goodness must be grounded not only in the properties of those things, but also in the properties of human beings” (WGW 88).
“Organic development, health, and proper physical functioning are . . . important components of human flourishing; but for us, faring well includes healthy psychological development and functioning as well” (WGW 5).
“Truths about what is good, when they are made about human beings, are truths about what is good for us . . . and must therefore be grounded in facts about our physical and psychological functioning. A theory about what is good that is applicable to human life must rest on ideas about the healthy development and exercise of the human mind” (WGW 90; further, 92–94, 131–66).
I have been quoting from Richard Kraut’s new book What Is Good and Why, subtitled The Ethics of Well-Being. It was issued by Harvard University Press in 2007. (Psssst—This is a very fine book.) The picture composed by those quotations will look familiar to readers who have studied Ayn Rand’s ethics.
One more from Prof. Kraut:
“When we do good, we do good for someone. And so, in addition to our deciding which things are good, we also must answer the question ‘Whose good should one promote?’ There are many simple formulas that propose an answer to that question. The two that are most prominent are egoism and utilitarianism.
“Egoism holds that there is only one person whose good should be the direct object of one’s actions: oneself. It allows one to take an indirect interest in others, and to promote their well-being, but only to the extent that doing so is a means towards the maximization of what is good for oneself” (WGW 39).
Before explaining Kraut’s reasons for rejecting egoism, I want to begin to review Rand’s arguments for her type of ethical egoism. Within the 1957 exposition of her ethics, Rand writes:
“Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of its own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain” (AS 1014 [hb]).
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live” (AS 1014).
“To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-Esteem . . . . These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues . . . : rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride” (AS 1018).
“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value . . .—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character . . . —that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man . . . has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational man he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself . . .” (AS 1020–21; see also 1056–58).
In the 1964 Introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand observes that “the choice of the beneficiary of moral values . . . . has to be derived and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system. / The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action . . .” (x). I discern three intertwined strands in Rand’s defense of ethical egoism. I will be focusing on her arguments that move from agent egoism to beneficiary egoism. It is only when the latter is joined to the former that the theory should be called ethical egoism.
Strand One
In Rand’s 1957 presentation, the first move to beneficiary egoism is in the first paragraph of her text that I quoted above. It is there asserted that if one does not hold one’s own life as the motive and goal of one’s actions, one is acting in a self-destructive way. In The Fountainhead Rand wrote that “[man’s] moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others” (740 [hb]). One illustration of the self-destructive path set upon by doing otherwise is Peter Keating’s being dissuaded by his mother from marrying the woman he loves. It will be argued, however, that there are some moral choices in which one’s immediate motive is the good of others, yet that choice is not self-destructive. In ordinary circumstances, I tell people the truth. My immediate motive is often their self-interest, not mine; I don’t want them to be taking up falsehoods.
Kraut articulates this apparent defect of egoism as follows:
“When everything goes well for a child and he has all the emotional resources he needs to interact with his community in ways that are best for himself, he will have some direct interest in some members of that community—namely, those who have manifestly expressed their love for him in ways that benefit him. So no one whose early education is as good for him as it can be will emerge from childhood as a person who is inclined to act as egoism says he should act. So fortunate a young adult will gladly help others for their sake . . . . Egoism tells him to extirpate this desire” (WGW 40–41; further, 48–65, 211–14, 231, 238–43).
I observe that when one chooses to tell the truth in ordinary circumstances or to render aid to others, one is engaged not only as an agent egoist. One is not only following one’s own judgment about what to do. One is also choosing in the particular occasion what is the good state of affairs for individuals in general.
Help another “if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. . . . Man’s fight against suffering” is a value (AS 1059–60). In this passage, Rand is commending acting on one’s pleasure in a value-operation not one’s own. It seems to me that this is an occasion of egoistic action that is not directly for one’s own sake, only indirectly so. One has the pleasure directly, but the object of one’s intelligence yielding the pleasure is a value-operation not one’s own and a value-operation whose aim is success (e.g., truth or relief from suffering) for one not oneself. Then, strictly speaking, Rand’s is an egoism that falls outside Kraut’s definition of egoism.
Kraut’s definition is more narrow than the usual definition for ethical theory. It is surely correct to call Rand’s ethics an egoism, an integrated agent-beneficiary egoism. (Objectivist conceptions of egoism are usual. See N. Branden VOS 57; L. Peikoff Om. // 65, OPAR 230–31; T. Smith VV 154–55, ARNE 23–24.) Kraut opposes also this theory of ethics, which he takes to be less than full-fledged egoism. Rand holds that one should never sacrifice one’s own true interests to those of another. Kraut observes that “that thesis holds that one has a special normative relationship to oneself. It places the self ahead of others . . . .” (WGW 53). It gives priority always to striving for one’s own good, rather than striving for the good of others. Kraut rejects the ethics of uniform self-priority. “There is no reason always to place oneself first in situations of conflict, or always to refrain from making large sacrifices for the good of others” (WGW 54; further, 180–83, 191–96).
Rand writes concerning sacrifice:
“If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is” (AS 1028).
“If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat” (AS 1029).
As an example of self-sacrifice, Kraut poses the following:
“Suppose a parent, to earn enough money to give his child an expensive education, gives up a job that makes full use of his talents and in its place accepts a post that is intellectually and emotionally deadening and physically dangerous, but provides a large and steady income” (WGW 181).
Kraut counts this as an example of self-sacrifice. To any ethical theory that would count it as not sacrificial, Kraut poses a challenge. Suppose the child who receives the education is an ungrateful child, who says he owes his parent nothing in return, that the parent was satisfying the parent’s own hierarchy of values, so there was no real self-sacrifice in the parent letting go of the career that would have been better for the parent.
It is possible that on Rand’s egoism, a parent who forfeited the better career for the purpose of a better education for the child would necessarily be making an inverted-value sacrifice, the forfeiture of what ought to be valued more in comparison to something that ought to be valued less, though highly. That is, the better career for the parent should necessarily be valued more highly by the parent than the better education for the child. Whether such a conclusion follows from Rand’s ethics, I will leave undetermined; thoughts from readers would be appreciated. What is clear is that a Randian should hold the child’s ungratefulness to be prima facie wrong for the child and a wrong against the parent because the value of what the parent forfeited for the child’s education was enormous, regardless of the possibility that the parent valued the latter over the former.
I concluded above that Rand’s conception of holding one’s own life “as the motive and goal” of one’s actions and never placing “[one’s] prime goal within the persons of others” does not entail always taking one’s own interests as the direct object of one’s actions. This further undermines the ungrateful child’s rationale. The direct motive for the parent’s momentous choice could be the child’s well-being, even if that choice also serves the parent’s well-being.
Strand Two
The first strand in Rand’s move from agent egoism to beneficiary egoism was the thesis that if one does not hold ones own life as the motive and goal of one’s actions (at least indirectly), one is acting in a self-destructive way. The second strand, wound together with the first, is that if one does not hold one’s life as the motive and goal of one’s actions, one is acting in a disintegrated way, and integrated life is better life.
All living organisms are engaged in continual integrated actions suited to their individual survival or the survival of their species. Deterioration of an organism’s ability to perform its integrated repertoire of actions is a loosening of the tight organization required for its continued life or the continuation of its species. Rand draws attention to the overarching value of the survival of the individual organism that is served by its integrated repertoire of actions suited to its kind. (She leaves out of the frame of attention the overarching value of the propagation of the species that is served by the repertoire of the individual organism.)
