Boydstun

946, Isn't it easy and an everyday thing for people to choose reason to a great degree? Surely one was choosing reason and learning what it is, even without the later concept of it, by one's desire and efforts to acquire language in early childhood. People seem enmeshed in their reason, and that applies to my religious friends too, even the ones stuck in the more ignorant, feeling-dominated sects. Of those last, I notice we have fine economic commerce with each other, and we enjoy each other in our practical, rational activities. I wanted to add to your accumulation, in an earlier post, of Rand's dark-future-outlooks and highly deterministic personal developments: Rand 1957 was projecting a future. It was pretty dark, and I think not only for the purpose of making the light lighter. Outside the USA, there were to be only Peoples States, it seems. In the USA were to be great economic regulation and growing political tyranny. Happily, since 1957, though Peoples States are still around, such as in Venezuela and Cuba, such States are far from gripping the whole world outside the USA. Inside the USA, nothing getting close to the controls in The Moratorium on Brains happened. Brash interventions such as Nixon's wage-and-price controls have become just eyeball-rollers today. During the big contraction and financial crisis of 2008, some banks and other companies were bailed out by the government (by us), but the Obama administration didn't nationalize the banks, which in earlier times would have been a serious option on the table, and for the fictional Pres. Thompson would have been a no-brainer. As Rearden is carrying the young government man Tony in his arms, where Tony dies, Rearden thinks of this young man as having been made by schooling and the wider culture. It's not entirely deterministic, of course, because Tony's time with the productive enterprise had brought him round to reach for fresh right and to protect the mills. Rand later expanded greatly on what she had given to Rearden's thoughts there. That was in her essay called "The Comprachicos" which is included in the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. It is a very dark and heavily deterministic picture she paints there of the US educational system. The picture is entirely foreign to any of my experience with the system here, public grade and high and State university (for first degree) at that very era she was writing about. But the relevant point here is how rare and hard she thought it was for a student to become an independent and rational individual given such type of formal education.

Calling President Trump, calling Mr. Trump: Suspend the 500 million dollars in annual aid to Zambia until the prisoners are freed. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-50901537

946, America and the world are not going to ever adopt full freedom according with Rand's theory of individual rights and proper, limited function of government; or full freedom as drafted under any other libertarian, limited government theory. It will not matter how far people become rational (apparently, in the last 500 years in the West, they have become more rational on average) or how much they are manipulated by freedom lovers by irrational appeals. Such an understanding and care for freedom that Objectivists have will not be happening. In America we are going to have a mixed economy, Social Security, and Medicare even through the lives of our grandchildren. I discourage young people from becoming consumed with political or other social causes. The present American situation is no excuse for not successfully making a good life for yourself. Just shed the grip of public affairs, and get on with making a pile of money, seeing the world, or accumulating and reading a private library with the size and heft of mine. No social excuses. Rand has helped many to their personal liberation, and how many others can be helped to that liberation of reason is secondary even when focus is simply on the other's own personal well-being. When the focus is on influencing politics or culture, the proper attitude is suspicion that one is losing one's focus on what should matter most.

I recently eliminated all of those essay-threads that I had created for the Boydstun Corner at OBJECTIVIST LIVING because the advertising at that site has made it no longer appropriate for sustained serious compositions and reading thereof. I've been making some of those old studies available at OBJECTIVISM ONLINE, and I think this one fits well in this sector. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn I. Searching In Thomas Kuhn's view, observation and experiment are essential to scientific understanding of the world (1990 [S], 42), but observation and experiment, in an established science, are guided and made sense of by one or another paradigm (S 109). Under the notion paradigm, Kuhn means to include theories, theoretical definitions, natural laws, particular models, and preeminently, concrete problem-solutions that exemplify theory and law, giving them empirical content (S 182–89). Scientific concepts, laws, and theories are presented and comprehended not in the abstract alone; but with applications to some concrete range of phenomena, purely natural, such as freely falling bodies, or natural-within-contrivance, such as pendulums (S 46–47, 187–91). Normal science undertakes ever more exact and subtle experimental and observational investigation of "facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things" (S 25), determination of facts that "can be compared directly with predictions from the paradigm theory" (S 26), and articulation of the paradigm theory (S 27–29). These are roles of observation in science, I should say, even if we should reject Kuhn's distinction between normal and revolutionary periods of science as too sharply drawn. One illustration of normal science would be the ongoing investigation of neutrinos. The existence of neutrinos is a fact established in 1956 (they were then detected) within the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics and detail conservation of energy. The characteristics of neutrinos are facts particularly revealing of the nature of elementary-particle interactions. The further, more refined determination of neutrino characteristics bears on the correctness and further refinement of a number of interconnected paradigms. Elaborate observations of solar neutrinos the past few decades provide quantitative constraints on models of nuclear reactions in the sun's core and on models of the sun's magnetic fields. And they provide constraints on the fundamental theory of neutrinos and of the electronuclear forces of nature (Bahcall 1990). Elaborate observations of cosmic neutrinos, these past few years [1], to ascertain whether they change flavors, hence whether they possess nonzero mass, inform efforts toward a Grand Unified Theory that may eventually supercede or subsume the Standard Model for elementary particles and their forces (Kearns, Kajita, and Totsuka 1999; Feldman and Steinberger 1991; Weinberg 1999). And they bear on current cosmology, under purview of general relativity. Other normal-science investigations framed under the paradigm of general relativity are these: The finding of pulsar binary neutron stars has yielded, as hoped, empirical data for comparison with predictions from general relativity in the context of strong gravitational fields, predictions such as the rate of the orbital precession of the major axis of the stars' elliptical orbit and red-shifting of the pulse-clock (Piran 1995). Observation of quasi-periodic X-ray emissions from neutron stars pulling in matter from gaseous companion stars are yielding data indicating that, as predicted by general relativity (contrary the prediction from Newtonian gravitation), there is, just outside the neutron star, an innermost circular orbit for captured gas (Cowen 1998). Black holes are entities conceived and cultured solely by general relativity. Astronomical search for black holes and their distinctive features may yield an overwhelming vindication of general relativity (Lasota 1999). There are three points made by Kuhn concerning the role of observation in science with which I should take some issue. One is his claim that "no part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena" (S 24). "Even the [normal-science] program whose goal is paradigm articulation does not aim at the unexpected novelty" (S 35). "Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none" (S 52). But scientists will be human, chronically so, hoping to catch something unexpected and momentous in their instruments, not only expected and readily comprehended phenomena. X-ray astronomer Bruno Rossi writes: "The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery . . . was a subconscious trust of mine in the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man. This meant that, whenever technical progress opened up a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window hoping to see something unexpected" (1977, 39). Kuhn does say that "without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur" (S 65, emphasis added). So I should productively construe the statements of his that I have quoted in the preceding paragraph as delineation of the strain that he calls normal science which in truth is found within a broader, richer actual practice of science. Kuhn errs secondly, though only slightly, in his contention that "the act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other" (S 77, further, 147). Not always so. We continue to test empirically whether any mass-energy can be transported faster than vacuum c (Alväger, Farley, Kjellman and Wallin 1964; Brecher 1977; Chiao, Kwait, and Steinberg 1993). Some of these experiments, in the last two decades, have helped to articulate more finely the light-speed postulate of relativistic kinematics. But it is perfectly possible that such tests in the future could dispositively contradict the postulate. That would be the demise of special relativity regardless of the existence of competitor theories. Without viable alternative kinematics already on the stage or in the wings, what should we do if the light-speed postulate were empirically refuted? We should take our cues from the particulars of the failure and from our old, very successful special-relativity kinematics, and then develop a new and better kinematics. Again, we continue to test a principle of general relativity, the principle of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass. These tests are not simply tests that help us articulate the paradigm, as when we search the heavens for evidence bearing on whether Einstein's field equations should include a nonzero cosmological constant (Krauss 1999; Cowen 2000). No, tests of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass cut to the quick of general relativity (Wald 1984, 8, 66–67; Ciufolini and Wheeler 1995, 13–18, 90–116). As I understand it, if gravitational and inertial mass are not precisely equivalent, then gravity cannot rightly be made geometric. And we have no viable alternative (nongeometric) to general relativity waiting in the wings. Were gravitational and inertial mass shown inequivalent by experiment or observation, then theoretical physicists would scramble to construct a replacement theory. We need not already have a competing theory to prefer over general relativity in order to reject the latter on experimental or observational grounds [2]. II. Seeing Kuhn errs thirdly, and most seriously, in his (inconstant) denial that in our scientific observations we can always separate and adequately express what we literally perceive and what we take those percepts to indicate. Having learned prevailing scientific concepts, theories, and natural laws under exemplifying concrete observational applications, one is not able to see the phenomena in those applications entirely freely of the prevailing conceptual apparatus (S 46–47, 111–12, 186–89). Scientific observational phenomena are to some extent inextricably structured by the scientific, theoretical paradigm under which one is operating (S 111–35, 147–50). "Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph, the student sees confused and broken lines, the physicist a record of familiar subnuclear events" (S 111). To enter the physicist's scientific observational world, the student undergoes "transformations of vision," like coming "to see a new gestalt." Hardly. Throughout the student's entry into the observational world of physics, all participants easily, routinely, and expressly distinguish between what of the physicist's observational world is commonsense perception and what is scientific interpretation, however automatic the latter may become (cf. S 196–98). A bubble-chamber photograph provides detailed records of particle events "in a form that experienced physicists can interpret at a glance" (Breuker et al. 1991, 61). The photographs from bubble, cloud, or spark-streamer chambers never do yield a strictly perceptual particle-interaction gestalt in the way, say, that an X-ray photograph of a hand yields a strictly perceptual hand-skeleton gestalt. In the hand X-ray, given our ontogeny and our ordinary visual experience with hands, we are required to see the hand-in-the-image. We can tell ourselves, truly, that what is before us when we see the hand-in-the-image is only the trace of a hand, shadows of hand preserved on film, but we cannot avoid seeing the hand-in-the-image all the same. That is our perceptual constitution. Gestalt shifts too, such as in the Necker cube, are mandated by our primate perceptual constitution. We can tell ourselves that before us are only lines on paper, but we are required to see one cube or the other, with alternations every few seconds (Logothetis 1999). Contemporary elementary-particle tracking is mediated by vast electronic and computer processing systems, embodying painstaking deliberate interpretations. What is perceptually obligatory in the resulting computer-image displays are things like colors, lines, and 3D perspectives; all of these, self-conscious visual aids to scientific, interpretive observation. Kuhn writes: "Since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristotelians, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Constrained by the chain, it could achieve rest at its low point only after a tortuous motion and a considerable time. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum." (S 118–19) To be sure, Kuhn was "acutely aware of the difficulties created by saying that when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum" (S 121). Yet Kuhn will not let go his continual equivocation on see and its cognates (S 196–97). He maintains that an embracer of the new paradigm of mechanics—such was Galileo—is not an interpreter of swinging stones as pendulums, but "is like a man wearing inverted lenses," like a man who's vision has adapted to those lenses (S 122). "Galileo interpreted observations on the pendulum, Aristotle observations on [constrained] falling stones" (ibid.). That is inaccurate, I should say. Rather, Galileo and we interpret swinging stones as pendulums, on which we then make further interpretative observations. Similarly, one may interpret the swinging stone as in Aristotelian mechanics, as a constrained body working its way to the lowest feasible point. We can deliberately, with training, switch our interpretative perspectives: Aristotelian, Galilean, Newtonian, Lagrangian. Kuhn suggests that the contemporary scientist "who looks at a swinging stone can have no experience that is in principle more elementary than seeing a pendulum. The alternative is not some hypothetical 'fixed' vision, but vision through another paradigm, one which makes the swinging stone something else" (S 128). I suggest, to the contrary, that developmentally, epistemologically, and evidentially, it is a swinging stone that is most elementary for everyone. It is with respect to analysis that we "see" (take) the pendulum as most elementary. I do not mean to contradict Kuhn's thesis that scientists do not come to reject scientific theories on account of uninterpreted observations (e.g. S 77). We can recognize that and assimilate that without conflating what we literally perceive and what we make of those percepts in thought. III. Saying According to Kuhn, "there can be no scientifically or empirically neutral system of language or concepts" (S 146). Moreover, since we have no rudimentary paradigm-neutral observation language, the pendulum and constrained fall must be simply different perceptions, rather than "different interpretations of the unequivocal data provided by observation of a swinging stone" (S 126). Kuhn has in mind "a generally applicable language of pure percepts," where, by the term percepts, he apparently thinks not of swinging stones, but of more primitive constituents that compose our perceptions of swinging stones. Attempts to construct such a language of pure percepts have not fully succeeded, and anyway, all such projects "presuppose a paradigm, taken either from current scientific theory or from some fraction of everyday discourse, . . . . [thereby yielding] a language that—like those employed in the sciences—embodies a host of expectations about nature and fails to function the moment these expectations are violated" (S 127). I should say, with Willard Quine, that we do indeed have a trustworthy scientifically neutral system of observation language appropriate and necessary for the physical sciences. This is not a rarified, fully reductive language of "pure percepts," but a natural language of posited objects and events (1969 [EN], 74–79; 1995a [N], 252, 254; 1995b [SS], 10–21, 27–29, 35–42; cf. 1951, 293–98). Swinging body and pendulum are both legitimate expressions of things observed[3], the former providing a fallback in cases of dispute over the latter. "What counts as an observation sentence varies with the width of community considered. But we can always get an absolute standard by taking in all speakers of the language, or most" (EN 88; also N 255; SS 22, 42–45). Pendulum, damped harmonic oscillator, and electron-positron track may be rightly spoken of as observed in the narrower, scientific community. But when necessary, scientists can shift gears and recognize those items as interpretations of more widely accepted and developmentally prior observed items. Our broadest and most rudimentary observation language is our language of everyday experience, in which we report "it is raining" or "the iron is on" and in which we generalize "swinging suspended bodies return to rest" or "if it is snowing, then it is cold" (N 252, 254–55; SS 22–26). That last ordinary observation sentence is an example of what Quine calls an observation categorical, which is an empirically testable hypothesis, standing (as Popper would have it) as not yet shown false. Quine supposes, reasonably I think, that an empirically testable scientific hypothesis can be cashed out as an elementary observation categorical (N 255; SS 43–47). The detection of cosmic background microwave radiation, for example, cashes to visible records of activities in an antenna (which antenna cashes to . . . ). Quine realizes, of course, that scientists do not trace all the links from their hypothesis to observational categorical. "Still, the deduction and checking of observation categoricals is the essence, surely, of the experimental method, . . . . [and it remains] that prediction of observable events is the ultimate test of scientific theory" (N 256). Quine recognizes that some hypotheses thus far not testable are accepted, rationally, even in the hard sciences. They may be accepted because "they fit in smoothly by analogy, or they symmetrize and simplify the overall design. . . . Moreover, such acceptations are not idle fancy; their proliferation generates, every here and there, a hypothesis that can indeed be tested. Surely this is the major source of testable hypotheses and the growth of science" (N 256; also SS 49). Can we test whether spacetime is curved? Well, yes, indirectly, more and more, we can. Kuhn overrated the difficulties of vocabulary translations between alternative paradigms (S 149, 201). He did seem to allow that eventually translation can be effected (S 201–3). Such has been effected between Newtonian gravitational theory and general relativity, and gradually physics has attained more and more tests between those deep and grand theories, tests such as that for an innermost circular orbit about a neutron star. Notes 1. This study was composed in 2000. 2. Hilary Putnam points out that Kuhn exaggerates in asserting that a paradigm can never be overthrown in the absence of a competitor paradigm. But Putnam then deflates the demerit of the exaggeration by posing as a hypothetical counterexample to Kuhn's universal claim only a Goodmanesque scenario: the world simply starts to behave radically differently. Barring such an implausible scenario, Putnam then expressly affirms the Kuhnian generalization at issue (Putnam 1974, 69–70). My counterexample scenarios (failure of light-speed postulate or failure of principle of equivalence) are intended to be entirely, mundanely realistic. 3. Rudolf Carnap (1966) likewise recognized that what in one context of inquiry should be taken as inferred from what was observed could in another context be rightly taken as simply observed (Suppe 1977, 47). References Alväger, T., Farley, F.J.M., Kjellman, J., and I. Wallin 1964. Test of the Second Postulate of Special Relativity in the Gev Region. Physics Letters 12:260. Bahcall, J.N. 1990. The Solar-Neutrino Problem. Sci. Amer. (May):54–61. Brecher, K. 1977. Is the Speed of Light Independent of the Velocity of the Source? Phy. Rev. Ltrs. 39(17):1051–54. Breuker, H., Drevermann, H., Grab, C., Rademakers, A.A., and H. Stone 1991. Tracking and Imaging Elementary Particles. Sci. Amer. (Aug):58–63. Chiao, R.Y., Kwait, P.G., and A.M. Steinberg 1993. Faster than Light? Sci. Amer. (Aug):52–60. Ciufolini, I., and J.A. Wheeler 1995. Gravitation and Inertia. Princeton: University Press. Cowan, R. 1998. All in the Timing. Sci. News 154:318–19. ——. 2000. Revved-Up Universe. Sci. News 157:106–8. Feldman, G.J., and J. Steinberger 1991. The Number of Families of Matter [= Three]. Sci. Amer. (Feb):70–75. Kearns, E., Kajita, T., and V. Totsuka 1999. Detecting Massive Neutrinos. Sci. Amer. (Aug):64–71. Krauss, L.M. 1999. Cosmological Antigravity. Sci. Amer. (Jan):52–59. Kuhn, T.S. 1990 [1970, 1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: Univerity Press. Lasota, J-P. 1999. Unmasking Black Holes. Sci. Amer. (May):40–47. Logothetis, N.K. 1999. Vision: A Window on Consciousness. Sci. Amer. (Nov):69–75. Piran, T. 1995. Binary Neutron Stars. Sci. Amer. (May):53–61. Putnam, H. 1974. The "Corroboration" of Theories. In Scientific Revolutions. I. Hacking, editor. 1981. New York: Oxford University Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1951. Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. M. Curd and J.A. Cover, editors. 1998. New York: W.W. Norton. ——. 1969. Epistemology Naturalized. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1995a. Naturalism, or, Living within One's Means. Dialectica 49(2–4):251–61. ——. 1995b. From Stimulus to Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rossi, B. 1977. X-Ray Astronomy. Daedalus 106(4):37–58. Suppe, F. 1977 [1973]. The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories. In The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2nd. ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Wald, R.M. 1984. General Relativity. Chicago: University Press. Weinberg, S. 1999. A Unified Physics by 2050? Sci. Amer. (Dec):68–75.