Consider the repertoire of the marine snail Pleurobranchea. The nervous systems of these animals are much simpler than the mammalian central nervous system, but they are sufficiently complex to coordinate the behavioral sequences known as fixed action patterns. Those are inherited stereotypical patterns of behavior (such as egg-laying) consisting of several distinct steps that either together form a coordinated sequence or do not take place at all. It has been determined that the fixed action patterns characteristic of Pleurobranchea are organized neurologically into a definite hierarchy: feeding is dominant over righting, gill and siphon withdrawal, or mating; episodic egg-laying is dominant over feeding; escape swimming is dominant over all other behaviors.
Humans have sensations of pleasure and pain. These are signs of the body’s welfare or injury. In addition to bodily pleasure-pain systems, we have emotional systems. Rand conceives joy and suffering as fundamental emotions that estimate whether something furthers one’s life or threatens it. Which particular things emotions will signal as good or as bad will be shaped by one’s unique past experience and value judgments. If one has taken up values opposing one’s self-interest—not only self-sacrifice as a value, but values contradictory, values impossible, or values sheltered from rational assessment—then suffering and destruction will be the results. On the other hand, if one chooses to value the full use of one’s rational mind, to value the possible, the productive, and the self-beneficial, then there is fair promise of life and happiness (AS 1020–22).
Just as the organs and systems of the human body must act in a properly coordinated way if they are to effect the end-in-itself that is the life of the individual organism, so one’s consciously directed actions must be properly organized if one is to achieve well the end-in-itself that is the conscious life of the individual human being. Rand identified seven coordinated patterns of volitional actions necessary for one’s realistically best life. Those are her seven cardinal virtues I listed in the root post of this thread. (David Kelley has argued that an eighth cardinal virtue, sister to productivity, naturally issues from Rand’s ethics and conception of human existence. That virtue is benevolence. This addition is argued in his essay “Unrugged Individualism” [1996]). These virtues are defended as general principles, good guides for any individual. Ethical theory, on Rand’s account, tells one what are the main right values and virtues and their rationale. It tells one also who is rightly the primary beneficiary of one’s agency.
Kraut argues that philosophy can help answer “What is good?” but it cannot help answer “Whose good should I be serving?” (WGW 39–65, 208–13, 255–57). He argues that there are many proper answers to that second question, so an ethical theory that purports a uniquely correct answer to it must have gone wrong. The answer that one should always promote one’s own good is incorrect by overgeneralization. He recognizes that there are circumstances in which there is no one’s good besides one’s own that one should promote, but those circumstances are not typical. Contrary to Kraut, I think, as in Strand One, that promotion of the good of other persons can be directly for their sake, yet one can be holding in an integrated way to the overarching good for oneself, the overarching primary good of one’s own life and happiness.
One does stand in a special normative relation to oneself. Mature and healthy individuals are constituted—and Kraut also takes this for true—so as to love themselves, to take care of themselves, and to act for their own benefit. But Kraut allows for the possibility, when one has reached adulthood, of properly turning one’s life into a purely instrumental value serving the good of definite others (WGW 48–53). This extreme possibility is not cashed out in terms of a real-world circumstance in which it would be proper. I think, as Rand thought, that such an agent would not be self-harmonious, so, would not be flourishing.
Kraut does think philosophy can help answer “What is good?” and I want to give at least a peek at the fruits of his labor. Recall that Kraut maintains that the good is the flourishing of living things. The salient components he finds constituting human flourishing are: autonomy (WGW 196–201), cognitive skills (164–66), affects expressing rational assessments (153–58), affectionate relationships (161–63), honesty (192–93, 257–61), and justice (194–96, 225–34).
Strand Three
Rand writes that “man’s life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling, and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life” (AS 1014).
If one aims to live and live well, then man’s life must be one’s standard of morality. Part of the nature of man’s life, in Rand’s conception, is that it is life of individuals in which each is organized to be an end in himself existing for his own sake. That is how human beings are outfitted by biological nature, and in the ways that are open to their choice, that is how they should organize themselves.
Morality can be put to various purposes. The proper one, in Rand’s view, is to provide “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life” (VOS 13).
Kraut notes that the term moral is often used by way of contrast to terms like prudential, self-interested, and selfish. He allows that it is useful to have the term moral for distinguishing between behavior that benefits others in contrast to behavior that benefits oneself, but he observes that “this way of talking has the unfortunate effect of making self-interested actions and concern for one’s own good dishonorable, or in any case of secondary importance” (WGW 256). He takes both the moral and the prudential to be genres of the good.
The good, in Kraut’s view, is the flourishing of the living. Rand stresses more than Kraut that organisms are organized so as to survive. She also stresses more than Kraut that individual human beings are by nature ends in themselves.
Kraut makes the good point that by citing facts of nature—of plants and animals and the powers nature has given humans—he is not maintaining that “what is good for us is whatever is natural for us, and whatever we are born with must be used” (WGW 146). We might correctly conclude that some of our natural powers are bad for us. But it is not plausible that many or all of them are bad for us.
“It would be foolish to begin with the assumption that whereas it is good for all other living things to flourish, it is not good for us to flourish. After all, flourishing consists in the growth and development of the capacities of a living thing: why should that be good for plants and animals, but not for us? . . . If a theory of goodness can fit its account of human well-being into a larger framework that applies to the entire natural [biological] world, that gives it an advantage over any theory that holds ‘G is good for S’ is one kind of relationship for human beings and a different kind for all other creatures” (GWG 147–48).That merit of Kraut’s theory holds for Rand’s as well.
The third strand in the cord by which Rand ties beneficiary egoism to agency egoism is the stress she lays on the self-sufficiency of organisms in general and individual humans in particular. There is much to be said for this and against this. Not today.
The preceding pair of studies of mine, joining and criticizing Ayn Rand in her theory of value, theory of moral value, and her ethical egoism were written 14–16 years ago. Since then I developed my own metaphysics, also both joining and criticizing Rand in some of her fundamentals. My account is in the OL thread "These Hours of Resonant Existence" and in the links I included therein. I have not changed my mind about anything I wrote in the 2008 studies I have quoted in this post. But now I have the affirmative alternative, neighboring Rand's ethical theory, that I think more correct and best replacement for hers. In the OL thread "These Hours of Resonant Existence," I wrote out Chapter X of the monograph.
Although my account builds on a social nature of human individuals running deeper than social nature as characterized by Rand, I land in much agreement with Rand on general characterization of life as self-generated and self-maintaining action and as teleological action (even for vegetative actions such as gravitropic plant roots) and with life as the phenomenon among existents with which such things as function, needs, alternatives, problems, and solutions enter the world at all. All of those features are in stark contrast to inanimate matter in our ordinary experience and as in our modern science. In the case of human selves and lives, all of those glories are reached in coordination with others, living or long deceased, and humans have greater choice than other animals in shaping longer arcs in their lives. As with Rand's ethics, Rationality remains the overarching human virtue, although, into my reasons for that there is not the instrumental value of rationality (solo and in cooperation) for successful continuation of life, but the inherent value of rationality to human self and life, including joint participation of rationality in lives and selves. Rationality is inherently self-directed, so independence in a social environment (in thought and in making a life) remains a virtue, as with Rand. Creativity and productivity and integrity and voluntary association are also part and parcel of my broadened notion of rational human nature.
There is an additional distinctive feature in Rand's general characterization of life I'd like address: Life is an end in itself. I endorse that characterization also, although what constitutes individual human life is deeper in its connections to others, than in Rand's characterization of it, and that is so, even though in maturity choice is a factor in which relationships are instituted. Rand had the circumstance that life is an end in itself in a beautiful dual role in her ethics. (i) Directed to one's general moral conduct in all circumstances, it has one rightly treating oneself as an end in itself; self-interest is the ultimate criterion for any decisions or actions. (ii) Directed to one's conduct towards others, Rand adds that they too are ends in themselves and that conformance to individual rights correctly has each treated as an end in himself and makes possible each continuing self-direction all together in coordination.
The second (ii) is correct within my system. The first (i) is not, because self-interest (or other-interest) are inadequate moral criteria stemming from inadequate understanding of human natue. As I wrote earlier in "These Hours of Resonant Existence" X:
QuoteLife known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
QuoteCaring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue.
This broader rationality and the individual human end-in-itself that I embrace is an extra-easy fit with respect for the rights of other individuals.
I am sorry that I've needed to go ahead and develop and present the ethical sector of Resonant Existence in such an unscholarly way. I'd have hoped to set it out with the pageant of all previous thought on ethics and situation with respect to other ethicists, those leading in the philosophical profession today. But there is that cessation thing for each life, and I wanted to at least get hold of and share in these hours we have this outline for this vital subject.
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On 4/26/2024 at 6:52 PM, SocratesJr said:
So Kant was right.
On 4/29/2024 at 7:10 AM, Boydstun said:I had recently written:
“Ratios are in the magnitude structure of the world, independently of discernment by intelligent consciousness (with its devised measurement scales, coordinate systems, and so forth). However, there is no such thing as the proportionate in a world not faced by the organizations that are living beings."*
To which SJ responded: “So Kant was right.”*
Wrong. How disappointing to Kant were he to hear such a report of his view on space, after all his argumentation and reiterations that the magnitude structure of the world (i.e. Euclidean geometry) is not independent of intelligent consciousness.
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On 4/28/2024 at 9:47 PM, SocratesJr said:
Yes, this is leading to big problems for your metaphysics. . . .
On 4/29/2024 at 6:46 AM, Boydstun said:To my recent remark “Under that good principle [‘nothing comes from nothing’], the conception that an elementary particle came from vacuum space while maintaining that such space is nothing is false,” SocratesJr ignores the qualifier “while maintaining that such space is nothing”.
SJ writes: “Yes, this is leading to big problems for your metaphysics. Because it's a fact (A is A) that virtual particles come and go from empty space. The Casimir Effect demonstrates a tiny attractive force between two closely spaced metal plates. QFT explains this force arising from the exchange of virtual photons between the plates, even though no real photons are emitted. The Lamb Shift observed a slight shift in the energy levels of hydrogen atoms. The shift can be explained by the interaction of the electron with the virtual "cloud" of particles surrounding it.”*
I do not maintain that space is nothing. I’ve written a hundred times to the contrary. One did not need to wait on the discovery of quantum field theory and the richness of the vacuum to know that empty space is an existent. Anyone who ever attempted to sit in a chair which had been pulled away should face up to the fact that empty space is not nothing.
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From These Hours of Resonant Existence
QuoteIII. Divisions of Existence
One exhaustive division of Existence is by the of-existence existents and the existents that are not also of-existence. Another division of Existence—I hope to be exhaustive—is by most basic kinds, for which my offer is: entity, passage, situation, and character. Call those the categories of existence. One exhaustive division of existents that are concrete is between the actual and the potential.
Actual concretes have potentials, and they have formalities. An iron skillet in my hand has weight, shape, durability, susceptibility to rust, and potential functions. It can be warmed on the stove, and the heat of its handle transported into my hand. The skillet is a concrete entity, and it has concrete passage, situation, and character. It has concrete potentials. Let us reserve the term potentials for concretes, in contradistinction to possibilities.
Any concrete has formalities. There are formalities belonging to concretes, actual and potential. Flat on a countertop, my right hand has four spaces between my five fingers. My hand in umbrella formation engaged in picking up a glass by its top has five fingers and five spaces between them, not four. Those are formalities belonging to concretes. Mine is not a traditional use of the term formality, which has been used entirely as in contrast to the concrete. I shall go along with the usual contrast of the abstract from the concrete, but there are formalities I take as belonging to concretes. Brought into the shops of the abstract, belonging-formalities can be wrought into abstract formalities often useful in science and satisfying in themselves. Call such abstract formalities “tooling-formalities.”
Although potentials and some formalities belong to concretes and although potentials are concretes, potentials and formalities have causal powers only via actual concretes. Potentials and formalities can effect only through their grasp and use in the world by intelligence.
Empirical science is the rational discipline of learning the natures of concretes, saliently, their potentials. Mathematics is the rational discipline of learning the formalities of situation. Logic is the rational discipline of learning the formalities of character and passage.
12 hours ago, SocratesJr said:The idea that the forms or formalities inherent in the physical world alone determine human knowledge would pose significant challenges to mankind's ability to discover truths that require going beyond direct empirical observation and formulating abstract conceptual models or hypotheses.
If human beings could only passively derive knowledge from the physical formalities present in their immediate empirical experience, without the capacity for active conceptual reasoning and hypothesis formation, then major scientific advances like resolving the heliocentric versus geocentric models of the solar system would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Contrary SJ's insinuation, I did not say "alone".
Furthermore, in no way did I state, imply, or insinuate that pickup of belonging-formalities were passive. Taking off my left glove, turning it inside out, and finding it fits my right hand is very active. So is every example I have ever given of discernments of belonging-formalities.
For the most part, SJ's criticisms of my philosophy of Resonant Existence pertain to positions taken in other philosophies, not ones taken in mine.
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I had recently written:
“Ratios are in the magnitude structure of the world, independently of discernment by intelligent consciousness (with its devised measurement scales, coordinate systems, and so forth). However, there is no such thing as the proportionate in a world not faced by the organizations that are living beings."*
To which SJ responded: “So Kant was right.”*
Wrong. How disappointing to Kant were he to hear such a report of his view on space, after all his argumentation and reiterations that the magnitude structure of the world (i.e. Euclidean geometry) is not independent of intelligent consciousness.
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To my recent remark “Under that good principle [‘nothing comes from nothing’], the conception that an elementary particle came from vacuum space while maintaining that such space is nothing is false,” SocratesJr ignores the qualifier “while maintaining that such space is nothing”.
SJ writes: “Yes, this is leading to big problems for your metaphysics. Because it's a fact (A is A) that virtual particles come and go from empty space. The Casimir Effect demonstrates a tiny attractive force between two closely spaced metal plates. QFT explains this force arising from the exchange of virtual photons between the plates, even though no real photons are emitted. The Lamb Shift observed a slight shift in the energy levels of hydrogen atoms. The shift can be explained by the interaction of the electron with the virtual "cloud" of particles surrounding it.”*
I do not maintain that space is nothing. I’ve written a hundred times to the contrary. One did not need to wait on the discovery of quantum field theory and the richness of the vacuum to know that empty space is an existent. Anyone who ever attempted to sit in a chair which had been pulled away should face up to the fact that empty space is not nothing.
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On 4/24/2024 at 3:37 PM, Ogg_Vorbis said:
. . . A deep sense of guilt whenever I could not identify a reason behind a desire, and a stiffling of any natural ambition, natural pleasures of life, in the name of reason and not living irrationally. Whim worship, I feared it like the plague.
. . .
I'm anxious to discover other answers to life's questions. So here I am. I may have a lot of silly questions in the future. Bare with me.
"A deep sense of guilt whenever I could not identify a reason behind a desire, and a stifling of any natural ambition, natural pleasures of life, in the name of reason and not living irrationally. Whim worship, I feared it like the plague." I never felt that way when I was an Objectivist. You remind me of the evangelists who tell tall tales of the sins they committed and misery they suffered before they were "saved"—in your case, before you were no longer an Objectivist.