Capturing Quantity Part 3 “With the grasp of the (implicit) concept “unit” man reaches the conceptual level of cognition which consists of two interrelated fields: Conceptual and the Mathematical. The process of concept-formation is, in large part, a mathematical process” (ITOE 7). Rand registers the substitution sense of units by the locution some . . . any. That expression is logical quantification, which is a logical support of the mathematical concept number and which is applicable to mathematical objects and their principles. An elementary mathematical application would be at the start of a proof saying, “Construct any triangle ABC.” One understands that one needs to construct some triangle, but it could be any triangle and that each vertex is to be labeled one (some) of A or B or C, but any one of them, provided the letter is not already selected for another vertex. Or a proof might begin by saying, “Consider any rational number q.” One understands that one is reflecting on some rational number, that it can be any rational number, and that although the particular number is unspecified, it is to be regarded as a particular number throughout the proof. Rand applies the logical quantification some . . . any three times to any concept in her mensural objectivist theory of concepts. Firstly, a concept means some one of its instances, any one (also true, degenerately, for proper-noun concepts). Secondly, the some . . . any quantification is used in regarding common distinctive dimensioned characteristics of items indicated by a defined concept in her theory. For example, Rand takes locomotion and consciousness to be the basic common characteristics distinguishing animals within the broader class of living things. (Sponges are animals, but she was apparently taking animal somewhat more narrowly.) An animal must possess some form of locomotion and consciousness, but it can be any form of these. Similarly, being a living thing, an animal must possess some form of internally generated actions, but these may be any such form, including the actions that are locomotion and consciousness (ITOE 24–25). Thirdly, the logical quantification some . . . any is applied to measurement values of the common distinctive dimensioned characteristics. For example, the form of consciousness of a type of animal must have some scope, but may have any finite scope (ibid.). Then too, functions, including functions of consciousness, have measurable dimensions. So in saying the consciousness of a type of animal serves to preserve the life of the individual animal and its species, one is saying consciousness of the animal type has a measurable scope in perpetuating the life of that animal. To be an animal, it must have some scope of consciousness and some coordinate scope to which consciousness preserves its life, but any measure-value of such scopes will qualify for animal (ITOE 22; OE 18–21). In Part 2, I introduced the core cognitions Carey discerns pertaining to quantity, or magnitude: (i) parallel individuation of small sets and (ii) analog magnitude representations of number. Carey observes that those core cognitions require something like linguistic and logical quantification in the prelinguistic infant. She calls this cognitive power set-based quantification. The term set here and in (i) means only definite collection. The prelinguistic infant must be able to select collections of individuals to quantify arithmetically in analog magnitude number representations (OC 136–37). That ability to select collections in the tasks exhibiting either of the two core quantitative cognitions need not have “the representational force of set-based quantification” (OC 255). In neither of those two core cognitions are prelinguistic symbols required for the logical quantifications marked in English by singular/plural constructions or by the terms each, every, any, some, more, a, and so forth (OC 254–57). Along with many other authors, Carey thinks “human evolution bequeathed us with innate knowledge of language, which we can imagine takes the form of a language acquisition device (LAD). The LAD guides the learning of natural language syntax, morphology, and phonology” (OC 247). From experimental results, Carey concludes that the process of learning one’s native language likely helps to avail and deploy the logical cognition that is set-based quantification. But that logical cognition is not a creature contrived by language. The young infant distinguishes between individuated entities such as objects and nonindividuated entities such as sand, and compares representations of sets of objects with respect to both continuous and discrete quantification. Also, at least by the time the infant is about a year old, he or she has constructed her first object kind-sortals, distinguishing kind-sortals from properties in categorization, individuation, inductive inference, and language. . . . Natural languages most likely have the quantification machinery they do because of the quantificational resources of prelinguistic mental representations (both ontogenetically and phylogenetically), as these were drawn upon in creating the language-acquisition device. (OC 284–85) Carey allows that the prelinguistic capability that is set-based quantification underlies natural language quantification, although prelinguistic set-based quantification does not invoke symbols marking it, such as will be available in a natural language such as English (OC 296). Our language has markers for distinguishing singular and plural, and it has approximate mathematical quantifiers such as more, some, and many. As we know from logic texts, the logical quantifiers a, some, and every (or all or any) work in the absence of the successor function. The latter takes thought beyond logic to mathematics, specifically to the infinite set of natural numbers, the counting numbers. Part 1 included a reiteration (from Boydstun 2004, 301n40) that it is not until around age 3 that children demonstrate an implicit grasp of the principles of counting. Those five stated principles, which are from Gelman and Gallistel 1978, do not include an implicit grasp of the successor function nor a generative base for an inexhaustible supply of number names. By age 5, some children will have extended the number to which they can count to 20. They do not yet comprehend that the integers are endless, but they can count and have been doing so for a year or two (Gelman and Meck 1983, 357–58). By age 3, the child has been talking and thinking in concepts for a couple of years. First year, first word is the rule of thumb. Rand’s measurement-omission theory of concept formation is readily adaptable to that circumstance. Grasp of units under a concept in their substitutional aspect need not include grasp that items potentially qualified for placement under the concept are endless. Neither does it require the 3-to-4 year old’s implicit mastery of the five principles of counting. The limited scope of prelinguistic set-based quantification implicated in parallel individuation of sets may suffice for the some . . . any logical quantification Rand proposed as implicit in the grasp of a first common-noun word such as ball. (That word and the concept it marks is an example of what Carey calls an object kind-sortal in the last block quote above [see OC 263–83].) Rand’s idea that entry into conceptual thought is attained with implicit grasp of the concept unit includes the four claims designated below. I shall use the concept ball as example of an earliest concept because that was the first word of the child whose development I have been privileged to witness since his birth. LS – Substitution unit is logically implicit in ball. LM – Measure-value unit is logically implicit in ball. ES – Substitution unit is implicitly employed in comprehending ball. EM – Measure-value unit is implicitly employed in comprehending ball. The first two are true, and between them it is LM, when greatly generalized, that is distinctive in Rand’s analysis of concepts, including universal concepts. However, the present essay is concerned only with ES and EM. I have related the result that ES looks true, based on research on infants, as reported in Carey 2009. ES is not a claim about concept formation uniquely Rand’s. When greatly generalized, EM is Rand’s distinctive claim concerning concept formation. Carey’s core cognitions and representations in preverbal infants are tacit; they are not articulated in language. They are privately articulated iconically, wordlessly. Nevertheless, for the mind cognizing them—preverbal infant, nonverbal animal, or adult human—they are conscious articulations, they are explicit in that mind, even if wordless. Additionally, there is knowledge in that mind “embodied in the computations carried out over explicit representations” (OC 64). This is like our meaning in saying that a competent speaker of natural language is systematically governed by certain rules of syntax without being able to state those rules (Boydstun 2004, 300n35; cf. Campbell 2002). When Carey argues that a cognitive power of set-based quantification is required for the two core cognitions pertaining to magnitude, she is arguing not only a logico-mathematical entailment, but an implicitly operating cognition. Similarly, Carey’s elementary set-based quantification is implicitly in operation in core cognitions of quantity, or magnitude. Such implicit set-based quantification is required for ES. Preverbal set-based quantification is operationally implicated in both ES and in parallel individuation of small sets for the infant at 10-to-12 months. At that age, parallel individuation of small sets is limited to having no more than three items. Why is ball applied to any of more than 3 of them in the infant’s experience? I think this is because applying ball to one in hand or one recalled does not create the demands on working memory present in the parallel-individuation experiments eliciting comprehension of numbers to 3. Application of ball requires only recognition memory and long-term memory. (On the developmental time line of explicit memory, see Hartshorn et al. 1998.) I should head off a natural error. It is natural to think that parallel individuation of small sets is a primitive ability to count to 3. It is not. At its adult level of development, parallel individuation of small sets has advanced from 3 to 4. A child with the ability to count to say 20 has a numerical skill and comprehension markedly distinct from that in parallel individuation of small sets. (Note that the other core cognition pertaining to quantity—analog magnitude representation of number—is not limited to a small number of distinct ranked magnitudes; see also Piazza 2011.) Moreover, an adult with Williams syndrome can have some command of language, but be unable to count (Johnson 2005, 144). That is not a counterexample to ES. The individual with that syndrome could possess the (delayed) power of parallel individuation of small sets and the set-based quantification that entails, which latter is required for ES to be true. The Williams individual has working memory, so I venture the possibility that these individuals have the power of parallel individuation of small sets and its implicit set-based quantification prior their first word. I cannot venture as a possibility with any backing that the Williams child has the power of analog magnitude representation of number, for these children have deficits in spatio-visual skills. If such a child were not in possession of the perceptual ratio-scaling discrimination characteristic of analog magnitude representation of number, yet had ball, then that child’s concept of ball would seem unlikely to require EM. It could still be the case that ball for the normal one-year-old might require such perceptual ratio discriminations in addition to set-based quantification, application of both to balls of different sizes, and a grasp of the invariant shape across ball size. That is, consistent with research, it could still be the case that EM is at work in the first word of the normal child. Notice that capabilities for parallel individuation of small sets and capabilities for analog magnitude representations of number, as well as the set-based quantification operative in them, are possessed by animals other than the human. It is a live option that Rand was right in saying that grasp of unit is key to conceptual capability. Concerning neurological distinctiveness supporting that distinct human grasp, I would look to the secondary sensory cortices (greater surface relative-area in humans compared to chimps) and to language areas (OC 268–85; Dehaene and Brannon 2011, chapters 17, 19; Johnson 2005, chapter 7; Deacon 1997). Rand’s EM is probably on the mark for ball and other early concepts. It is off the mark for colors. When the toddler tells you a light on the Christmas tree to which you point is blue, that the next is red, and so forth, there is no EM at work. The fact that we can, with scientific advance, resolve colors into dimensions and scale them is not to the point of the operationally implicit (ITOE 13–14). There are other means available for delivering similarities given in perception for conceptual identification, means that do not operationally entail implicitly the scaling of quantities along dimensions (Boydstun 2004, 291–93, Analytic Constraint, and Nosofsky 1992 cited therein; Jetton 2011, 225–27). ES is enough in such cases. Rand was off the mark, as I have noted before, in her complete generalization of LM and EM to all concepts. They cannot hold for concepts logically presupposed by measurement in its essentials (e.g. essentials in Suppes 2002, 25–26). For instance set-based quantification in schematic form is implicit in all early concepts for which LM and EM hold, and not the other way around. All the same, Rand’s theory of concept genesis has more (even more) consonance with cognitive psychology’s understanding of the infant and toddler today (2013) than with that understanding twenty-three years ago, when I first opened Rand’s work in that light. References Boydstun, S. 1990. Capturing Concepts. Objectivity 1(1):13–41. ——. 2004. Universals and Measurement. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5(2):271–305. Campbell, R. L. 2002. Goals, Values, and the Implicit: Explorations in Psychological Ontology. JARS 3(2):289–327. Carey, S. 2009. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford. Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. Norton. Dehaene, S., and E. Brannon, editors, 2011. Space, Time and Number in the Brain. Academic Press. Gelman, R. and C.R. Gallistel 1986 [1978]. The Child’s Understanding of Number. Harvard. Gelman, R., and E. Meck. 1983. Preschoolers’ Counting: Principles before Skill. Cognition 13:343–59. Hartshorn, K. et al. 1998. Ontogeny of Learning and Memory in the First Year-and-a-Half of Life. Developmental Psychobiology 32:69–89. Jetton, M. 2011. The Sim-Dif Model and Comparison. JARS 11(2):215–32. Johnson, M. H. 2005 [1997]. Developmental Cognitive Science. Blackwell. Nosofsky, R. 1992. Similarity Scaling and Cognitive Process Models. Annual Review of Psychology 43:25–53. Piazza, M. 2011. Neurocognitive Start-Up Tools for Symbolic Number Representations. In Dehaene and Brannon 2011. Rand, A. 1961. The Objectivist Ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness. 1964. Signet. ——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 2nd edition. Meridian. Suppes, P. 2002. Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures. CSLI.

Capturing Quantity Part 2 Psychologists cited in my 1990 and 1991 include Renée Baillargeon, Randy Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Alan Leslie, and Elizabeth Spelke. With those writers, Susan Carey records her agreement “that the cognition of humans, like that of all animals, begins with highly structured innate mechanisms designed to build representations with specific content. I call the mental structures that represent them ‘core cognition’” (2009, 67). It is the word content in Carey’s description of these core cognitions that makes them decidedly innate cognitive systems (cf. Jetton 1995, 73; Touchstone 1996, 117–18). Those contents are not obtained by individual learning. This would draw a smile from Leibniz, but frowns from Locke, Helmholtz, Piaget, and Rand. It gets frowns from some of Carey’s colleagues as well (2009, 68–69). The dissenters argue that all cognitive content and the cognitive systems composing that content are learned ultimately from elementary perceptual and sensory-motor experience. For the pure empiricists, it is learning all the way down. Rand was of that view. "To focus his eyes (which is not innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements . . . ." (Rand 1970, 191; cf. Bennett 1966, 98–99; Touchstone 1996, 166) Carey works assiduously, through laboratory research, to specify innate core cognitive systems. These cognitive systems she identifies as core are specific to different domains of experience. There are only a handful of these core systems (at least only a handful discerned so far), and two pertain to cognition of magnitude. Another pertains to object, another to intentional agency. All innate core cognitive systems are perceptual input analyzers, all aid acquisition of experientially learned skills and knowledge, and all remain in use throughout child and adult life. These innate core cognitive systems are to be understood as gotten by evolution and instituted in the individual simply by brain maturation, which may or may not be sufficient by time of birth (Carey 2009, 55–69; cf. Macnamara 1986, 72–74, 191–92). In an extended sense, that could be said to be a purely empirical view, with the human species and its earlier lineages being said to have learned by population experience (cf. Jetton 1995, 67–68). But Carey does not select that wide arc as a type of learning, and I shall accede to her denomination of the core cognitions as innate, rather than empirical. It should be understood that these innate cognitive systems and their outputs upon their analyses of experiential inputs are devoid of the spiritualism endemic in the old rationalist theories of innate ideas. I should mention that Carey does not confine the possibility of innate representations to the core cognitive systems. We may also have innate cognitive systems poised to deliver content (e.g. the representation cause) that spans various core cognitions (Carey 2009, 215–18, 240–46; see further, Baillargeon and Carey 2012). Integrating the research reported and analyzed in Carey 2009, Origin of Concepts (OC), with Rand’s thinking on concepts and mathematics in infant and child development is not most importantly concerned over the issue of whether the core systems Carey calls innate are best said to be innate in Carey’s mild and purely natural sense. What matters most are sequence, functions, interrelations among skills, and interrelations among contents. There is a key choice of terminology made by Carey to which I strongly object. She calls the innate core cognitions conceptual. Their contents are concepts, in her choice of terminology. Core cognition has rich integrated conceptual content. By this I mean that the representations in core cognition cannot be reduced to perceptual or sensori-motor primitives, that the representations are accessible and drive voluntary action, and that representations from distinct core cognition systems interact in central inferential processes. (OC 67; see also 97) Carey goes on to specify that “the format of representation of core cognition is iconic rather than involving sentence-like symbol structures” (OC 68; further, 104–5, 134–35, 195–96). My instant response would be: “Then those representations are schemas, not concepts” (Flavell 1963, 52–58; Jetton 1991, 70–72; 1998, 102–11). Very occasionally, Carey herself refers to a preverbval infant general representation by schema rather than by concept (OC 195–96, 241, 244). It has been my view, consistent with Rand’s, that what C. S. Peirce and Terrence Deacon call purely iconic representations are not concepts. They are prerequisites for indexical and fully symbolic representations, but only the latter two are concepts by Rand’s account and mine. With more reflection, I need to revise my view, though it will yet be a view consistent with Rand’s and one under which I shall yet object to Carey’s choice concept, rather than schema, as name for the representations exercised in core cognitions. The photo of me displayed at the top of the left margin is an iconic representation of me because it resembles me, and one can associate it with me on that account. It occasions also an indexical representation of the approximate elevation of the sun above the horizon, indicating that circumstance in one’s association through grasped causal relations (rather than simply through perceived similarity). That the photo is associated with photo is by convention, and this is symbolic representation. So say Peirce and Deacon. Digging further into Carey’s book, I find that when she wrote iconic she meant it in the more general sense of the pictorial, which would include not only the iconic in the strict Peirce-Deacon sense, but the indexical as well. To now I have thought of Rand’s view of earliest concepts, those marked in the single-word stage of language acquisition, as being indexical representations, not symbolic representations in the strict sense. That is incorrect, and it is an internal tension in my 2004. On the one hand, I had written: By 24 months, the child is using two-word utterances such as . . . “I know [how to do it]” (Bremner 1994, 252–53; Nelson 1996, 112, 124–25). Up to about this time, when grammar begins to develop, “words learned remain tied to their world models and do not form systems of their own” (Nelson 1996, 128). In terms of Deacon’s iconic, indexical, and symbolic levels of representation (1997, 70–83), I should say that concepts at the single-words stage are indexical representations, and these concepts will become symbolic representations with the onset of grammar. Rand’s conceptual level of representation cuts across Deacon’s indexical and symbolic levels. (Boydstun 2004, 300n37) On the other hand, I had noted a way in which Rand’s thesis “a concept identifying perceptual concretes stands for some implicit propositions” is true even for the toddler at the single-word stage of language acquisition (ITOE 48, 21). He cannot state propositions, but by the time he can say ball (ba) for a ball, the word can mean a suite of image and action schemas into which he knows a ball fits (Boydstun 2004, 290). I was correct in thinking the representation of named classes of objects at the single-word stage to be indexical, but incorrect in thinking of them as not also symbolic in the strict sense of Peirce-Deacon. At the single-word stage the child has gotten symbolic representation, in which the word is a conventional representation for the class, not associated with the class simply by support of causal connection or simply by similarity. Having the reliable word for the concept caps the concept’s definiteness, even though the word is not yet set in grammatical expressions. So it remains that, contrary to Carey, I shall reserve concept for the representation in the first word of language competence and beyond. Before that, schema (see also Mandler 2010). I reported in 1991: "Jean Piaget (1954) concluded from his investigations that infants first acquire a notion of enduring objects at nine months of age. Until then, if a toy attractive to the infant were covered with a cloth, the infant would make no attempt to lift the cloth and grasp the toy, even though she were capable (after the fifth month) of performing each of these actions. Piaget concluded that, until the ninth month, the infant does not regard the toy as an enduring entity that continues to exist while not in view; only after the ninth month does the infant begin to infer the continued existence of objects. . . . "Piaget’s observations have been reconfirmed many times, but Piaget’s interpretation is now widely questioned. Infants younger than nine months may fail to lift the cover and grasp the toy not because they lack a notion of enduring objects, but because they are not yet able to coordinate such a means-ends sequence (Baillargeon 1986, 38–39). It is likely that this inability is due to immaturity of the frontal cortex (Diamond 1989). Recent experiments, not demanding coordination of means-ends-sequences, indicate that infants as young as six months (Baillargeon 1986), even four months (Baillargeon 1987), understand not only that objects continue to exist when not seen, but that moving objects continue along trajectories when not seen and that those trajectories could not be through other solid objects." (Boydstun 1991a, 38–39; see also 1991b, 6–7 and Friedenberg 1993, 32–33.) The experimental methods of Baillargeon and other contemporary developmental cognitive psychologists were not available to Piaget. Since my reports in 1990 and 1991, those experimental methods have shown that infants have much of what Piagetians called “object concept” (e.g. Flavell 1963, 129–35) as early as two months. (On brain maturation factors, see also Johnson 2005, 82–85, 146–57, 172–75.) “By two months of age, infants represent objects as spatio-temporally continuous. Not only do they represent objects as continuing to exist behind barriers, they also take evidence of spatio-temporal discontinuity as evidence for numerical distinctness” (OC 40; see also Aguiar and Baillargeon 1999; 2002). Carey analyzes the laboratory evidence that during the first two months, infants acquire the ability to represent and quantify objects from sensory and perceptual primitives. She finds that that evidence can be interpreted otherwise, and she gives some empirical reasons to conclude that “perceptual input analyzers that yield representations of objects are most likely innate” (OC 55; see 55–63). In working memory, we have object representations used to track their individual identity as we perceive them in different locations. These representations are called object files (Kahneman, Treisman, and Gibbs 1992. Characteristics of our operations with these representations include: "(1) privileging spatio-temporal information over property/kind information in individuation and computations of numerical identity; (2) a set-size limit on the number of objects that may be simultaneously attended to and represented in working memory (on the order of three or four); and (3) the capacity to track individual objects through occlusion, with specific spatio-temporal information distinguishing cessation of existence from occlusion" (OC 71–72). Carey adduces evidence that those our adult characteristics of object representation are also found in young infants (OC 72–87). The set-size limitation increases during infancy, reaching the adult level by 10 months. Two core cognitions underlie infant performance in tasks reflecting sensitivity to magnitude. One is parallel individuation of small sets, which supports an infant and adult sensitivity to number. This cognition entertains a small number of object-file representations. Object files of some individuals are held in one bin in working memory while others are held in another. In one experimental task eliciting these operations, an infant watches as graham crackers are placed into each of two opaque containers, which have been shown empty to the baby prior to the deposits. In view of the baby, one cracker is placed in one container. One cracker and another are placed in the other container. Baby (10–12 months) is released to crawl to the containers. Baby heads for the container with two crackers. (Monkey’s also perform such tasks.) Next 2 versus 3. Baby succeeds again. 1 versus 3? Success. 1 versus 4? Failure. 2 or 3 versus 4? Failure. (Feigenson, Carey, and Hauser 2002). The limits on the number of objects that can be simultaneously attended to and represented in working memory are manifest in those results. This characteristic indicates that in such tasks the infants’ sensitivity (implicitly) to number is supported by parallel individuation in small sets, rather than by a second core cognition concerning magnitude: analog magnitude representations of number. In such cognitions, ability to discriminate any two magnitudes is a monotonically increasing function of their ratios. A ratio of 4:1 is easier to discriminate than a ratio of 2:1 or 3:2. The analog magnitude system is “an evolutionary ancient representational system in which number is encoded by an analog magnitude proportional to the number of objects in the set. These representations support computations of numerical equivalence and numerical order” in preverbal infants (OC 123). The individuals whose set sizes are discriminated by that core cognition can be objects or tones (OC 124). Cognition of magnitudes through parallel individuation of small sets has been elicited in preverbal infants using not only objects, but events and tones (OC 148–49). It is parallel individuation in small sets I expect for first rung in the ladder to units in the substitution sense in Rand’s theory of concepts. It is analog magnitude representations of number I expect for first rung to units in the measure-value sense in Rand’s theory. We shall see. (To be continued.) References Aguiar, A., and R. Baillargeon 1999. 2.5 Month-Old Infants’ Reasoning about When Objects Should and Should Not Be Occluded. Cognitive Psychology 39(2):116–57. ——. 2002. Developments in Young Infants’ Reasoning about Occluded Objects. Cognitive Psychology 45(2):267–336. Baillargeon, R. 1986. Representing the Existence and the Location of Hidden Objects: Object Permanence in 6- and 8-Month-Old Infants. Cognition 23:21–41. ——. 1987. Object Permanence in 3.5- and 4.5-Month-Old Infants. Developmental Psychology 23:655–64. Baillargeon, R., and S. Carey. 2012. Core Cognition and Beyond: The Acquisition of Physical and Numerical Knowledge. In Early Childhood Development and Later Outcome. S. Pauen, editor. Cambridge. Boydstun, S. 1990. Capturing Concepts. Objectivity (O) 1(1):13–41. ——. 1991a. Induction on Identity I. O 1(2):33–46. ——. 1991b. Induction on Identity II–XII. O 1(3):1–56. ——. 2004. Universals and Measurement. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 5(2):271–305. Bennett, J. 1966. Kant’s Analytic. Cambridge. Bremner, J. G. 1994. Infancy. 2nd edition. Blackwell. Carey, S. 2009. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford. Deacon, T. 1997. The Symbolic Species. Norton. Diamond, A. 1989. Differences Between Adult and Infant Cognition: Is the Crucial Variable Presence or Absence of Language? In Thought without Language. L. Weiskrantz, editor. Oxford. Feigenson, L., S. Carey, and M. Hauser 2002. The Representations Underlying Infants’ Choice of More: Object Files versus Analog Magnitudes. Psychological Science 13(2):150–56. Flavell, J. H. 1963. The Developmental Psychology of Jean Piaget. D. Van Norstrand. Friedenberg, J. 1993. Intricate Consciousness. O 1(5):29–67. Jetton, M. 1991. Imagination and Cognition. O 1(3):57–92. ——. 1995. Time, Prescience, and Biology. O 2(2):59–104. ——. 1998. Pursuing Similarity. O 2(6):41–130. Johnson, M. H. 2005 [1997]. Developmental Cognitive Science. Blackwell. Kahneman, D., Treisman, A., and B. J. Gibbs. 1992. The Reviewing of Object Files: Object-Specific Integration of Information. Cognitive Psychology 24:175–219. Macnamara, J. 1986. A Border Dispute – The Place of Logic in Psychology. MIT. Mandler, J. M. 2010. The Spatial Foundations of the Conceptual System. Language and Cognition 2(1):21–44. Nelson, K. 1996. Language in Cognitive Development. Cambridge. Piaget, J. 1954. The Construction of Reality in the Child. Basic Books. Rand, A. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 2nd edition. Meridian. ——. 1970. The Comprachicos. In The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Signet. Touchstone, K. 1996. Mathematics and Intuition. O 2(4):93–182.