"I'm anxious to discover other answers to life's questions. So here I am. I may have a lot of silly questions in the future. Bare with me." No. Bear with me. You are here to preach, starting with disingenuous questions.
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Introduction to "Necessity and Form in Truths"
Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – A
Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – A'
Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – B
What are the right relationships between metaphysics today and modern science? The Analytic-Synthetic dichotomy of the Logical Empiricists and Quine’s refutation and replacement of their dichotomy are bound up with contemporary skepticism towards metaphysics and differing ideas about the relationships of philosophy to science and of logic to reality.
Rand took metaphysics to be the study of existence as such, which is faithful to a traditional conception of metaphysics as the study of being as being. Metaphysics so conceived pertains to all things. It pertains to all things in ordinary experience or in science, which latter makes available more experience and more subtle targets of knowledge. I propose that metaphysics can, alongside logic and mathematics, rest on ordinary experience and on information attained in empirical sciences.
Against Kant and others, such as Morganti 2013, I propose that metaphysics need not be a priori to fulfill its distinctive modern functions vis-a-vis other disciplines. Metaphysics can be in important part from reflection on knowledge gotten in those disciplines. Metaphysics can sift for principles to which all rational disciplines and their findings conform or set as norms of performance. Metaphysics can aim for setting the fullest context of knowledge, and that without itself uncovering potentials and limits of concretes as in science. And without itself uncovering possible structure in the formalities of situations as (I say is done) in mathematics. Rather, metaphysics can have the job of forming an explicit widest frame for fuller comprehension of findings in those disciplines. Whether such a metaphysics can also set the reality-base for logic employed in ordinary, scientific, and mathematical thought is yet another criterion for the goodness of the metaphysics.
Metaphysics need not and should not in these activities also propose any new ontological finds deeper than anything found in the sciences, such as substances other than those of chemistry, physics, and science of materials. Metaphysics should not try to cook up some special metaphysical concept of time, but address only the time of physics and ordinary experience. One may and should look, I suggest, in the course of any experience or inquiry, to metaphysics for the integrated whole that one is holding, sourced from all areas of experience.
Rand and Peikoff, however, maintained that the concept existence, as one might enlist it in the assertion that “existence exists” or “there are existents” does not mean specifically physical existence (ITOE App. 245–48). In their view, it means only a “that” exists; it means something exists. If that is all one means by “existence” as such, then I say metaphysics could not be a keeper of widest context and general norms worth employing.
One does not need to have language and express understanding that existence is what one is taking physical actions with and in or that existence is identity in order to implicitly know “existence” is those things in all one’s early activities and experience (and one doesn’t need to have the concept of experience to be having experiences). Learning of alleged sorts of existence that are not physical existence comes later, after acquiring language. To know that existence is physical existence—to know unsupported objects fall, for example—is prelinguistic. We have scientific developmental cognitive psychology on that now for decades. It is far past time to leave behind our folk conjectures on such early developments supplemented with old psychological conjectures of, say, William James.
When I was teaching adults to fetch a ball I rolled across the floor, I was engaging physical existents, and when I say “existence exists,” I am generalizing from such physical specifics, and I still mean them, such physical things, first and foremost by “existents.” Under explicit assertion, “existence exists” is assertion of some physical existence. If we reject the notion of a physicality-not-yet-committed “existence” in “existence exists,” it is more plausible that a Randian metaphysics can be an integrated unity from all experience and thought and a pertinent constraint-from-the-whole on the various parts of reality for pruning some absences of fact alleged as fact.
An example of such pruning would be from the ancient metaphysical principle “nothing comes from nothing.” Under that good principle, the conception that an elementary particle came from vacuum space while maintaining that such space is nothing is false. Again, that all mass-energy of the universe came into existence from nothing preceding it can be pruned as false. Ex nihilo creation of the world by an intelligent being is quashed by good metaphysics.
Yet metaphysics can still have things to learn from advancing physics. When physics explicated and experimentally set up situations of chaos in the classical regime in the last three decades of the twentieth century, philosophy could wake up to the aspect that fully deterministic situations do not always allow of realistic in-principle predictability and that ability to control the chaotic action did not require significant predictability.
From our widest-world assessment of advances in science for their import for metaphysics, however, we must understand the science for ourselves, or at least get report of the science by a qualified authority. One should not just take on board the pronouncements of others about the import for metaphysics.
In Rand’s metaphysics, existents as such have broad subdivisions such as actual or potential, current or past or future, entity or its attribute or activity (animate or inanimate), individual or collection or assembly, natural or man-made, causal (often scientifically lawful) determinations of entities or of their attributes or activities. In Rand’s metaphysics also, existents have magnitude structures we implicitly capture in perceptual-level similarities and in our concepts, concepts in her analysis, being a type of set implicitly structured by suspension of particular measure values within characteristic ranges along dimensions common among collections of particular existents.
Right metaphysics can set a science in right relations to other sciences and set out its right relations to reality. A metaphysics such as Rand’s can be a protector of science by defending realism in science and by refuting mystical and skeptical degradations of science. Metaphysics can tackle integration of the specific findings of all the different sciences, assimilating them into a comprehensive network of conceptual dependencies. Then too, general metaphysics can offer integration across and guidance to detailed philosophies of each science.
Kant would have metaphysics be conceived as “nothing other than the philosophy of the fundamental principles of our cognition” (1763 2:283). Furthermore, two dozen years later: “Metaphysics is a speculative cognition by reason that . . . rises entirely above being instructed by experience. It is cognition through mere concepts (not, like mathematics, cognition through the application of concepts to intuitions)” (KrV Bxiv).
Rand, and I also, and many moderns deny there is any such thing as a priori knowledge, knowledge entirely independent of any experience. Rather, I say, any knowledge we have derives ultimately from our interactions with the physical world and coordinations with other people in the world. That is the source of our knowledge in the physical sciences as well as in mathematics and logic. This is not to deny that some of our rational thinking is intimately tied to the capacity for thought; it is only to say that that thinking, such as deductive inference, is not entirely unentangled with physical experience in its emergence and continuance (contra Ichikawa and Jarvis 2013 and Casullo 2012).
Kant had logic as a priori and as analytic. Logic, in his view, provides the way to make previous knowledge distinct (Lu-Adler 2018, 90). That is the facility of logic as analytic. Kant stressed that logic (i.e., deduction) does not have for its function or power the gaining of new knowledge, and logic does its job of rendering distinctness without rendering new content.
I notice that the notion of logic providing only improvement in old knowledge does not in fact entail that logic is a priori. Contrary to Kant’s view, analyticity might obtain even were that skill to have issued from interactions with the world, not from dictates and organization of Kantian faculties of reason and understanding. I should mention too that right philosophical analyses of conceptual dependencies, which is so much a task for philosophy, is more than being analytic in the sense of drawing out implications of whatever stipulations. Conceptual dependencies of concepts won through ordinary experience, science, and mathematics trace reality in our grasp.
Kant’s reason for thinking that pure logic and pure mathematics must be a priori is because the only way he imagines they could issue from empirical interactions is as empirical generalizations, whose character cannot yield the manifest absolute impossibility-of-exception universality had by logical and mathematical principles. Aristotle might enter the friendly point: “To accept as a sufficient starting point that something always either is or happens in a certain way, is not to take things up in the right way.” (Phys. 252a32–33).