Capturing Quantity Part 1 I completed Capturing Concepts and published it in 1990. In its list of References, there is much relevant research in developmental cognitive psychology published through 1989. There is only one work in that list published in 1990, and that is the expanded second edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The expansion included new material, transcripts from recordings of Rand’s seminar on ITOE a couple of years after ITOE had been published in The Objectivst (1966–67). I have often pointed out that Rand could be wrong in some ways concerning how concepts are formed, yet, in the logical presuppositions of such a proposed process, land on true character of all concretes and a true capability we possess for conceptualizing them around that character. In particular Rand can be wrong in supposing all concepts at all stages of our cognitive development are formed, at least implicitly, by a process of measurement omission, yet be correct in the presupposition that all concretes stand in measurement relations to other concretes and that we can and should conceive things with the appropriate measurement relations recognized and their particular values, within appropriate ranges, omitted for the contraction of concretes into concept. Recall Rand’s picture of our earliest conceptual and mathematical capabilities. In coming to concepts and language we moved from regarding things only as entities to regarding them also as units. "When a child observes that two objects (which he will later learn to designate as 'tables') resemble each other, but are different from four other objects ('chairs'), his mind is focusing on a particular attribute of the objects (their shape), then isolating them according to their differences, and integrating them as units into separate groups according to their similarities. "This is the key, the entrance to the conceptual level of man’s consciousness. The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow. "A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.) Note that the concept unit involves an act of consciousness (a selective focus, a certain way of regarding things), but that it is not an arbitrary creation of consciousness: it is a method of identification or classification according to the attributes which a consciousness observes in reality. . . . The criterion of classification is not invented, it is perceived in reality. Thus the concept 'unit' is a bridge between metaphysics and epistemology: units do not exist qua units, what exists are things, but units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships. "With the grasp of the (implicit) concept 'unit' man reaches the conceptual level of cognition, which consists of two interrelated fields: Conceptual and Mathematical. The process of concept-formation is, in large part, a mathematical process." (ITOE 6–7) In “Capturing Concepts” I cited evidence from research that indicates our earliest concepts could not be of the Randian form for concepts. Subsequent research on infant cognition of quantity calls for a revision of my report and conclusion. Here is the pertinent part of what I had written in that 1990 paper: "There is much evidence to suggest that preschoolers typically contrast objects in terms of holistic, dimensionally nonspecific relations of magnitude. Objects intense in size and color are grouped together and segregated from objects not intense in both size and color. It is moreness and lessness across both dimensions that matter for these young children. They are observed trying to seriate objects on two dimensions at once. Quite possibly, they have not only notions of global magnitude polarities, but notions of dimensionally undifferentiated directions of difference. The preschooler’s understanding of global magnitude, however, does not entail an understanding that greater than and less than are necessarily opposing directions of difference. That understanding comes later, with an understanding of the ordering of values along single dimensions (Smith 1989, 165–72; Halford 1984; Chapman and Lindenberger 1988; Minsky 1985, 99–107, 149, 241). "The formation of concepts according to Rand’s formula of measurement omission requires a dimensional understanding of isolated attributes. The dimensions must be accessible but might be scalable only ordinally (ITOE 31–33, 14–15). A child knows size as a dimension when he regards big and little as attributes of a single kind; part identities have then become organized by dimensional kind. He knows size as an ordinal dimension when he regards bigger and littler as necessarily opposing directions of difference. Preschoolers have only a very incomplete and fragmented understanding of these quantitative relations. They do have the beginnings of such understanding (Smith 1989, 168–72; Gelman and Gallistel 1986, 160–67), and perhaps there is enough in some of the preschooler’s domains of knowledge to begin to form concepts along the lines of Rand’s formula. "It is doubtful, though, that preschoolers could hold the full-blown Randian form of concepts; they cannot yet view numbers algebraically. (Could they nonetheless view different values along some dimensions as variables?) It is doubtful, furthermore, that the preschooler’s concepts engage universals full-force; they do not yet realize that counting numbers are endless (Gelman and Meck 1983, 357–58)." (Boydstun 1990, 33–34) Rand had written that “man’s mathematical and conceptual abilities develop simultaneously” (ITOE 9). Research in recent years on infant cognition supports that contention. I am going to present those research results and look at what they say about the relation of first lexical concepts to the quantitative knowledge possessed by the infant at that time. Rand had gone on to say in support of her contention just quoted that “a child learns to count when he is learning his first words.” That latter contention was incorrect. As I noted in “Universals and Measurement” (2004): "The child has gone far beyond learning first words (roughly months 12 to 18) by the time she is learning to count. By 30 months, the basic linguistic system has become established and is fairly stable (Nelson 1996, 106). Not until around 36 months or beyond does the child have an implicit grasp of the elementary principles of counting: assign one-label-for-one-item, keep stable the order of number labels recited, assign final recited number as the number of items in the counted collection, realize that any sort of items can be counted, and realize that the order in which the items are counted is irrelevant (Gelman and Meck 1983; Butterworth 1999, 109–16)." (301n40) This error of Rand’s was pointed out to her in her epistemology seminar (c. 1971). Professor H (who may be Michael Berliner) reminded Rand of her remark on counting and first words. She replied that counting is almost simultaneous with first words, but not quite. H: “You say [counting] occurs shortly afterward. From what I have observed, it seems to occur quite a bit later, so that it seems to be a much higher-level process. AR: It isn’t so much higher-level, but the fact is that you cannot begin to count objects until you have learned to distinguish them, and you cannot distinguish them firmly until you have learned some words—i.e., formed some concepts. Therefore, it is part of the same general development. But a child does have to acquire some conceptual vocabulary, meaning: learn to identity some concretes in reality, before he can begin to count. H: I was taking it too literally. AR: No, if I said “when he is learning his first words,” I meant in the same general period of development. (ITOE Appendix, 200) The question of whether our earliest express concepts, our concepts at the one-word stage of language acquisition, are simultaneous with some quantitative knowledge need not hang on ability to count. It turns out we had some other quantitative knowledge at the dawn of our concepts. We can give Rand a little gold star, or anyway a silver star, for a little prescience in thinking the conceptual and mathematical work abreast each other from the outset. It turns out also that I deserve a little star for something I said about units in “Universals and Measurement.” "Concepts are mental integrations of 'two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted' (ITOE 13). "The units spoken of in this definition are items appropriately construed as units by the conceiving mind. They are items construed as units in two senses, as substitution units and as measure values (ITOE Appendix, 184, 186–88). As substitution units, the items in the concept class are regarded as indifferently interchangeable, all of them standing as members of the class and as instances of the concept. Applied to concept units in their substitution sense, measurement omission means release of the particular identities of the class members so they may be treated indifferently for further conceptual cognitive purposes. This is the same indifference at work in the order-indifference principle of counting. The number of items in a collection may be ascertained by counting them in any order. Comprehension of counting and count number requires comprehension of that indifference. "The release of particular identity for making items into concept-class substitution units is a constant and necessary part of Rand's measurement-omission recipe. But this part is not peculiar to Rand's scheme. What is novel in Rand's theory is the idea that in the release of particular identity, the release of which-particular-one, there is also a suspension of particular measure values along a common dimension." (Boydstun 2004, 273–74) My new little lucky star is on account of research indicating that in infancy we already had two branches of quantitative knowledge that are precursors to and instruments for our later grasp of units in the dual sense of substitution units and measure-value units. Remember, this new material we are going to assimilate concerns only genesis of our human cognition, not analysis of its structure, actual or desirable. Still, the stars are sweet. My window into recent research bearing so heavily on our genesis questions pertinent to Rand’s theory of concepts is Susan Carey’s The Origin of Concepts (2009). (To be continued.) References Boydstun, S. 1990. Capturing Concepts. Objectivity 1(1):13–41. ——. 2004. Universals and Measurement. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5(2):271–305. Butterworth, B. 1999. What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math. New York: Free Press. Carey, S. 2009. The Origin of Concepts. Oxford. Chapman, M., and U. Lindenberger 1988. Functions, Operations, and Decaloge in the Development of Transitivity. Developmental Psychology 24(4):542–51. Gelman, R. and C.R. Gallistel 1986 [1978]. The Child’s Understanding of Number. Harvard. Gelman, R., and E. Meck. 1983. Preschoolers’ Counting: Principles before Skill. Cognition 13:343–59. Halford, G. 1984. Can Young Children Integrate Premises in Transitivity and Serial Order Tasks? Cognitive Psychology 16:65–93. Minsky, M. 1985. The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Nelson, K. 1996. Language in Cognitive Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rand, A. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Expanded 2nd edition. H. Binswanger and L. Peikoff, editors. Meridian. Smith, L. 1989. From Global Similarities to Kinds of Similarities. In Similarity and Analogical Reasoning. Vosniadou and Ortony, editors. 1989. Cambridge.

Critical Faculty Rand wrote that the higher animals “possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A ‘perception’ is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present, and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations” (OE, 1961, 19). Nathaniel Branden maintained that higher animals can engage in perceptual abstractions (Mortimer Adler’s term), which is recognition of a number of sensible particulars as of the same kind. The animal does not have the further, human conceptual power, which entails “identifying explicitly of what the kind consists” (Psy of S-E 1969, 30). Leonard Peikoff remarked that perceptual similarities are seen by animals, but humans go beyond that. We isolate similar concretes and form concepts standing for an unlimited number of concretes (Phil of Obj, Lecture 4, 1976). David Kelley wrote that in judging of an object, which one is perceiving, that it is a such-and-such, one “classifies the object on the basis of similarities that have been explicitly isolated and named” (ES, 1986, 219). Rand wrote that “an animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality to him is whatever he senses or feels” (FNI, 1961, 17). She remarked orally that “an animal does not have the capacity to isolate critically the fact that there is something and he is conscious of it” (ITOE, c.1970, 246). An animal lacks the human ability “to apply introspection to the processes of one’s own consciousness and check them” (256). In the preceding statements, notice these phrases especially: identifying explicitly /// isolate similar concretes /// explicitly isolated /// isolate critically the fact that there is something. In their Scientific American article “The Biological Basis of Learning and Individuality” (Sep 1992), Kandel and Hawkins distinguish between two kinds of learning found in animals with nervous systems. Higher animals, including humans, learn in both ways. One kind of learning is called implicit, the other is called explicit. Habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning are forms of what is called implicit learning. Such learning “is slow and accumulates through repetition over many trials. It often [viz., classical conditioning] involves association of sequential stimuli and permits storage of information about predictive relations between events” (80). In contrast, “explicit learning is fast and may take place after only one training trial. It often involves association of simultaneous stimuli and permits storage of information about a single event that happens in a particular time and place; it therefore affords a sense of familiarity about previous events” (80). Explicit learning requires consciousness. Explicit learning evidently occurs only in vertebrates; it requires structures in the temporal lobes. Within the broad category known as explicit learning, there are degrees of explicitness. In Explaining Behavior, Fred Dretske characterizes those degrees: Consider a rat that has learned through operant, or instrumental, conditioning that to obtain food it should press a bar. The rat could reasonably be said to be guided in its behavior by a belief that is relatively implicit. An implicit belief (explicit, but relatively implicit) is applied in fairly narrow circumstances. A fully explicit belief “can enter into combinations with other beliefs to generate a wide range of different actions” (1988, 118). Prior to the acquisition of language, our beliefs lie in the more implicit zones of explicit learning and belief. Even at the relatively implicit levels of belief guiding a rat’s operantly conditioned behavior, it is possible to err and correct, although it be in a very local way. Nevertheless, I decline to call such beliefs knowledge. I incline to reserve knowledge for beliefs attaining truth where those beliefs are interconnected within and improvable by a critical consciousness holding them. This lies in the more fully explicit zone of explicit belief, a zone not far from linguistically held beliefs of an intact human mind. Beginning By day of birth, one had the additional reflexes of pupil dilation, kneejerk, and startle. On that day, one had visual preference for 3-dimensional objects (one perceived something of the 3D of objects), visual discriminations of different static line orientations, visual correction for 3D size constancy under variation of distance and correction for shape constancy under variation of object orientation. One was unable to detect boundaries and unable to fill in invisible parts of objects. One’s visual acuity was poor (probably due to immaturity of both the retina and the visual cortex), and one’s contrast sensitivity was poor. One’s significant body motions were in alternation with visual attending. One was capable of rough, saccadic tracking, which was not only not smooth, but not anticipatory. One fixed on interesting objects, and perhaps one had some slight control in this; perhaps it was not entirely passive capture. One may have had an early visual preference for faces in tracking. One could imitate two facial movements and one head turn; one could perform these imitations when forced to delay until the model movement was absent. One’s auditory resolution of pitches and volumes was already pretty good. One had a preference for Mother’s voice over the voice of a stranger, and one could distinguish human language from other auditory input. One was engaged in early head-turning, in the horizontal plane, towards sound sources. As of the time I compiled—a dozen years ago—the developmental time line from which the items here are taken, it was unknown whether the sound source is experienced as outside the head; head-turning had been evoked also by earphones. Let’s wrap up the first day. One cried when other infants cried. One had auditory recognition memory; retention was for days under conditioning, for 24 hours under habituation. One was sensitive to pain, to touch (coetaneous and active), and to changes in bodily position. By the end of the second day, one could discriminate Mother’s face from a stranger’s face. One had a preference for infant-directed speech (motherese) over adult-directed speech. By five days, one engaged in early reaching towards an object in the visual field, reaching that included a preparation for grasping. This reaching and visual detection may be an undifferentiated attention system. By twelve days, one could imitate three facial (oral) movements and one set of sequential finger movements. By fourteen days, one had a preference for Father’s voice over that of other males. By three weeks, one expected the reappearance of visual objects that were gradually occluded by a moving screen, provided the occlusion time was short. Through the third week, I don’t think the infant has yet had a percept. She is not yet able to engage in explorations sufficiently controlled, and with enough memory, to have what we would call a percept. Sensory experience, discriminations, detections, responses—but no percepts. If no percepts, then no knowledge in the strict sense. If the infant in the first couple of days, and even in the first three weeks, has yet to have a percept, do his sensory registrations and preferences, his reaches, and his expectations amount to identifications? Well, yes, she does seem bent on singling things out, especially Mother. It’s just that the strivings and discriminations do not yet coalesce into a percept. Rand had expressed already in 1957, how she thought about the beginning of the infant’s mind in his first days after delivery. She interpreted the baby as having not yet grasped that A is A. This is the stage “ when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects.” To a baby at this stage, “the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is the curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other . . .” (AS 1040–41) There was some revision or refinement of Rand’s views on identifications of what between 1957 and 1966. She wrote in the earlier exposition: “The task of [man’s] senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind” (1016). To reason as an identifying faculty, Rand would later add the mind’s automatic formation of percepts from sensory inputs. “A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality. . . . Percept, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident” (1966, 5). Sensations are parts of the percept, but their integration to form the whole percept has already been accomplished by automatic brain processing. Consciously directed identification proceeds, reason proceeds, upon whatever percepts are possible to us. By way of speaking truth, and in conformity with Rand’s later view, take the statement “his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind” thusly: the telling of the senses is automatic sensory processing up to but not including the automatic formation of percepts. (So for vision, that would include pickup and peripheral processing at the retinas, then preattentive processing [within one-fifth of a second] by LGN, V1–4, and others.) Let “learning by his mind” include some automatic learning, not only volitional, directed learning. However much Rand’s view shifted between ’57 and ’66, it is the latter view that settled as her final, considered picture. In 1966 Rand added: “The (implicit) concept ‘existent’ undergoes three stages of development in man’s mind. The first stage is a child’s awareness of objects, of things—which represents the (implicit) concept ‘entity’. The second and closely allied sage is the awareness of specific, particular things which he can distinguish from the rest of his perceptual field—which represents the (implicit) concept ‘identity’”(ITOE 6). Only at a third stage are concepts attained, in Rand’s cameo portrait. “The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow. “A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.) Note that the concept unit involves an act of consciousness (a selective focus, a certain way of regarding things), but that it is not an arbitrary creation of consciousness: it is a method of identification or classification according to the attributes which a consciousness observes in reality. . . . The criterion of classification is not invented, it is perceived in reality. Thus the concept “unit” is a bridge between metaphysics and epistemology: units do not exist qua units, what exists are things, but units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships.” (ITOE 6–7) Leonard Peikoff renders Rand’s idea of an existence-identity sequence in early development on page 12 of OPAR. He refers to this idea of Rand’s as something of a suggestion, and I think that is fair enough. “The three axioms [axiomatic concepts] are not [implicitly] learned by the developing child simultaneously. ‘Existence’, Miss Rand suggests, is implicit from the start; it is given in the first sensation. To grasp ‘identity’ and (later) ‘consciousness’, however, even in implicit form, the child must attain across a period of months a certain perspective on his mental contents. He must perform, in stages, various processes of differentiation and integration that are not given in the simple act of opening his eyes. “Before a child can distinguish this object from that one, and thus reach the implicit concept of ‘identity’, he must first come to perceive that objects exist. This requires that he move beyond the chaos of disparate, fleeting sensations with which his conscious life begins; it requires that he integrate his sensations into the percepts of things or objects. . . . At this point, the child has reached, in implicit form, the concept of ‘entity’.” (The summer after this book was published, I attended a two-week conference at which Dr. Peikoff was presenting a series of lectures. I recall that at the dining hall, he had a little girl in tow. His parental experience of infant development was recent.) I think Peikoff’s piecing together of Rand’s existence-identity sequence has a certain neatness. He has identity wait for entity, where entity is in the form object (all these notions being only implicitly held, once they are held at all). However, I do not think it is reasonable to have the identity that is at hand with this versus that wait on object (say, four months). There are other existents with their this-versus-that assimilated by the infant mind sooner than that.

Objectivity About Objectivity

Thanks, Merlin, for connecting this exchange between Hook and Branden to your hefty work in those two JARS articles. I have them hardcopy. I hope they can receive attention online and be remarked on once people who do not subscribe to JARS (or who do not have full JSTOR access at a university library) are able to study them through JSTOR when it is available in due course to the general public. On your second paragraph here, I’d have two qualms. There seems to be a strand in Rand’s works which puts the point of character on effective action, though of course, the concept of human action is ends-directed by a mind, so not really a thing independent of character. Secondly, I’m unsure in Rand’s picture, whether motivations and their valence of selfishness can sometimes be undercover, not manifest, until they are analyzed and shown to be selfish (or counter-self or . . .). The visibility principle that Branden laid out, with Rand’s concordance, seems to be a selfishness analysis of occasions that on the surface show only one’s (and another’s) enjoyment. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I thought it would be nice to set the spring 1961 Hook/Branden exchange in its sequence of Objectivist disseminations and social connections to Hook. The Objectivist Newsletter would not begin publication until January 1962. According to Branden’s 1999 memoir My Years with Ayn Rand, he and Rand decided in August 1961 to create The Objectivist Newsletter. Rand had delivered her lecture “The Objectivist Ethics” in Madison in February 1961, but that would not appear in print until 1964, when The Virtue of Selfishness was published. Barbara Branden had taken several courses under Sidney Hook, and he was the director of her Master’s thesis in philosophy at NYU in the 1950’s. Hook, as readers here know, was the Ph.D. dissertation advisor for Leonard Peikoff, whose dissertation was a work in progress at the time of Hook’s critical NYT review of Rand’s book For the New Intellectual and her philosophy set forth therein. Nathaniel Branden had taken a philosophy course (also at NYU) under William Barrett, none under Hook.