“If we now put aside all cognition that we have to borrow from objects, and merely reflect on the use just of the understanding in general, we discover those rules which are necessary without qualification, for every purpose and without regard to any particular objects of thought, because without them we would not think at all. Thus we can have insight into these rules a priori, i.e., independently of all experience, because they contain merely the conditions of the use of the understanding in general, whether pure or empirical, without distinction among its objects. And from this it follows at the same time that the universal and necessary rules of thought in general can concern merely its form and not in any way its matter.” (Kant/Jäsche 1800, 12; cf. KrV A52–55 B76–79)
“The boundary of logic is determined quite precisely by the fact that logic is a science that provides nothing but a comprehensive exposition and strict proof of the formal rules of all thought [including discursive thought not entirely independent of the senses]” (KrV Bix). “This science of the necessary laws of the understanding and of reason in general, or what is one and the same, of the mere form of thought as such, we call logic.” (Kant/Jäsche 1800, 13). Logic is a canon “and as a canon of the understanding and of reason it may not borrow any principles either from any science or from any experience; it must contain nothing but laws a priori . . . ” (ibid.).
“Logic is a science of reason, not as mere form, but also as to matter; a science a priori of the necessary laws of thought, not in regard to particular objects, however, but to all objects in general; – hence a science of the correct use of the understanding and of reason in general, not subjectively, however, i.e., not according to empirical (psychological) principles for how the understanding does think, but objectively, i.e., according to principles a priori for how it ought to think.” (Kant/Jäsche 1800, 16)
Judgments might fail to adhere to logic set down from the faculty of reason, Kant thought, because of unrecognized spoiling influences from the senses on judgment (Kant/Jäsche 1800, 37; see also KrV A293–94 B350–51). The sensory inputs themselves are not erroneous, in Kant’s view, for only judgments can be true or false. Kant is here staying near Descartes’ view that errors all arise from allowing our will to outrun our understanding.
One might think it a bit odd that logic should be among the norms for right judgments without its principles having arisen from interactions with the world. More basically, one should question, as did Bolzano, how logic can be normative for cognition if logic is not for the purpose of attaining truth.
Kant took some experience to be necessary in order that reason get going in logic. This is analogous to the old Leibniz thought that some sensory experience is needed to trigger access to innate ideas. Not natural or popular logic, but “only artificial or scientific logic [not natural or popular logic] deserves this name [logic], then, as a science of the necessary and universal rules of thought, which can and must be cognized a priori, independently of the natural use of the understanding and of reason in concreto, although these rules can first be found only through observation of that natural use.” (Kant/Jäsche 1800, 17)
Our contemporary students of elementary logic may add to Bolzano: right deductions aid in the pursuit of truth only by giving the rules for preserving truth of premises to truth of conclusions. Necessity in deductive logic, I should clarify, is not that we necessarily follow the rules of valid inference. No, necessity in deductive logic is otherwise in two ways: (i) If we want to preserve truth of premisses to conclusions, we must follow the rules of logical deduction. That is a necessity-for, a necessity for attaining an end. That has nothing to do with the other necessity in deductive logic: (ii) Rules of deductive inference are necessarily right. Rand could say, and I do say, that this necessity, a necessity-that, is from the obdurate everywhere fact that existence exists and is identity and logic is conformed to that circumstance, the widest necessity-that. That first-figure syllogisms are necessarily right is due to the fact that identity (here, particular-to-classed collection character) is a formal feature belonging to concrete existents (once collections are rendered classes and particulars their members).
I say contra Kant: The necessities in the formal disciplines stem ultimately from formalities that are not sourced most fundamentally in mental operations. The necessity-thats of formal disciplines attach to existence and to effective mental operations forged by utility of those formalities. Formalities belonging to situation (mathematics) and to passage and character (logic) are the Ur-springs of necessities in the formal disciplines. The necessity of truths in the formal disciplines—necessity absolute and differing from necessities in empirical generalizations—are inherited from the necessity-that of existence and of the formalities belonging to fundamental categories of existence.
That Existence exists, I should add, is true because it states a fact. It is not true only because any item of thought can be mapped onto itself. That is to say: That Existence exists is not true due to it being a tautology. Rather, that things are susceptible to our mapping them onto themselves is because Existence exists and is identity and part of that identity is the affordance (by highly intelligent animals) of having itself mapped onto itself.
(To be continued.)
References
Aristotle c. 348–322 B.C.E. Physics. J. Sachs, translator. 2011. In Aristotle’s Physics – A Guided Study. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Casullo, A. 2012. Essays on A Priori Knowledge and Justification. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ichikawa, J.J. and B.W. Jarvis 2013. The Rules of Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lu-Adler, H. 2018. Kant and the Science of Logic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kant, I. 1763. Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality. In Immanuel Kant – Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770. D. Walford and R. Meerbote, translators. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
——. 1781(A), 1787(B). Critique of Pure Reason. W. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Indianapolis: Hackett.
——. 1800. Jäsche Logic. J.M. Young, translator. 1992. In Immanual Kant – Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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1 hour ago, SocratesJr said:
Aristotle didn't believe that where there is life there are needs?
Print my whole statement. No, nevermind. I'll not bother with you further.
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12 hours ago, SocratesJr said:
. . . The Golden Ratio is a natural mathematical pattern that, while linked to our perception of beauty, is not dependent upon human consciousness for its existence.
Ratios are in the magnitude structure of the world, independently of discernment by intelligent consciousness (with its devised measurement scales, coordinate systems, and so forth). However, there is no such thing as the proportionate in a world not faced by the organizations that are living beings.* Where there are no needs, nothing is proportionate or disproportionate. Where there is no life, there are no needs.
Additionally, where there is life, there are needs. Aristotle did not understand this, it seems, given the way he went around projecting teleological causation beyond its proper bounds, which is life (including vegetative life) we know on earth. He projected teleological causes even onto the celestial sphere he and his predecessors thought carried the fixed stars over the night sky, and he projected life and intelligence onto the Primary Mover even while thinking the fixed stars and Prime Mover eternal and not susceptible to corruption or decline, hence without needs.
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1 hour ago, SocratesJr said:
I ran across the following question in a discussion I was having somewhere else: Why is life a value in an atheist universe?
I don't have an answer. Do any of you?
Life is the residence of all value. And the value of all value.
Notice the analogical projection of life into nature of an immaterial god-mind by Plato, Philo, Pseudo-Dionysus, Boethius, Anselm, Avicenna, Albert, Aquinas, and Luther. The apostle Paul writes of “the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein” (Acts 14:15; also Deut. 32:40 and Psalm 18:46). Consider too the breaths of life from God to men (Genesis 2:7 and Psalm 104:30). Aristotle on God’s mind and ours: “And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality” (Metaph. 1072b26–27; also 1022a32 and Top. 136b3–7).
Why do all these impute life to God? Because of a suspicion that life is the source of all value, and God has no value without life. (Full disclosure: if something is alive, it is mortal. So, if God is immortal, It is not living.)
Until life enters the universe, there is no such thing as value (or questions or solutions).
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On 4/20/2024 at 5:05 PM, Boydstun said:
These Hours of Resonant Existence
X. Mortal Life and Care
“Existence exists, we live.” The act of grasping that statement implies that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
There is normativity in that most basic metaphysical frame, with that immediate implication and explication. We are given, dedicated to grasping reality in awareness concerted with other and in coordinated acts with other. This is automatic animal engineering-performance-norm of operation. We are given, already loving truth, truth-getting, act, self, and other.
With later education, we learn that life ends, that it requires maintenance, and in our human case, that it requires production and education and social cooperative conventions. We learn that those means to life require a waking state and adequate sleep. Going beyond the original grasp of life in breath and cry and suckle, learning more of life and its requirements requires some focused effort. The plenty and exuberance of human life of today required individual creativity, initiative, and freedom coordinated at the large social scale by moral- and rights-constraints on treatments of others.