New York Times Sunday, May 28, 1961 Nathaniel Branden In his review of Ayn Rand’s “For the New Intellectual” (Times Book Review, April 9), Professor Sidney Hook has had the courage to do that which few, if any of Miss Rand’s opponents have done in the past: he attempts to state what Miss Rand’s ideas are and to argue against them. Unfortunately, he is less than equal to his task. After his opening summary, his discussion of Miss Rand’s position bears almost no relation to her actual philosophy, and, in certain instances, represents its exact opposite. For example, he writes: “Swearing fidelity to Aristotle, Miss Rand claims to deduce not only matters of fact from logic but, with as little warrant, ethical rules and economic truths as well.” This assertion is unequivocally false; there is not a single sentence in any of Miss Rand’s books that would support it. What Ayn Rand does state in “For the New Intellectual” is: (a) that man’s mind is competent to achieve knowledge of reality; )b) that reason (as distinguished from faith, feeling or revelation) is man’s exclusive means of knowledge; (c) that “reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by [man’s]senses”; (d) that logic, the tool of reason, “the art of non-contradictory identification”; (e) that matters of fact, ethical rules and economic truths are, therefore, to be derived from one’s observations of reality (not from logic) by means of logical inference (pp. 9, 10, 20, 152–4, 157, 184–6). If it is this Prof. Hook challenges, does he wish us to understand that his conclusions, ethical rules and economic beliefs were arrived at by means other than logic? In presenting Miss Rand’s ethics, Prof. Hook has chosen to omit the as and the validation, to discuss only some of the consequences and to misstate most of them—and then to offer his disconnected fragments as a summary of her position, thus imputing to her his own chaos. Thus, he either ignores or evades the most radical, original and philosophically important aspects of her ethics: the derivation of the need for values from the nature of living organisms; the demonstration that “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible”; the explanation of why man, specifically, needs a code of moral values; the solution to the question of how normative propositions are to be derived from factual propositions; the proof of why man’s life (meaning: man’s survival qua man, qua rational being) is the standard by which moral values should be chosen; the delineation of what man’s survival in fact requires; and the explanation of why thinking and productive work are man’s highest virtues (pp. 146–161). If Prof. Hook will refer to the extensive library of ethical literature, (of which incredibly, he accuses Miss Rand of being ignorant), and if he considers the questions on which past ethical systems have foundered, he will perhaps discover the importance of the above concepts and why they are the place to begin an appraisal of Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy. Prof. Hook rebukes Miss Rand for the importance she attaches to logic and he proceeds to declare that treating human beings like chattels “is perfectly compatible” with the laws of logic and biology. The superficiality of his approach to ethics permits him to disregard the fact that the belief in such “compatibility” is precisely what she refutes. By analyzing the logical and genetic roots of the concept of “value,” she shows that not to hold man’s life as one’s standard of moral values is a logical contradiction—and by identifying what man’s life depends on, she demonstrates that, logically and biologically, man’s survival is not compatible with serfdom. Let Prof. Hook tell some poor wretch dying of starvation or malnutrition in Soviet Russia, chained, choked, forbidden to think or to act, that his state of existence is “perfectly compatible” with logic and biology, and that if the wretch refuses to perceive this he reveals his ignorance of the fact that all analytic propositions are mere linguistic tautologies. When Prof. Hook proceeds to discuss Ayn Rand’s concept of selfishness or rational self-interest, he ignores her definition of it, as well as her entire presentation of the subject, then he swings between several conflicting interpretations of her theory, all of them wrong—almost as if he were thinking aloud, trying to speculate what her position might be, as if no book existed to tell him. First, he declares that “In places, Miss Rand suggests that all human beings are inescapably egoistic”—in defiance of the fact that she explicitly and consistently maintains the opposite. Then he declares that “what she really means” in her condemnation of unselfishness is only what virtual everyone would agree with—“to which none could object but saints.” Then he declares that her concept of selfishness is merely a tautological truism. Having misrepresented her view, in every possible way, and having tried in vain to translate her theory into something he has heard before by attributing to her arguments she has not uttered—he announces that she is guilty of “confusion” in her concept of selfishness. The essence of her position, as several hundred thousand of her readers will be glad to inform Prof. Hook, is this: that man is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; that he has the right to exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose; that he can achieve neither happiness nor survival by renouncing his intellect and stumbling through reality as an irresponsible whim-worshipper or a mindless brute; that man can achieve happiness and survival only to the extent that he lives by the guidance of reason, choosing values and goals that clash neither with reality nor with one another nor with his own nature and needs (pp. 73–75, 77–81, 89–101, 149–50, 156–61, 172–183). Prof. Hook is certainly aware that in all the dominant ethical systems of the world, man has always been the victim, twisted against himself and commanded to be “unselfish” in sacrificial service to some allegedly higher value called God, Society, the State, the Race, the Proletariat. It was scarcely a “truism” in Nazi Germany that man has the right to exist for his own sake. It is scarcely a “truism” in Soviet Russia. And neither is it a “truism” in the philosophy of the “welfare state,” which Prof. Hook upholds and which demands that the wealth of one man be expropriated for the unearned benefit of another. His suggestion that Ayn Rand’s condemnation of unselfishness would be agreed to by virtually everyone is therefore rash, to say the least. When Ayn Rand propounds her concept of justice, when she states that one must not grant or demand the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit, when she states that just as a rational man “does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his sprit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect”—Prof. Hook refers to this as the attitude of a “calculating monster.” May one take it, then, that in his philosophy one should desire and value unearned love, friendship and esteem? He concludes his discussion of morality by asserting that to recommend a policy of rational selfishness is insufficiently specific as a guide to action, and that it is more instructive to enjoin men “to be intelligent.” This, evidently, is his concept of moral profundity, clarity and specificity. When he comes to politics, Prof. Hook must be credited with reporting one fact correctly: he states that Miss Rand is an advocate of capitalism, and she is. He charges her, however, with “disregard for historical fact” and cites the example of child labor as one of he evils of the industrial revolution. Which government controls corrected. The “historical fact” he does not choose to acknowledge is that it was the industrial revolution that saved those children from starvation, by offering them their one chance at survival, and that child labor was finally made unnecessary, not by government controls, but by increased capital accumulation and a concomitant rise in the standard of living. His remarks suggest that he is not too conversant with the last thirty-five years of historiographic research on British economic history; may I therefore recommend to his attention the words of such writers and Professors W. H. Hutt, T. S. Ashton, M. C. Buer, L. v. Mises, J. H. Clapham, C. W. Daniels, Jr., H. Heaton, M. D. George, L. C. A. Knowles and J. D. Chambers. If he wishes to challenge Miss Rand on the history of capitalism , he will find himself on very unfortunate ground. Curiously, Prof. Hook declines to answer or discuss the most important social-political principle in “For the New Intellectual”—that no man or group of men has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others, that “no advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.” Doubtless, Professor Hook has his reasons. When one considers the scrupulous precision of Ayn Rand’s writing, the care and consistency with which every key term is defined and used, and the systematic manner in which she builds her case—the most irresponsible and disgraceful of Prof. Hook’s accusations is that she does not offer “serious argument “ to support her conclusions What he means, of course, is that she does not argue on his terms, nor by his definitions, nor in his context: she does not oblige him by providing him with a case he has heard before. What he objects to is that her book is written for the new intellectual.

New York Times - Book Reviews Sunday, April 9, 1961 AYN RAND’S PHILOSOPHY: EACH MAN FOR HIMSELF For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. 242 pp. New York: Random House. $3.95. By Sidney Hook It is a daring writer who uses the novel primarily as a vehicle for philosophical ideas. Ayn Rand, author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” regards herself as much a philosopher as a novelist. This is not her only distinction. A dissenter among our current hosts of dissenters, she has made them gag, and shocked them into a healthy awareness that dissent as such has no more virtue than assent. Her ideas have enraged many and at the same time won her a devoted following who are less critical than one would expect of worshipers of reason. Miss Rand’s new book is made up of philosophical excerpts from her novels and a long essay on a new philosophy for the New Intellectual. She defines the New Intellectual as “any man or woman who is willing to think,” and offers this outline of her “objectivist” system for their consideration. Pruned of its repetitions, her philosophy reduces itself to three main contentions. The first is that “all the disasters that have wrecked the world” can be traced to a disregard of the Aristotelian laws of logic, especially the law of identity, A is A. This law is not only the cornerstone of reason but the rule of all knowledge. The second thesis locates the poisoned premise of all modern ethical theory and practice in the principle of altruism, in the belief that “man exists for the pleasure of others.” The third is that capitalism and the free market are the highest expression of human reason and justice; any limitation upon them opens the floodgates of irrationalism, mysticism and force. The book is written with passionate fervor, more in the style of a prophetess of a cult than in the analytic vein of a philosopher. Despite the great play with the word “Reason,” one is struck by the absence of any serious argument in this unique combination of tautology and extravagant absurdity. Since his baptism in medieval times, Aristotle has served many strange purposes. None have been odder than this sacramental alliance, so to speak, of Aristotle with Adam Smith. The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests the she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can test only consistency. They cannot establish truth. Inconsistency is a sign of falsity, but as the existence of consistent liars and paranoiacs indicates, non-consistency is never a sufficient condition of truth. Swearing fidelity to Aristotle, Miss Rand claims to deduce not only matters of fact from logic but with as little warranty ethical rules and economic truths as well. As she understands them, the laws of logic license her in proclaiming “existence exists,” which is vey much like saying that the law of gravitation is heavy and the formula of sugar sweet. After singing Aristotle’s praises as the world’s first intellectual, whose thought is the source of all our freedom, Miss Rand is capable of writing—and in italics, too—“a free mind and a free market are corollaries”—which would locate Aristotle in limbo rather than in Athens. To do her justice, Miss Rand is resolutely opposed to a free market in which human beings are chattels, although she fails to see that this is perfectly compatible with the laws of logic, physics and biology. She is also opposed to the initial use of physical force in human affairs, but sees nothing wrong in the use of economic power to coerce men by starving them. In places Miss Rand suggests that all human beings are by nature inescapably egoistic—a psychological proposition which if true would make her ethical principle pointless. If man by his very nature always seeks his own interest, there is not much point in urging this course of action upon him as a moral duty (though he might be encouraged to improve upon nature and act more selfishly). But as psychology it is clearly false. It rests upon confusing the satisfaction one gets in gratifying any desire, selfish or unselfish, with the object or end of the desire which gives an act its moral quality. As for the ethical theory of egoism, Miss Rand does not really mean that anything desired by any self is good or that others should be sacrificed to oneself. She advocates “a rational egoism” directed not to mean and vulgar goals, but as affecting others, only to persons recognized as ends. Here Miss Rand does herself an injustice by the vehement unclarity of her writing. Her egoism is not lax and hedonistic but instead severe. “Happiness is possible only to rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goods, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.” In the ordinary sense of these words, the statement is simply false. It is truer to say that in much wisdom there is much grief. But Miss Rand rarely uses words in their ordinary sense. She makes the rational man sound like a calculating monster or a perpetual trader, even in the realm of the spirit. She is unaware of the ambiguities of the term “rational,” and her most frequent use is more consonant with the superstitions of faculty psychology than with modern scientific thought. In some quarters Miss Rand has created a terrifying public image of herself because of her condemnation of unselfishness. But what she really means is that one should not sacrifice oneself for anyone or anything that is morally unworthy or degrading—to which none can object but saints. When we do act to relieve the distress of others or to help them, if our reason does not veto the action, Miss Rand refuses by semantic fiat to call the action altruistic or unselfish. I am confident that even at some danger to herself Miss Rand would not rush out of a burning building and leave a helpless child behind. Nor would she give the child and intelligence test before she sought to rescue it. But she reuses to call such an action unselfish because she falls back on the truism that every voluntary choice is a choice of the self, which she mistakes as an act for oneself. Despite her ferocious tone on this point, Miss Rand is a paper tigress. She is a principled opponent of Hitler and all totalitarians on the ground that it is they who expect men to sacrifice themselves to an abstraction. Logically there is little difference between always recommending a policy of rational selfishness and one of rational unselfishness. Ethically both are inadequate because commitments of this general sort cannot function as guides in choosing conflicting goods and rights. It is enough to settle, in John Erskine’s phrase, for the moral obligation to be intelligent. Ayn Rand’s third proposition about the high morality of capitalism is defended by a very old gambit: like Christianity, capitalism has never been tried! “All the evils popularly ascribed to capitalism were caused, necessitated and made possible only by government controls imposed on the economy.” Disregarding the scandalous looseness of the language, one is appalled by the reckless disregard of historic fact. For example, the horrible forms of child labor which sprang up with the industrial revolution were certainly not caused by government controls. On the contrary, they were eliminated by government controls. Miss Rand’s conception of free enterprise is so extreme that it is safe to predict she will be a serious embarrassment to many of its defenders. Her notions of the proper function of government would turn over even our roads and schools to private hands, abolish all health services, and let the unemployed rot. She has no use for historical materialism but invokes its dogmas in her claim that all public ownership necessarily is destructive of political and cultural freedom, which is logically a non sequitur and historically false. Marx’ indictment of capitalism, that “it has degraded personal dignity to the level of exchange value,” she hails as its chief moral virtue, and sees justice, not degradation, in putting a money value on all things. One does not have to be a professional philosopher to write an interesting book on philosophy, but it cannot be done by substituting denunciation for analysis and mouthing slogans instead of considering problems. Just as not all who cry “Peace! Peace!” mean it, not all who cry “Reason! Reason!” use it. The language of reason does not justify references to economists with whom one disagrees as “frantic cowards,” or to philosophers as “intellectual hoodlums who pose as professors.” This is the way philosophy is written in the Soviet Union. In a free culture there must always be room for vigorous polemic and controversy but civility of mind is integral to the concept of a civilized society.

In my piece Desire to Live I showed Rand’s ousting, in her mature philosophy, of instinct from human powers. There is a passage in We The Living referring to human instinct. It appeared in the 1936 initial version of the novel, and Rand left it in the edited 1959 version. “She did not have to tell her legs to move any longer. She thought they were running. An instinct was driving her, the instinct of an animal, beating in living creatures, whipping them blindly into the scramble of self-preservation. “She was whispering through frozen lips: ‘You’re a good soldier, Kira Argounova, you’re a good soldier . . .’” (562) I think Rand could pass these words on instinct in humans from ’36 to ’59 by a smooth change of meaning and scope of instinct. It could be also that Rand wanted to preserve as much of her original text as possible, even where it was no longer correct in her mature view of human constitution, provided the old conception was one not utterly revolting in the new. On Rand’s consciously coming to gauging instinct small in human constitution, see her notes from 1945 on pages 252 and 303 of David Harriman’s compilation The Journals of Ayn Rand. Even in notes of 1934, by the way, she was crafting reason over instinct (68, 72-73). In his 1991 book The Ideas of Ayn Rand, Ronald Merrill quoted a note by Rand in her journal from 1934: “It may be considered strange and denying my own supremacy of reason—that I start with a set of ideas—then want to study and derive my ideas from that. But these ideas, to a great extent, are the result of a subconscious instinct, which is a form of unrealized reason. All instincts are reason, essentially, or reason is instincts made conscious. The ‘unreasonable’ instincts are diseased ones.” (23, emphasis added; Ron obtained this note from its publication in The Objectivist Forum). From my ‘Desire to Live’ piece linked above, one can see easily Rand here making use of and modifying a thread running through Nietzsche on instinct and reason. Adam Reed, who had been a long-time friend of Ron’s, recounted Ron in 1966 coming across a 1936 issue of We the Living, in the library stacks at either Tufts or Boston College (Ron and Adam were students at MIT). Ron checked the book out and xeroxed it ("Merrill & the Discovery of Rand's Nietzschean Period" in JARS, Spring 2009). I was able to purchase the 1936 edition via the internet a few years ago, and that is its picture in the post preceding this one. (By the way, before having the fortune of have an original issue of WL come up for sale at a feasible price, I tried to arrange with the Library of Congress for me to come and examine one of their two copies. After searching they concluded that in fact, contrary the catalog, both copies were lost.