Human moral life arises in the milieu of learned character of life, all within and ever with the basic frame “Existence exists, we live.” In learning life beyond the basic knowing, we can grasp the concept of “alternative” mined by Ayn Rand: Only with advent of the ends-getting organized matter that is life do alternatives enter nature. I observe, in addition: We say that when we've got the accelerator on, a given electron is either going to encounter a positron or not. That saying is true to nature, but it, unlike identity, is not something in nature independently of a striving mind. Either-Or, I wrote in "Existence, We", is based in identities in nature, but is only in nature where living systems are in nature facing nature. That is, the Law of Excluded Middle for thought rises as high-animal mind rises by organic evolutionary layers on vegetative neuronal control systems of animals. The electron will either encounter a positron or it will not, but the electron does not face an alternative of continued existence or not. We see the possibilities, but the electron, unlike a living cell, does not face them. We and all living things face the alternative of continued existence or not, and from that fundamental alternative, all alternative is born.
In moral life, we elect to keep life going, including to keep going life known in the basic frame. Once we have the developed powers, we elect to keep thinking, coordinating, creating, and producing. The moral virtue of truth-telling is rooted in the basic frame, constantly at hand. Life known in the basic frame is striving and growing, and doing so with other. Those were given; they are given engineering specs. Keeping such life operative in oneself is moral life. Striving and growing with other becomes joint thinking and production, and, as well, joint generative, out-flowing love of nature, the creation nature affords, and such love of such selves. Living selves.
Moral life is elected allowance of continued resonance of life among selves. Selves living ever under the alternative of cessation, which is death. The call of moral conduct is the call of life in its form that is living selves.
On 4/22/2024 at 1:17 PM, Boydstun said:The preceding (X) is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. It is not a moral code so far as it is now developed. There are some virtues that may be drawn from this basis, however, and in this it will be helpful to compare with Rand and with Kant.
As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence.
Famously, for part of Rand’s ethical base, she characterized life in complete generality as self-generating and self-maintaining. This she took from standard biology along with the findings that all organismic life is cellular the findings of ontogeny and of evolution from Darwin to the present. It is quite true that self-generation and self-maintenance are features (which is character in my general ontology) of any life. Even if we humans become creators of life from inanimate matter, our success will mean that we created means for the appearance of matter organized such that it is self-generating and self-maintaining. We are relying on that character when we plant, water, and fertilize crops, even if we only dimly notice that the crops do the growing themselves and possess various ranges of adaptability themselves under changes in surrounding conditions.
That living things have functions in their subsystems to the preservation and replication of the whole organism and that living things have powers of self-generation and self-maintenance might better have some elements such as growth drawn out more, but I’ll stay with Rand’s broad meanings of self-generation and self-maintenance. Notice that these steps are not necessarily only suited for a ladder to ethical egoism.
To be a fair characterization of life in general, we must understand “self” in self-generating and self-maintaining in a broad and indeed rather shifty way. Overwhelmingly, life gets started from life. Other life. Self as individual organism and self as its species work back and forth for continuation of those two selves. An individual life can be just a quickly disposable trial tool in the function of preserving the species, although overall, the species requires individual organisms. Of course.
I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one's ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running.
Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. And that means, as stated in the monograph, continuing to pursue the facts and the coordination with others in that pursuit. Rand has it that rationality is our overarching method for getting the facts and making good uses of them. That is fine, but I contest the picture in which one was just going along alone rationally pursuing the facts and how to use them and then as it were noticed, secondarily, that the existence of other people is enjoyable, knowledge-boosting, and economically advantageous.
The higher intelligence of humans does indeed have launchings spontaneously in individuals. Young children will spontaneously seriate a group of rods according to their lengths; none of our closest primate pals do that. But we have been in intelligent human company all along our individual active existence, from precautions and playing to learning common nouns, proper names, verbs, classification, and predication. Rationality is profoundly social in one from the get-go, even as its acquisition by each person consists in individual facility in its operation independently of direction from others and self-direction in seeking information or specialized skills from others
Rationality is seen by Rand as the basic moral virtue because it is the necessary general operation needed for the human form of life. She takes the other virtues in her ethical system to be salient strands of rationality aimed at individual survival. I say, rather, that rationality is the given proper being of a human and the proper responsiveness to persons, other and self. Rationality is the grand means of human survival, as Rand held, but that is not the whole of its story.
Rand had proposed that the virtue of rationality is not only virtue in a social setting, but virtue—main moral virtue—for a castaway on a deserted island. This is because in the isolated setting rationality is necessary to the individual’s survival. That is so, however, I say that enabling survival is not the only source of the goodness of rationality. There is a person on that island: the castaway. Rationality is proper responsiveness to and continuation of his self. It is call of life in that life form that is his personal self that is the distinctively moral in the virtue of rationality for a castaway.
Though the castaway carries along other in foundational frame, he is now the only human present. He is an end-in-himself with much rightness to continue himself. (A pet might go a ways for fulfilling the need to love and interact with another human self.) Returned to society, an individual remains an end-in-himself rightly making his life, a fully human life with interactions and mutual values and interactions with the other ends-in-themselves that are human selves at centers of making lives.
Ayn Rand offered an ethical egoism in which rationality took its place as central overall virtue for a person due to the need for rationality in making one’s reality-according individual human life. She tried to weave the prima facie virtue of truth-telling to others as a derivative of the need to be honest with oneself about the facts. That is not plausibly the basic reason one wants to and should want to be honest with others. Rand’s account of honesty is inadequate by reliance on a purely egoistic basis. Ethical egoism, a genuine one such as hers, one attempting to derive all its moral virtues purely from self-interest, is false. It rests on an inadequate view of what is the constitution of the human self.
(To be continued.)Caring for human life includes caring for rationality in human selves, indeed caring of the entire human psyche supporting its rationality. What good would be a person having all she desires but her rational mind? Distinctively moral caring is caring for human selves, notably in the great psyche-constituent and power of rationality—caring in the sense of concern and caring in the sense of tending.
The power of human rationality is discovery and utilization of nature, and it is also our fundamental human love, which is an originative, out-springing love for the natural world and, as well, for we humans in nature, for human selves and our attainments. It is the love of creation and production, the love of intelligent conversation and commerce. That rationality is the fundamental human virtue. One failing to have it is in human failure, including moral failure.
Fight for human rationality, knowing yours is the battle “for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.”
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7 hours ago, Boydstun said:
How do you know there are no Martians? Must you have proof to know that? How do you know that there cannot both be and not be Martians at the same time and in the same sense? How do you know that is true? By proof?
How do you know you have typed some questions? Do you need a proof to know that is so?
I'd say one does need memory, working and semantic, to think anything up at this level of posting, and one needs thinking to know anything. But surely we know lots of things without proof of them. To know that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 2R requires proof. But to know that any triangle is trilateral does not require proof. To know I'm writing this does not require proof. To know I selected to do this instead of not doing it does not require proof. To know, to the contrary, that I did not freely select between those two options would require proof.
What is the proof that I don’t have free will? where free will is exemplified by my having the ability to make this post or not and choosing to make it.
What is the proof that humans have no free will? If there is no such proof, then what is plain is true: they have some free will.
7 hours ago, Boydstun said:State your proof that free will does not exist.
Just as you would state your proof that Martians do not exist.
Or that the sum of angles in any triangle in a Euclidean plane is 2R.
6 hours ago, SocratesJr said:If I can't prove that free will doesn't exist, does that mean it does exist?
Correct. Just as: If it cannot proven that thinking does not exist, then it does exist.
And thinking does exist, and some of thinking is our ability to formulate definitions and to construct proofs. Proofs that free will does not exist, proofs that when we experience making a free choice, it is not really free have been offered by others. Which one do you think correct? What is your proof, specifically? If you find no proof up to your standards and if you have the experience of freely choosing to reply to this post or not, then you should accept that you have that freedom. At least you should accept it until such time as you formulate or see a good enough proof that it does not exist, despite appearances.
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State your proof that free will does not exist.
Just as you would state your proof that Martians do not exist.
Or that the sum of angles in any triangle in a Euclidean plane is 2R.
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4 hours ago, SocratesJr said:
What is . . . proof that free will exists? . . . To say ". . . defined it" is not an answer, since it is possible to define things that don't exist such as "Martian": extraterrestrial beings originating from the planet Mars.
How do you know there are no Martians? Must you have proof to know that? How do you know that there cannot both be and not be Martians at the same time and in the same sense? How do you know that is true? By proof?
How do you know you have typed some questions? Do you need a proof to know that is so?
I'd say one does need memory, working and semantic, to think anything up at this level of posting, and one needs thinking to know anything. But surely we know lots of things without proof of them. To know that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 2R requires proof. But to know that any triangle is trilateral does not require proof. To know I'm writing this does not require proof. To know I selected to do this instead of not doing it does not require proof. To know, to the contrary, that I did not freely select between those two options would require proof.
What is the proof that I don’t have free will? where free will is exemplified by my having the ability to make this post or not and choosing to make it.
What is the proof that humans have no free will? If there is no such proof, then what is plain is true: they have some free will.
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11 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:
From this forum’s homepage: "Man must act for his own rational self-interest" "The purpose of morality is to teach you[...] to enjoy yourself and live"
”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.”
MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.
Ogg, you may recall that Rand worked with different sorts of 'musts' (as do we all) if you recall what you read in her essay "Causality versus Duty." That all animals must die is a must from a necessity in nature. That one must pay taxes is a man-made must. Another division of "musts" is between the unconditional ones and conditional ones. The latter are of the if-then form: "If such-and-such is to be accomplished, then condition so-and-so must obtain." So there are four kinds of 'musts'. For man-made and conditional, we have: "If you don't want to suffer the penalties of a legal violation, you must pay your taxes." For nature-given and conditional, we have: "If there is to be a fire here, there must be oxygen" and "If you are to breathe, there must be oxygen" and "If you want to live and enjoy yourself, you must do certain things and not others." For man-made and unconditional, there is apparently no such thing (maybe you can think of one). For nature-given and unconditional, we have: "Angular momentum must be conserved" (meaning only it always will be conserved come what may).
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When we bought our first real estate, we had just retired. It is a couple of acres with many trees, often large. At first I would walk around thinking this tree is mine, touch another and think this tree is mine, and so forth. Only then could I have a live sense of saying all these trees are mine or this acreage is mine. Similarly, by the time one was reading Atlas Shrugged, one already had known that pencils and telephones and books and . . . . exist. That comes before any live sense in observing "All these things exist. Call that sum Existence. Existence exists." Not every aspect of a particular belonging to all particulars (such as pairs of electric potential differences between all pairs of objects of non-zero rest mass) is an aspect that can be attributed also to the Universe. Existence is one thing that can be so boosted to the whole from the particular. And one does not know that Existence exists except by knowing that there are particular existents. This particular existent has to sleep now.
Well, OK, one copy-and-paste:
The concept and referent mass-energy is able to hold both stasis and activity. Its amount is constant although mass can be at rest or moving uniformly or accelerating or being turned into pure energy by collision with its corresponding anti-matter. So let the philosophers catch up and get with the scientific program.
Rand/Peikoff took all of these to be existents: baseball, its striking the bat and motion to right field, the spin on the ball, and the materials of which it was made. I agree.
The shift from Scholastic talk of being to existence is good. One way in which being was divided was as unqualified being (also called absolute being) and qualified being. I'm with Rand/Peikoff and others in thinking there is no such thing as unqualified being (other than non-being, one might sputter). Anything that is is with qualifications, i.e., with identity. We are univocal in our view of existence, as Scotus was in his view of being. I have an Objectivist philosopher friend who disagrees. Against our univocal-existence view, I should try to understand more fully Kris McDaniel's The Fragmentation of Being (2017).
When someone says there is at least one absolute being, they are mistaken. Even the totality of existence, i.e., the universe, is qualified by having a certain total mass-energy.
g
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted · Edited by Boydstun
Hear, hear!
Beyond what Rand wrote about philosophic axioms in her 1957 is Chapter 6 "Axiomatic Concepts" of her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Additional defenses of the Objectivist philosophical axioms are these:
Machan 1992
Chapter 4 of H. Binswanger's How We Know (2014)
Chapter 11 of Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (2016)
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References I cited but failed to show in my earlier post:
Braver, Lee. 2012. Groundless Grounds – A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Jary, Mark. 2010. Assertion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Additionally relevant, from an earlier scholarly paper* of mine:
PHILOSOPHY FRAMES
The foundation of a house is one thing, its framework another. That is not so for a submarine. Its inner, pressure hull is the craft’s passive support against collapse under external hydrostatic pressure. The pressure hull is the foundation, but it is also an integral part of the frame of the structure. When speaking of epistemological foundations, we tend to slip into analogy with foundations of a building. I’ll use foundation and framework interchangeably in connection with epistemology, rather like their fusion in the structural organization of a submarine, though with a further character. When thinking of bases of knowledge, analogies from statics are natural. (See another statics analogy in Binswanger 2014, 151.) But knowledge entails processes of knowing, and it entails growth of knowledge. The continuing organization that is knowledge is more like a dynamically maintained structure, such as an animal cell wall.
All cell walls must withstand internal hydrostatic pressure that arises ultimately from net negative electrical charge of their internal molecules of life. Analogy of my philosophic foundationalism with the cell wall of a plant would go no further than analogy with the hull of a submarine. Structural integrity of the plant cell wall against hydrostatic pressure is by strength of materials, and its account is by statics. Analogy with the delicate cell wall of an animal is fuller by its requirement of continuous dynamic maintenance of the wall, which is by ion pumps across it, preventing the buildup of internal pressure. The structural integrity of the animal cell wall is by dynamical process featuring continual commerce with its surround (Boydstun 1994, 121–23). Similarly, the structure that is knowledge has core principles by which it is dynamically maintained, and these principles include patterns of success in external commerce. Core principles of the maintenance of the animal cell wall are a finer analogy to what I’ll mean in speaking of foundations or frameworks in epistemology.
Nicholas Wolterstorff (2001, 187–91) demarcates foundationalism as invoking mediate and immediate justified (or warranted) judgments in which there are justification conditions of the immediate judgments and methods by which such merit of justification can be conveyed to mediate judgments. The foundationalism of Rand, and mine too, can be brought under Wolterstorff’s broad formula if the immediate judgments (or action-schemata prior to language acquisition) are ordinary judgments expressing facts disclosed in perceptual acquaintance, such as “this pen still writes” or “the oven is on” or “this board is less bowed than that one.”1 Metaphysical axioms and their core elucidations, Rand’s or mine, are widest scene-setters and are quality controls for conveyance of justification to mediate judgments. Among the quality controls for conveyance of justification would be logic, deductive and inductive, whose foundations lie with metaphysical axioms and their elucidations.