At the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January 2020 (Philadelphia, 201 Hotel), the topic of the Ayn Rand Society session will be "Aristotle and Rand on Axioms." Robert Mayhew will chair the session. James Lennox will deliver the paper. The commentator will be Michail Peramatzis. Friday, 10 January 2020, 7:00–10:00 p.m. Lennox 2005

I mentioned earlier that my Nietzsche/Rand series of articles had been composed in 2010 for the Boydstun Corner at OBJECTIVIST LIVING, and that by now the series there had received 20,600 hits. I have now removed this series and a couple of others from that site because OL has taken on a type of outside advertising that I saw was dispersed within the Nietzsche/Rand thread. The ads use motion to get the eye's attention, distracting from extended concentration that these posts need in order to assimilate the information. The ads have headers like "Seven Women for Every Man" and other such irrelevant foolishness. So OBJECTIVISM ONLINE is now the exclusive public sharing place of these compositions.

Continue to LOCOMOTIVE RAND v. NIETZSCHE

Continue to 1938-46 RAND v. NIETZSCHE

Continue to 1929-38 RAND v. NIETZSCHE

Rand had some important steady differences with Nietzsche from the first of her publications to her last. She always extolled the virtues of reason and the hard sciences. Rand’s protagonists Kira, Equality 7-2521, Roark, Rearden, and Galt all love science and technology. They embrace technological and social progress, contrary to Nietzsche. They all find the possibility of entirely meaningful work in technical and commercial areas, contrary to Nietzsche’s assessments of work in those areas. They all develop into persons whose moral character is in a stable equilibrium for the best possible human life, contrary Nietzsche’s ideal of endless reach beyond particular tables of good and evil. Rand was constant in her opposition to materialist, determinist reduction of all human thought, will, and desire, contrary to Nietzsche. Rand contests Nietzsche’s mature philosophy in her 1960 essay “For the New Intellectual.” She stands against Nietzsche’s proclamations “that the ideal man is moved, not by reason, but by his ‘blood’, by his innate instincts, feelings and will to power—that he is predestined by birth to rule others and sacrifice them to himself, while they are predestined by birth to be his victims and slaves—that reason, logic, principles are futile and debilitating, that morality is useless, the ‘superman’ is ‘beyond good and evil’, that he is a ‘beast of prey’ whose ultimate standard is nothing but his own whim” (36). That Randian summary of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy is roughly right. Nietzsche would deny, of course, that the ultimate standard of his ideal, super human is nothing but whim. It goes too far to say that Nietzsche’s superhuman is moved not at all by reason. The Nietzschean virtues of intellectual honesty and courage are kin of reason. We have seen that, for Nietzsche, underneath will to truth and will to life is will to power. This he takes to be in the nature of human life independently of anyone’s whim. That will to power manifests itself in higher humans and in superhumans in the form of those particular virtues is not subject to the whims of those beings. Not just anything an individual might set up as a value for himself can pass for noble or be worthy of a superhuman. Weakness, pity, altruism, unconditional faith, and respect of equal rights for all will not fit the bill. (The middle three are issues on which Rand was in some steady agreement with Nietzsche.) Beyond those constraints on the values of a superhuman are the required perpetual drive to fashion new values and the circumstance that not just any new value can be grown out of his previous values. Notice that Aristotle’s constraint of the mean is not among the constraints on Nietzschean value sets. For the most part, it remains that the superhuman’s value sets, old and new, are to be peculiar to that individual alone. I should say that a value theory holding that values (and health) are relative to individuals and are idiosyncratic does not necessarily entail that they are not objective. Nietzsche, however, has not arrived at sufficiently specific and objective constraints on idiosyncratic values to provision the superintendence of feeling by reason. That was not his aim. He has also not established the objectivity of the uniform “noble” values he applauds. For all his questioning of ideals not his own and all his talk of self-criticism, Nietzsche’s own ideals of nobility and egoism are personal sentiments sheltered from objective assessment. Rand did not accept Nietzshe’s idea that the world that is relevant to us might be a fiction (BGE 34, 24, 230). From Kira fighting to live and make her own life to Tony dying in the arms of Rearden, Rand takes the absoluteness of truth or falsehood to equal the absoluteness of life or death. From We the Living to The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged, she takes rightness in values to be tethered to rightness for life against death. Roark tells Mallory that seeking the best is a law of survival (ET XI 349). Toohey tells Dominique that if the press and the professors valued their lives they should have come to the defense of Roark’s Temple of the Human Spirit (ET XII 369). Rand had Kira place before Andrei the possibility of wanting something for “no reason of right or wrong, for no reason at all, save one: that you wanted it” (WL 1936, 92; quoted in Milgram 2004, 40). In Fountainhead Rand writes not only of rightness and having rights. She writes expressly of good and evil. Catherine Halsey learns to greatly curtail her personal desires and to devote her efforts to helping others. This she does because she wants to do what is right and because she accepts the idea that selfishness is evil (ET XIII 384). Catherine also accepts the idea, advocated by Toohey (ET XI 342), that selfishness leads to unhappiness. I have been unable to recall or locate any major thinker who advocated this proposition, but it will follow from the premises that happiness requires morality and that selfishness is immoral. Catherine’s success at unselfishness makes her unhappy and resentful. She speaks with her Uncle Ellsworth about it. She acknowledges that he is much brighter than she and that “‘it’s a very big subject, good and evil’” (ET XIII 384). Rand then uses their dialogue to argue the incoherence and pointlessness of absolute unselfishness. Rand’s lead into her case for the goodness of pure selfishness consists of the sensibleness and pleasure of having personal desires (together with having one’s own thoughts and choices) and guiding one’s own actions. (ET XIII 384; GW II 454). We have seen this way of entering the case for egoism before, in the development of Andrei after he meets Kira. After her deep conversation with Uncle Ellsworth, Catherine gets together with Peter Keating. He is feeling dirty because of his testimony against Roark at the court case over the Stoddard Temple. Peter and Catherine reaffirm their love, which is a first-hand personal preference satisfying their own identities. They kiss. “Then he did not think of the Stoddard Temple any longer, and she did not think of good and evil. They did not need to; they felt too clean” (ET XIII 391). This suggests that at least one reason the concept of good and evil is needed is the human potential for betraying egoistic innocence. Unlike Nietzsche, Rand does not pretend that everything standing as good or evil is infirm and is malleable by those who are the meaning of the earth. Roark eventually comes to pain from not having known that helping Peter in design matters was wrong (HR XII 664). Roark is Rand’s meaning of the earth, in place of Nietzsche’s superhuman, but she does not make the fact that Roark chooses an action be the source of its moral correctness or incorrectness. Right after Peter’s scene with Catherine, he has a scene with Dominique. She offers to marry him. That would have advantages for his public personae, but marrying her instead of Catherine would be untrue to what little is himself. “He knew that he was violently alive, that he was forcing the stupor into his muscles and into his mind, because he wished to escape the responsibility of consciousness” (ET XIV 393; cf. Atlas 1148). Humans have a responsibility to be conscious, to connect, to integrate; but they can avoid consciousness at least to some degree. Keating marries Dominique. He is a chronic evader when it comes to self-awareness. In Roark’s courtroom soliloquy, he argues that creation and thought are necessities of human survival, that they are only possible by individual minds, that creative thinkers live for the truth borne in their creations, they live for themselves, and they need independence and freedom to function (cf. Z I “On the Way of the Creator”). “‘Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self’” (HR XVIII 738). Altruism is evil because it destroys the human creator, the font of human life. Egoism that includes the sacrifice of others to oneself, such as the egoism of Nietzsche, is evil because it blocks the self-sufficiency, the integrity, required for human life, whether the life of a profound architect or such lives as sit on the jury Roark selects for his trial: “two executives of industrial concerns, two engineers, a mathematician, a truck driver, a bricklayer, an electrician, a gardener, and three factory workers” (HR XVIII 733–34). Not to Nietzsche’s taste for equal rights (BGE 265; TI 48). In the opening of Galt’s radio speech in Atlas Shrugged, Rand sets aside traditional bases for morality. She sets aside mystical and social bases. An individual needs morality to sustain his or her life, even for life apart from society. Rand rejects the Christian and post-Christian distinction between the self-interested and the moral. They are one. The moral virtues of her fully developed ethics are integral with all the big choices in one’s life. Morality in Rand’s meaning “is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life” (OE 13). The basis of Rand’s morality is individual human life. The virtues she identifies as needed by anyone for best life are guides for their life. Rand’s ethics are aids for crafting one’s own lived moral ideal. Your ideal is to be the life you might make. Other particular ideal characters and lives can inspire, but they cannot substitute (AS 1017, 1058–59). In this way, Rand’s ethics is a little like Nietzsche’s individualist approach to value. However, contrary to Nietzsche’s admonitions, Rand proposes values and virtues as right for everyone. It is life itself that is standard for any genuine virtue or ideal (and life itself is not will to power). It is rationality, not irrationality, that enables human lives, every single one of them. Rand stands against “the kind of ‘Nietzschean egoists’. . . who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit” (VS x). Intended self-benefit is necessary but not sufficient for that which is morally right in Rand’s rational egoism (on insufficiency see further Branden 1962a; 1962b; Rand 1974). I should pause over the necessity of intended self-benefit for correct values. Not all of one’s potential selves are worth benefitting. Among those who are, Rand maintains that only potential selves whose every value is intended to benefit themselves hold entirely correct values. “Concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and . . . man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions. / The actor must always be the beneficiary of his action” (VS ix–x; also OE 46–47). One is a beneficiary in ways other than by one’s resulting positive feelings, because one is a self that is not only feelings. Man’s self is “‘that entity that is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego’” (HR XVIII 737). It is the self—one’s soul—that has thoughts, meaning, will, values, desires, and feeling (GW II 454). Roark loves the buildings he designs not only because of the positive responses they elicit in him. Dagny loves diesel-electric locomotives and the minds that create them not only because of the positive responses they elicit in her. It is not plausible that when she finds that man at the end of the rails, the one for whom she has longed since her youth, she will love him only because of the positive responses he evokes in her. There is, however, a thread of subjectivity in Rand’s conception of value and love and normative selfishness that is puckering up the fabric. In my judgment, that thread is unnecessary and should be removed. Speaking metaphorically, the solemnity of looking at the sky does not come only from the uplift of one’s head (HR V 598). In extreme desire for another person, the other does not recede in importance compared to the desire (GW IX 539). A rational desire to help someone in need is animated not only by “your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and struggle” (AS 1060, emphasis added). Rather, it is enough for rational egoism that, by design, no actions be contrary self-benefit (of a self worth benefitting). The requirement that all actions should intend primarily self-benefit should be dropped. In this way, one can love persons simply for the particular ends-in-themselves that they are. The man who dynamited Cortlandt rises, takes the oath, and stands before the court audience. “Roark stood before each of them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room” (HR XVIII 736). Rand takes benevolence to be people’s natural state when they are not constrained by law or morality to take basic direction from others rather than from themselves and to benefit others rather than themselves. David Kelley has added to Rand’s ethics by reckoning the ways in which benevolence is in one’s self-interest and arguing that the virtue of productivity has a cohort virtue in benevolence towards others (1996). In Kelley’s view, although benevolence is not an obligation by way of respecting the rights of others, it is an obligation to oneself. I think only some occasions of right benevolence are morally required; other occasions are morally permitted, but not required, not an obligation. Be that as it may, my dissent registered to Rand’s account of rational egoism applies to Kelley’s as well. Both of them correctly recognize that genuine benevolent responsiveness is not educed primarily by motives of self-sacrifice. Both are wrong in not recognizing that the genuine, innocent response of benevolence is also not educed primarily by motives of self-benefit. There is a common modern assumption that value implies sentience (e.g. William James). That is not the position we find in Nietzsche’s mature view. The will to power is the structure of value as the structure of all living things. Early Rand evidently held, contrary mature Nietzsche, that value implies sentience. Life cannot become value until it can know of itself. Kira says to Andrei: “‘What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something that knows how to want—isn’t that life itself?’” (WL 1936, 496; quoted in Wright 2005, 203). This is not a denial that animal and vegetative life are life. It is a claim that preciousness of life enters the world only in sentient beings who know and culture their desires. In the manuscript for Anthem (1938), Rand has the protagonist Equality 7-2521 reflect: “I will, for I know my desires, and I am free in that which I desire” (quoted in Milgram 2005, 19). He is not thinking simply that he is presently free from the coercive orders of other men. He is saying that man’s will is free by nature. To be directed by one’s own will is the natural state of human beings. In the 1938 edition, Equality writes: “My will, which chooses, and orders, and creates. My will, the master which knows no masters. My will, the liberator and conqueror. My will, which is the thin flame, still and holy, in the shrine of my body, my body which is but the shrine of my will. Many words have been granted me, and some are wise, and some are false, but only three are holy: ‘I will it’” (quoted in Mayhew 2005b, 40). Early Rand held to considerable freedom of the will, contrary Marx and Nietzsche. The will for Rand is spirit. Human will, joy, and thought are of the inner self, which is spirit. If the will were only drives of the body, it would not be free or sacred. This sense of sacredness does not entail belief in the supernatural nor opposition to reason, which is itself part of the holy self. We have seen that in The Fountainhead, too, deterministic materialist reduction of human life is rejected by Rand (PK VI 77; HR VII 615; HR X 649). Deeper than the bones, for man, is his soul (GW III 471). Roark says to Wynand “‘we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form’” (HR II 558). All living creatures have a life source, which is their constitutional idea. Failure of organism integrity, compromise of its life source, is death (PK XV 205). Similarly, to set against the central constitutional idea particular to one’s self is a failure of an integrity that may be called moral integrity (ibid.). A person of integrity is self-motivated, a self-sufficient spirit (HR XI 660). Life itself for man requires human consciousness, which is independent judgment (HR XI 659). Life itself for man requires creators (HR XVIII 737). The vision, strength, and courage of a creator comes “from his own spirit” (ibid.). Human creators are “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force . . .” (ibid.). For all individuals, not only extraordinary creators, seeking the best, loving one’s work, and choosing independence is seeking, loving, and choosing life—one’s own life—against death (ET XI 349; HR XVIII 739–40). In her fully developed ethical system of Atlas Shrugged, the choice of life or death remains implicit in one’s choices for virtues such as integrity, productiveness, and independence. In Fountainhead loyalty to reason had been a virtue alongside virtues such as integrity and independence. In Atlas loyalty to truth in all things by reason, which is termed rationality, is the premier virtue. And the choice to think becomes the life-or-death choice underlying all the life-or-death virtues of Rand’s full system: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride (see also Wright 2009, 258–62, 265–70). “That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character” (AS 1017). The mind’s grasp of reality at the level required for human survival is not an automatic, physically determined process like sensory perception (AS 1012–13, 1041). Furthermore, the human mind has some fundamental freedom to orient itself to reality or to obscure reality by evasion (or to revolt outright against reason and reality, as with Toohey). It has some power of self-deception. Rand’s Galt says: “‘It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture’. / ‘Do not remind me that it pertains only to life on this earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you’” (emphasis added; cf. Nietzsche in Pippin 2010, 85–104). Value comes into the world by and only by the emergence of organisms out of inanimate chemicals (AS 994, 1012–13, 1016). Every organism’s life is “a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil” (AS 1012–13). Organic value is the deepest basis of moral value, there are no genuine nobilities transcending moral value, and the structure of organic value is not will to power. “In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. . . . Do not let the hero in your soul perish . . . . “Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth. “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine’.” (AS 1069) “‘Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind’” (AS 1045). “Every living species has a way of survival demanded by its nature” (AS 1014). That goes for plants, insects, and right on up to man. A fish cannot live out of water, a dog cannot live without its sense of smell, and neither can a man survive any-which-way-whatever. Man has an identity, a nature. Man’s life is made possible only by thinking and achievement (AS 1014–15). Correct virtues—whether peculiar of an extraordinary creator, or peculiar of an excellent practitioner of a particular profession, or common for all good persons—correct virtues are actions by which one gains or keeps correct values (AS 1012). The correct actions and correct values pertinent to every individual are those judged by the standard of Man’s Life to “the purpose of preserving, fulfilling, and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life” (AS 1014). In Rand’s characterization of life, every aspect of being alive, including growth, “involves a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action” (ITOE 81, 24–25). “For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. . . . “An animal’s capacity for development ends at physical maturity and thereafter its growth consists of the action necessary to maintain itself at a fixed level; after reaching maturity, it does not, to any significant extent, continue to grow in efficacy . . . . But man’s capacity for development does not end at physical maturity . . . . His ability to think, to learn, to discover new and better ways of dealing with reality, to expand the range of his efficacy, to grow intellectually, is an open door to a road that has no end. “When man discovered how to make fire to keep himself warm, his need for thought and effort was not ended; . . . when he moved his life expectancy . . . his need of thought and effort was not ended . . . . “Every achievement of man is a value in itself, but it is also a stepping-stone to greater achievements and values. Life is growth . . . . Every step upward opens to man a wider range of action and achievement—and creates the need for that achievement. . . . Survival demands constant growth and creativeness. “Constant growth is, further, a psychological need of man.” (Branden 1963, 121–22) As in Greek philosophy, psychological well-being and happiness is serious business in Rand’s philosophy. “Just as a man is free to attempt to survive in any manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man” (AS 1014). Think of Peter Keating (ET XI 341–43; GW II 449–50). (See also Enright 1991; Wright 2005; Salmieri 2009, 236–45; and Locke 2009, 323–32.) In The Fountainhead Rand sometimes calls certain human behaviors instinctual. Speaking to Roark, the sympathetic character Kent Lansing says: “‘Men are brothers, you know, and they have a great instinct for brotherhood. . . .’” (ET X 332). Rand also writes: “People began to ooze towards Ellsworth Toohey: the right kind of people, those who soon found him to be a spiritual necessity. The other kind did not come; there seemed to be an instinct about it” (ET IX 320). In the later years of the story, when Toohey has stopped promoting the career of Keating, the latter “tried not to think of Ellsworth Toohey. A dim instinct told him that he could preserve a precarious security of spirit so long as he did not touch upon that subject” (HR VII 612). Wynand says to Roark that second-handers will “‘accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct’” (HR XII 659). That talk of instincts, which humans have about themselves and each other, probably only meant either a deep-seated knack not requiring an articulated reasoning process or a deep-seated disposition manifest in feelings. There was a different, more elaborate, concept of instinct in use in nineteenth- and twentieth-century scientific characterization of animal behavior. Schopenhauer wrote of instinct in this sense as requiring will, perception, and some apprehension of elementary causal relations. In his characterization, animal instincts are infallible, like perception, and they are supplanted by reason in man (WWP I.2.136; I.2.180). Animal instincts, such as nest-building in birds or web-spinning in spiders, are not guided by the ends towards which the animal works. Schopenhauer’s picture of an animal faculty of instinct was in the tradition of medieval Aristotelians, but without supposing the faculty to have been instilled in animals by an intelligent Creator. (On concepts of instincts before Charles Darwin, see Richards 1987, 20–70.) Like Schopenhauer, Rand saw humans as needing to use intelligence for survival. “Man cannot survive except through his mind. . . . He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought . . . . Everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind” (HR XVIII 737). Nietzsche writes of all sorts of social instincts: an instinct for mediocrity (BGE 206); a cunning instinct of the middle classes against higher spirits (BGE 218); feminine instincts (BGE 239); and instincts for rank (BGE 263). Beneath all faith, or belief without conscious reason, is instinct (BGE 191). Beneath unegoistic morality is the herd instinct (GM I 2). We have a tendency towards self-preservation, and this is a common consequence of the more fundamental constant drive of life itself, the drive of will to power (BGE 13). Social instincts, too, are manifestations of organic will to power. The instinct for social freedom is a will to power (GM II 18). In the walls of society and peace, the human animal lost his fitness to wilderness, war, prowling, and adventure. His instincts became disvalued. He lost his former guides, his drives regulating, unconscious, and infallible. These, unfortunate human animals, “were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, . . . they were reduced to their ‘consciousness’, their weakest and most fallible organ” (GM II 16; also AC 14). Inhibited from their outward discharge, the instincts of the human animal turned inward, giving rise to the inner world called soul and the misery of bad conscience. The change from wild to civil, from unrestrained instinct to bad conscience “was not a gradual or voluntary one and did not represent an organic adaptation to new conditions” (GM II 17). Rather, institutional organization of nomadic men was effected by the violence of “some pack of blond beast of prey, a conquering and master race” (ibid.). These hypothetical unconscious creators of social structure were themselves without bad conscience, though they begat it. Civilized, man turned himself into “an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness” (GM II 16). Now man “gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if within him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise” (ibid.). Tomorrow, the overman. “The greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctual activity, and this is even the case for philosophical thought. . . . Most of a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced into determinate channels by the instincts” (BGE 3). In Nietzsche’s view, most of conceptual consciousness is directed by instinct, which is activity of body, physical, not spiritual. “Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit” (Z I “On Reading and Writing”). Said by a materialist, that line means also: spirit is blood. I do not mean to suggest that mature Rand was allied to spiritualism in contrast to materialism. She rejected mysticism of the spirit equally with mysticism of muscle (AS 1027, 1035–39, 1042–47). “‘You are an indivisible entity of matter and consciousness’” (AS 1029). The parts of consciousness over which humans have free first-person control are not something beyond the biological nature of humans. I should mention that Rand took each person and his or her life to be something absolutely irreplaceable, therefore unrepeatable (unlike Nietzsche). So it is not clear that she would accept the traditional conception of free will as the ability to have done something different in exactly the same circumstances, including brain state. It may be enough for the physical possibility of what Rand takes to be intelligent free choice that it be free of determining physical causes that are not neurological correlates of one’s thinking self (cf. Peikoff 1991, 55, 64–65; Pippin 2010, 68–84). Rand denies humans possess animal instincts. The concept desire should be distinguished from the concept instinct. A desire to live is not an instinct for self-preservation. One may desire to live, but that of itself would not include the knowledge required for living (AS 1013). Such knowledge is not automatic in the way of instincts. One has no instinct for tool making. Acquisition of human knowledge requires the voluntary action that is thinking (AS 1043–44). Not only conceptual thought, but even the desire to live is not automatic for human beings (AS 1013). Furthermore, man’s “moral instinct” is nothing more than his reason (AS 1017). Lastly: “Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instincts” (AS 1012). Humans have a conceptual capability for giving integration to their existence. Man’s consciousness is an “enormously powerful integrating mechanism” given by his organic nature. “His only choice is to drive it or to be driven by it. Since an act of volition—a process of thought—is required to use the mechanism for a cognitive purpose, man can evade that effort. But if he evades, chance takes over: the mechanism functions on its own like a machine without a driver; it goes on integrating blindly, incongruously, at random” (PSL 27; contrast with GS V 360). It is then no longer an instrument of cognition, but bringer of delusion, self-torture, and fear (PSL 27; also AS 1037). Ayn Rand did not find the coming of reason and morality into the pre-human race to be in any way unfortunate. Inner self-torture of a human being is from weakened reason. In health and innocence, there is indeed inner tension and promise in the human soul. Not for the coming of beings beyond the human. For the coming creations of man. So many days have not yet broken. References Branden, N. 1962a. Counterfeit Individualism. In Rand 1964. ——. 1962b. Isn’t Everyone Selfish? In Rand 1964. ——. 1963. The Divine Right of Stagnation. In Rand 1964. Enright, M. 1991. Why Man Needs Approval. Objectivity 1(2):67–93. Kelley, D. 1996. Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence. Institute of Objectivist Studies. Locke, E.A. 2009. The Traits of Business Heroes in Atlas Shrugged. In Mayhew 2009. Mayhew, R., editor. 2005a. Essays in Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Lexington. ——. 2005b. Anthem: ’38 & ’46. In Mayhew 2005a. ——. 2009. Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Lexington. Milgram, S. 2004. From Airtight to We the Living. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. R. Mayhew, editor. Lexington. ——. 2005. Anthem in Manuscript: Finding the Words. In Mayhew 2005a. Nietzsche, F. 1887. The Gay Science. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. ——. 1887. On the Genealogy of Morals. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, trans. Vintage. ——. 1888. The Anti-Christ. J. Norman, trans. 2005. Cambridge. ——. 1888. Twilight of the Idols. J. Norman, trans. 2005. Cambridge. Pippin, R.B. 2010. Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy. Chicago. Peikoff, L. 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Dutton. Rand, A. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill. ——. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House. ——. 1960. For the New Intellectual. In Rand 1961b. ——. 1961a. The Objectivist Ethics. In Rand 1964. ——. 1961b. For the New Intellectual. New American Library. ——. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library. ——. 1966. Philosophy and Sense of Life. In Rand 1975. ——. 1966–67. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 2nd ed. Meridian. ——. 1974. Selfishness without a Self. In Rand 1982. ——. 1975. The Romantic Manifesto. 2nd ed. Signet. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Needs It. New American Library. Richards, R.J. 1987. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago. Russell, B. 1945. A History of Western Philosophy. Simon & Schuster. Salmieri, G. 2009. Atlas Shrugged on the Role of the Mind in Man’s Existence. In Mayhew 2009. Schopenhauer, A. 1819. The World as Will and Presentation. Vol. 1. R.E. Aquila, trans. Pearson-Longman. Wright, D. 2005. Needs of the Psyche in Ayn Rand’s Early Ethical Thought. In Mayhew 2005a. ——. 2009. Ayn Rand’s Ethics: From The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged. In Mayhew 2009.

It’s Mine Gail Wynand is introduced in The Fountainhead in the voice of Guy Francon chatting with Peter Keating. We are told of a costume party Wynand has given for his latest mistress. Francon reports “‘Wynand dressed as Cesare Borgia—wouldn’t he, though?’” (PK VIII 99). Cesare’s father became Pope Alexander VI, the most notorious of Renaissance popes, in the year some of my ancestors had waved to Columbus from the shore. Cesare was a womanizer and a ruthless, cunning man of action. With Alexander on the throne, Cesare led the military campaigns reestablishing the Pope’s control of the papal states of central Italy, which had come to be under the control of semi-independent papal vicars. Cesare pursued power single-mindedly. His motto was “Either Caesar or Nothing.” Cesare was the model for the ideal prince in Machiavelli’s The Prince. Cesare aimed to win for himself the position Prince. He was feared and loathed all over Italy. The death of his father pulled the rug out from under him. Nietzsche saw the Renaissance as “the revaluation of all Christian values, an attempt using all means, all instincts, all genius, to allow the opposite values, noble values to triumph” (AC 61). He delights in a fantasy: “Cesare Borgia as Pope . . . . That would have been the victory that I am the only one demanding these days—: with this, Christianity was abolished!” (AC 61). Nietzsche took Cesare as natural, strong, and vital, a man of prey (BGE 197; TI 37). He saw him as a “higher man,” indeed, “as a type of overman” (TI 37). Nietzsche and Rand note that the age of the Italian Renaissance was an aristocratic age. Kiki Holcombe’s husband is a distinguished architect specializing exclusively in the Renaissance style. Her grand home is Renaissance. “Three crystal chandeliers blazed over her Florentine ballroom” (ET VI 271). She basks in the height of the ballroom’s ceiling, untouched and dominate, far above the sea of her guests. “‘There is nothing as useless, my dear Kiki’, said Ellsworth Toohey, ‘as a rich woman who makes herself a profession of entertaining. But then, all useless things have charm. Like aristocracy, for instance, the most useless conception of all’” (ET VI 270). Kiki liked the comparison to aristocracy. Aristocrats are widely taken to be unproductive parasites. Rand gives Wynand character of aristocracy, but with earned wealth, rather than inherited wealth (GW I 418; 428–29; IX 531). Toohey would find no modern worthwhile employment at all for the concept aristocratic. Toohey is a social leveler. Nietzsche and Rand are one in their opposition to the modern trend towards egalitarianism, a trend embodied in Toohey. Nietzsche and Rand concur that there are substantial differences among people in their spiritual independence and in what they are capable of accomplishing and appreciating. They concur that one should not aim to love all people equally, all children as much as one’s own (GW IV 475; HR IX 638). Unlike Nietzsche, Rand does not value the stereotypical unproductiveness of aristocracy. She will confine that element in the notion aristocratic to Wynand when he is on a vacation cruise on his yacht, a temporary relaxation from work (GW IX 531). One night, before Dominique and Roark come into his life, Gail Wynand the self-made commercial Caesar, alone in his penthouse, is reading. He stops. He has no desire to continue reading or to do anything at all any further. He has lost the root of desire, “the desire to desire” (GW I 426). He prepares for bed, sees his pistol in his dresser drawer, and feels no shock at the thought he will kill himself. That lack of shock convinces him he should. “The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide. / Now he stood at the glass wall [overlooking the city], stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one’s life, he thought, but not of one’s death” (ibid.). He decides to reflect on his life and “find either the will to live on or the reason to end it now” (GW I 427). Nietzsche: “The best became weary of their works. / . . . / We harvested well, but why did all our fruits turn foul and brown? What fell down from the evil moon last night? / . . . / ‘Oh where is there still a sea in which one could drown?’—thus rings our lament—out across shallow swamps’” (Z II “The Soothsayer”). “All of you who suffer from the great nausea like me, for whom the old God died and no new god is lying yet in cradles and crib clothes . . . . / . . . / I know you, you higher men” (Z IV “The Song of Melancholy 2). Wynand reviews the course of his amazing life, but stops with a sense of dread over further examination. Seeing that he still fears something, he knows suicide is out, at least for the present evening. “As long as he still feared something, he had a foothold on living; even if it meant only moving forward to an unknown disaster” (GW I 443). He goes to his study to get a drink before bed. Beside his desk stands an unopened gift. He opens its crate. Inside is a nude statue of Dominique, whom he does not know, though she formerly worked for his newspaper. The sculptor is Steven Mallory, the one whose works have a magnificent respect for the human being, the one whose works are of what humans could be and should be. Wynand soon meets Dominique. He observes that the same elements compose opposite themes: Everything about her in the statue goes to exaltation. Her own theme is suffering (GW III 468). Dominique had been thoroughly disappointed by humankind, from wealthy slumlords to irresponsible, poor parents (PK XII 145). She did not want to desire anything, for the net of connections to shallow, revolting people who would crush what is precious to her. She wanted perfection or nothing (PK XII 148–49). She meets Roark and desires him and has him, feverishly, helplessly. She sees his buildings as bright, bold, and sacred, and she is pained to see them given to a world dark, dingy, and small (ET VII 283; XII 378–79; GW V 498). Dominique sees the suffering the world causes Roark, and she expects he will eventually be destroyed. She cannot bear it. She severs her personal relationship to Roark. She chooses suffering; she marries and promotes Roark’s successful, incompetent classmate Keating. “Perfection or nothing” could also be a motto for Roark. He does not, however, expect humanity to destroy itself nor the best within him. He expects the rightness with the earth that is his to never be lost among men. I said that Dominique Francon and Gail Wynand fit the Nietzschean designation of higher humans. Like the higher men of Zarathustra, they are in spiritual convalescence in the course of the book. (Nietzsche would exclude women as hopeless, but this is error we kick away; Z IV “The Awakening” 1.) Given Rand’s conviction of free will, there is no need for Dominique to say Yes to an eternal recurrence of all suffering and joy. There is a need for Dominique to free herself of overwhelming disgust and contempt. “‘Does this town not steam with the reek of slaughtered spirit? / Do you not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?—And they even make newspapers out of these rags! / . . . / . . . They are all sick and addicted to public opinion’” (Z III “On Passing By”). On her way to Reno to divorce Keating, so she can marry Wynand, Dominique stops to see Roark building a department store in Clayton, Ohio. It is just a small town much like one will find anywhere in America today. Dominique and Roark talk on the stoop of a vacant house (as Kira and Leo a world and yesterday away). They stand, to walk to the station for her to take the next train west. She asks: “‘Until—when, Roark?’ / His hand moved over the streets. ‘Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it’” (GW V 499). Early in the story, Roark tells Cameron that though people in the streets may fear or hate him, though such people can bring him suffering through his love of his work, he does not notice them (PK IV 61). Dominique is going on, to marry Wynand. On Cameron’s deathbed, he had told Roark he did not hate anyone any more, except Gail Wynand, whose newspaper is symbol of the world’s overbearing vulgarity. Roark carries as near-hatred that token from Cameron, until he actually meets Wynand, husband of Dominique (HR II 556, V 593). Hatred in Fountainhead is mainly given to “those who love to crawl,” those who see man as puny (GW IV 478). Theirs is hatred of competent individuals who love their work and whose person and life is sufficient unto itself. Rand reasons that they hate the independent individual because the only existence and self-esteem these haters know is through others. In the independent man, they do not exist, and he is a reproach to them (PK IV 61; ET XII 379; HR XI 659). Yes, there are people who love to crawl—at least in their manifestos—people who resent the achievements and wealth of others, and who would level society. However, I have no experience of people hating me on account of my competence or love of my work or on account of self-sufficiency. People generally lightened if they noticed those things, no doubt they sometimes thought I was foolish or tragic in those things, but I never sensed that anyone hated me on those counts. They hated me because of my sexual orientation or my atheism or because of an intense rivalry. They were sometimes jealous of personal traits I had, but that is not hatred. In fact I have found the two traits, competence and love of work, to be subversive of people’s hatred of me based on other grounds. (For Rand’s picture of Keating’s jealousy, hatred, and love of Roark: PK XI 134; PK XV 202–3; ET IV 253–54; VI 278; GW II 456; HR VIII 626.) “‘We want to exact revenge and heap insult on all whose equals we are not’—thus vow the tarantula hearts. / ‘And “will to equality”—that itself from now on shall be the name for virtue; and against everything that has power we shall raise our clamor!’” (Z II “On the Tarantulas”). Nietzsche’s concern is for uncommon humans, against whom there is much hatred. The hated humans of his concern, of course, are not industrious and existentially productive (GS 329). Gail Wynand is hated for the power he wields. He is hated by some for the vulgarity of his newspaper, the Banner, which is enormously successful. For sport Wynand goes after certain individuals who have done nothing against him. He gets men to forfeit their integrity in return for money. Wynand has sold his own soul for money, the means to luxury and power. He continually wants to show himself that there are no men of incorruptible integrity. He says to Dominique “I have paid with my honor for the privilege of holding a position where I can amuse myself by observing how honor operates in other men” (GW III 472). Wynand works mightily on his business enterprises. When he is drained of strength and will, he visits his private collection of art locked in the lower, windowless floor of his penthouse. These treasures are not to be pawned. Leaving those rooms, he has a look of suffering. He wants to share them with Dominique right after meeting her. She is the cleanest person he had ever seen (GW IV 479). Gail worships Dominique. They marry. His values are hers. But he loves his child, the Banner, which is a daily pandering to the puny in people, a daily treason against the values of Gail and Dominique, against exaltation of man on earth. Dominique’s marriage to Gail is a daily treason to the spirit of the Stoddard Temple (GW 526–30). In their second cruise on Gail’s yacht, Dominique enjoys the sight of him relaxing in a deck chair, a state so much not his natural one. “She wondered about him; Gail Wynand, famous for his extraordinary capacity; but this was not merely the force of an ambitious adventurer who had created a chain of newspapers; this—the quality he saw in him here—the thing stretched out under the sun, like an answer —this was greater, a first cause, a faculty out of universal dynamics” (GW IX 531). Rand’s talk here of “a faculty out of universal dynamics” is probably an allusion to the force Nietzsche had come to think the fundamental essential force in all biological nature, even in all nature. That force for Nietzsche was will to power. He imputed to all organisms the drive for power he saw as the fundamental determinant of relations between human beings. Rand plays out what Nietzsche calls bourgeois drive for power in her characters Keating, his mother, and Catherine Halsey. She plays out more masterful drives for power in her characters Wynand and Toohey. Like Rand’s readers, Nietzsche would take all these characters as ignoble, excepting the mixed case of Wynand. He is noble in his honesty and courage, and in his self-regard and self-containment. Also, in his will of life and sense of gallantry (GW VII 517; IX 536). Nonetheless, Rand’s magnificent morality tale is a reproof of the necessity of will to power in human relations. Her Roark is devoid of it. Nietzsche would say Roark is profoundly impossible. Moreover, Nietzsche would detest all the framing in terms of good and evil, which Rand first brought expressly into her fiction in The Fountainhead. Rand bonds the good to the noble by the concept of integrity crafted in this book. I think her concept is sound, and I see no way to break the bond. Rand 1943 was not beyond speculating “a faculty out of universal dynamics.” But she sees human creation as fundamental and essential to human existence, and she sees creators like Roark as an original “life force” that is not a drive to power over others (HR XVIII 737). Wynand, too, had an abundance of that fundamental life force to which his will to power was inessential, dispensable. The character Wynand will not be able to redeem his treason. His love of Dominique and friendship with Roark do liberate him. Then too, the tallest skyscraper in New York will be built, in the pure spirit of Roark, as a monument to Wynand’s life, as if he had been forgiven (HR IX 643). Dominique does not need to learn to say Yes to all suffering and joy ever-returning. Also unlike Zarathustra, she does not need to learn to overcome pity. She needs to learn to stop hating the world that is opposite Roark and to be not so afraid for him. When Dominique severed her relationship with Roark, she said to him “When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you’” (ET XIV 399; also HR I 551–52). While Roark is building the home for Gail and Dominique, he is a frequent guest at their penthouse. Dominique learns to say Yes to the reality that is Roark in the real world, Roark as best friend of her husband, the three of them perfectly real in the city she dreads beyond the windows, as real as the three of them at the isolated, completed home (HR V 597; IX 636). She waits. Long ago she had walked through Roark’s Enright House under construction. “The girders and the conduits and the sweeping reaches of space were his and could not have been anyone else’s in the world; his, as his face, as his soul, . . . in every line of steel, a man’s self, hers for this moment, hers by the grace of seeing it and understanding” (ET VIII 306). Years later Roark had said to her and Gail. “‘What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word—“Yes.” The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. . . . The ability to say “Yes” or “No” is the essence of all ownership’” (HR IV 582). She waits. Roark enters her home and enlists her aid in his plan to dynamite Cortlandt, in the name of all creators and all real integrity. She is ready to fight. She is alone, driving the roadster along the East River to the site. “She laughed and thought: No, this is not New York, this is a private picture pasted to the window of my car, all of it, here on one small pane, under my hand, I own it, its mine now—she ran one hand across the buildings from the Battery to Queensborough Bridge—Roark, it’s mine and I’m giving it to you” (HR XII 668). References Nietzsche, F. 1882 & 1887. The Gay Science I–IV & V. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. ——. 1888. The Anti-Christ. J. Norman, trans. 2005. Cambridge. ——. 1888. Twilight of the Idols. J. Norman, trans. 2005. Cambridge. Rand, A. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill.