By taking First Philosophy as widest frame, I mean only frame encompassing and situating all other wide frames of human life and knowledge. Quest for widest frame entails foundationalism, descriptive, explicative, and regulative. Philosophers not skeptical and not foundationalist are in pursuit of wide frames subsidiary to widest. (Notably not foundationalists would be logical positivists; see Friedman 1999, 2–5, 10–11, 119–20, 124, 144–52). In her foundationalism, Rand evidently took the special sciences, including the modern hard sciences, to be in a one-way need of philosophy.2 I do not. First Philosophy discerning grounds and widest frames of the sciences, mathematics, and ethics stands in organic, indeed symbiotic, relationships with those arenas in their greater specificity.
We know what truth is by having some truth.3 Occasions of finest truth require our grasp of the world, together with critical, integrative reflection on that grasp. We had some truth in image- and action-schemata prior to having language, and our prelinguistic truths are stems from which linguistic form of truth, with its higher level of reflectivity, develops and receives continual support.4 There are no conceptual cognitions, no logical connections of anything, without guidance by existence, utilizing our prelinguistic image- and action-schemata (Prinz 2002, chap. 6; Barsalou 2008; Noë 2006; Churchland 2012). The normativity of logic is ultimately from normativity of life, thence life of mind and its conceptual capture of the world.
By fact I mean that which is, that which is the case in Existence. (I’ll capitalize existence when meaning not only existence per se, but existence as a whole.) Truth is grasp of fact.5 Fact precedes truth, necessity precedes certainty. That is so genetically and logically (cf. Rand 1973, 27; Peikoff 1967, 108–9). Mature and healthy certainty critically gauges exactitude of candidate truth and contingencies of its alleged fact, setting them within one’s abiding truths and their facts, concrete and formal. Subjective probabilities are to be continually recalibrated by objective frequencies and by advancing understanding of natures. Faintness or ambiguity of truths, I should add, does not disqualify them out the gate as candidates for framing core. Deeper and deeper mathematics is faintly born, then grown articulate, setting in new light earlier mathematical treasures. It is like that in lesser degree with right First Philosophy, enveloping all existence and knowing, empirical or formal (cf. Physics 184a22–25, in Aristotle [ca. 348–322 B.C.E.] 1984, 315).
Outside we living seekers of fact, there is nothing bearing meaning or truth. Before truth and with truth are not only fact, but life and value. Without conscious life and value, there are no challenges or problems, no curiosity, no accuracy or correctness, no meaning or truth. Truths of logic and their necessity have ground in formal features of existence and in the facts and necessities-for-ends of living mind.
The zone of philosophic reflection reached by Descartes in Meditations by doubting is a famous, if misshapen, sample of what is distinctively philosophical reflection (cf. Gilson [1939] 1986, 97). Phenomenological reduction of Husserl is a portion of what is distinctively philosophical reflection (cf. Drummond 1991, 45–48, 64–67). Philosophical reflection on the world and on us in it includes discerning what conditions what, in broadest perspective, and with what varieties of necessitation (Stoljar 2017, 25–34, 40–53). It discerns, in widest perspective, what depends necessarily on what.6 Independence of the existence of thinking subject, as in Meditations, from correctness of particular thoughts is one such dependency structure. Dependencies of self-reflecting acts on memory and on object-grasping acts are such structures. Dependence of justifications or refutations of knowledge on knowledge are two more such structures. The philosophic quest for most general categories is a quest for best hierarchical conceptual dependencies. Ethics concerns dependencies of the good. Dependencies between enquiry and value are among the structures to be discerned in philosophy.
Philosophical reflection also includes making general identifications such as the definition of man as an animal capable of and requiring rationality, and this work is informed by what depends necessarily on what. Definition of man as an animal capable of and requiring rationality contributes to philosophical foundational framing furthermore through its explication, its clarification, of a prevalent workaday concept. Such too would be Plato’s craft of justice, Tarski’s craft of truth, or Rand’s craft of reason.7
Philosophy is discernment of essentials and their situations in wider to widest existence. Such activity grows one’s picture of what is human being and one’s self. All of the truths of logic and pure mathematics are also discerned in divisions of what I am calling the zone of philosophical reflection (cf. Philebus 56d–58d, in Plato [ca. 428–348 B.C.E.] 1997, 446–48; and Metaphysics 1061b18–27, in Aristotle [ca. 349–322 B.C.E.] 1984, 1677).8 Discernment of the dependencies of formalities on each other and on their occasions in concretes is part of philosophical reflection (cf. Grosholz 2007, chap. 2; Sher 2011). The necessity in truth of conclusions deduced from true premises is one type of necessary dependence discerned in the zone of philosophical reflection, though not the only type and not independently of other types peculiar to the zone. In this zone, we grasp that nothing comes from nothing, that any matter is spatial and susceptible to stress, and that the simplest straight-edged closed figure in the Euclidean plane is a triangle.9
It is in this zone Aristotle discerned the principle of noncontradiction. Here, discerned that “the activity of mind is life” (Metaphysics 1072b27, translated by Lear 1988, 296).10 Rand would discern in this zone that life is an end in itself (1936, 42; 1957, 121; 1964, 17, 27, 29).11 Insights in the philosophic zone are generally not immune to error, particularly by way of supposed completeness and supposed complete independence from empirical knowledge attained in prelinguistic development, in mature common experience, and in science (cf. Armstrong 2004, 26–29; Stoljar 2017, 31–32).12
My pursuit of foundations—specifically a set of axioms, corollaries, postulates, and definitions—is because it looks to be feasible, indeed at work, and because it is desirable by the economy, unity, and comprehension it provides (cf. Posterior Analytics 72a15–18, Metaphysics 996b26–997a25, 1005a19–29, in Aristotle [ca. 349–322 B.C.E.] 1984, 116, 1575, 1587). Successful epistemological foundationalism is furthermore, secondarily, a barricade and corrective to the pitfalls of epistemic skepticism.13
In no wise are philosophic foundations, mine or Rand’s, “responsible for everything” (Sider 2011, 105; further, 112–16, 137–41). Neither existence per se nor existence as a whole is “responsible” for themselves or any particular existents they encompass. In no wise are these foundations something “in virtue of which” less fundamental facts or truths hold. Fundamental facts do not “give rise to” less fundamental facts. A valid syllogistic form does not “give rise to” the validity of its instances. Mathematical category does not “give rise to” its instances, such as the category of groups or the category of vector spaces. Differential equations do not “give rise to” the equations that are the solutions to those differential equations; the solutions merely satisfy the differential equations. Conservation of angular momentum does not “give rise to” the increasing angular velocity of a particular spinning skater who pulls in her arms. Two intersecting lines, whether in carpentry or Euclid, do not “give rise to” the plane they determine. Physical spacetime structure does not “give rise to” the conservation laws it determines.
This is not a terminological quibble. Metaphysical axioms and their core elucidations can be more fundamental—and are more fundamental in my sense and Rand’s—just by being wider form bound to narrower form or wider species subsuming narrower species or individuals. Metaphysical fundamentals need not give rise to or bring forth more particular bits of the world in order to bring light on the bits, including on us, in the world.
Some of the References
Friedman, Michael. 1999. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gilson, Étienne. [1939] 1986. Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge. Translated by Mark A. Wauck. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Grosholz, Emily R. 2007. Representation and Productive Ambiguity in Mathematics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lear, Jonathan. 1988. Aristotle: The Desire to Understand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sher, Gila. 2011. Truth and knowledge in logic and mathematics. In The Logica Yearbook 2011. Edited by Michal Pelis and Vít Punčochář. London: College Publications, King’s College.
Sider, Ted. 2011. Writing the Book of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stoljar, David. 2017. Philosophical Progress – In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2001. Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.