Pity At the end of Book IV of The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche introduces the character Zarathustra. He has stayed in the mountains the last ten years, enjoying “his spirit and solitude” (GS 342). He has decided to leave his cave in the mountains and to descend, to “go under,” back to humans for whom his happiness may shine. The same setting out from the mountains is repeated as the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883; Z I “Zarthustra’s Prologue” 1). Like Prometheus and the Christian God-the-Father, Zarathustra loves man and brings gifts to him (Z I “Zarathustra’s Prologue” 2). “My disciples: like me you strive for the bestowing virtue. . . . / This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves, and therefore you strive to amass all riches in your soul. / Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to bestow. / . . . / Indeed such a bestowing love must become a robber of all values, but holy and hale I call this selfishness. / There is another selfishness, one all too poor, a hungering one that always wants to steal; that selfishness of the sick, the sick selfishness.” (Z I “On the Bestowing Virtue”). Howard Roark bestows gifts by his creations. He is life-giving. He does not, however, need to take away old virtues of others to give them his gift. Moreover, he does not aim primarily, by his creative work, to be a one who bestows gifts. He aims to bring about the creations. Hopton Stoddard tells Roark the Temple of the Human Spirit shall be to “‘the human spirit as the creator and the conqueror of the ideal. The great life-giving force of the universe. . . . What I want in the building is your spirit. Your spirit, Mr. Roark’” (ET X 340). Henry Cameron had said to Roark: “‘May God bless you—or whoever it is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts’” (PK XI 137). Roark is one who pursues the best in his creations. He needs others of a certain character in order to create his buildings. He needs men of independent judgment, of honesty, of courage—men of integrity (PK XIII 166). For his buildings, Roark tracks down the best sculptor, one who is capable of showing in sculpture what men could and should be. Rand 1943 takes seeking the best, the highest, as a law of healthy, selfish life (ET XI 349). This law she calls a first law, this law to seek the best (ET XI 352; cf. Summa Theologica XIII Q94 A2). Unlike Zarathustra and his hoped-for superhuman children of the future, Roark is not in the business of breaking people’s old tables of good and evil and finding new, more noble virtues. Roark does not take an interest in persons on account of their need of value-reformation. There are fellows of Roark’s spirit, having integrity in the full-bodied sense characterized in The Fountainhead (PK XI 140–41; ET X 333; GW I 442; GW IX 532). These are Roark’s brothers (ET X 332; GW III 576). At his firm, Roark looks for and rewards only competence. Those who last a month are with him for life. “It was not loyalty to him, but to the best within themselves” (ET X 329). The way of life working at Roark’s firm and the way of life working under him on the Monadnock construction project is contrary the way of the world in general (HR I 547–49). Workers in step with Roark are in a crusade, although, unlike the disciples of Zarathustra and Jesus, the crusade is not the center of their aim. By the designs of his buildings, Roark bestows life on the spirit of others—on clients and users (PK XI 141, HR II 550, 723) and viewers (ET VIII 305, X 327, HR I 543–45)—and on his own spirit (PK XI 138, ET II 231–32, XI 359). By his buildings and within the social process of their execution, Roark is life-giving. He is also life-giving in personal relations. Austen Heller says to Roark: “You’re the coldest man I know. . . . [Yet] I always feel, when I see you, that you’re the most life-giving person I’ve ever met” (PK XIII 166–67). Roark is shown as life-giving by personal assistance to the talented young sculptor, Steven Mallory, who is fallen into drink and despair, who is without commissions in a world sot with vulgarity. Kent Lansing, a client of Roark’s and champion of his works, once remarked to Roark: “Men are brothers” (ET X 332). Between Lansing and Roark is the brotherhood of integrity in their intersecting commercial works (also, Wynand and Roark, HR III 576). Roark sees the sculptor Mallory as a spiritual confederate hurt in battle. Finding this man in despair, Roark’s eyes “were serene and they looked at Mallory quietly, a hard, clear glance of understanding—and respect” (ET XI 350). In that face, Mallory saw “the calmest, kindest face—a face without a hint of pity” (ET XI 350; cf. Roark and Wynand at site for future Wynand house, HR III 568–70). In Fountainhead Rand uses the term pity interchangeably with compassion (ET XI 350). She uses both to designate a feeling towards those in need, but a feeling sour with disrespect. Through the voice of Dominique, Rand states that within her meaning of compassion there is a letting go from holding up one’s heart or spirit, that the antipode of compassion is admiration, and that there is something unsound in adopting compassion as the greatest virtue, given that compassion presupposes suffering (ET VIII 301). Rand acknowledges that there is a lot of suffering in the world, though she would not make it a central concern of Roark to relieve suffering. Cameron says to Roark that Roark’s steps of success are going to be “a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face” (PK XI 137). The idea that all the pain on earth comes from human behavior is puzzling (cf. last two paragraphs). I understand Rand’s thought when she describes Dominique’s climax in bed with Roark as taking pain and suffering, inverting them, and sweeping them “into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy” (ET VIII 301). That denial is a momentary sanctuary against suffering in life, all suffering, whether caused by humans or nature. That denial, of course, is not a denial of the existence of suffering outside the iron gates of the sanctuary. Howard Roark suffers a great deal. He designs the Temple of the Human Spirit. He and Dominique walk without words through the completed silent temple on a night before its opening. The temple does not get opened for its designed purpose. It is to have its design modified and botched. Its purpose is rededicated, as a home for subnormal children, where twisted wealthy patrons will visit to enjoy a feeling of superiority. Roark says to Dominique, concerning the destruction of his creation: “I don’t believe it matters to me—that they’re going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don’t even know I’m hurt. But I don’t think so. . . . I’m not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it’s not really pain” (ET XII 366). Roark’s buildings each have their own personality, but all of them reflect his soul at its core. They are “innocent of pain” (HR I 544); they are a demanding joy (HR II 560). Cameron was definitely speaking of pain and suffering such as what Roark has to endure in the fate of the Temple. Dominique asks Roark where does the pain stop. He replies: “Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important” (ibid.). Dominique says that he should never have built such a thing to be delivered to such desecration. Roark: “That doesn’t matter. Not even that they’ll destroy it. Only that it had existed” (ibid.). Hmmmm. Where have we heard that thought before? It was at the close of We the Living. Walking away from the country of death and tyranny, Kira has been shot, in the snowy wilderness, in her wedding gown. She rises and staggers on, whispering the name Leo, whom she had loved. She falls for the last time. She knows she had known something “deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. . . . Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.” Something wonderful had existed. Though it is ending, it had been. It is a fact nothing can change. That is one sanctuary of great emotional suffering. This refuge is also set out for Keating, in his memory of his first and only moments of true love, moments “of wonderful anticipation just before spring is to begin” (HR X 650). Now in Rand’s story The Fountainhead, Roark’s pain and suffering in the course of his creative projects are due to wrongness in the minds and characters of some members of his society. The same is cause of the suffering he endures when Dominique leaves his arms and marries Keating (ET XV 399–400) and the pain he must carry the rest of his life over the friend he was not able to save (HR IX 749). Unlike in the novel, not all human pain and suffering stems from wrong ideas and choices. The best resolution I can make of Cameron’s statement is to see it as restricted by context in its meaning. Rand was referring, in Cameron’s statement, only to all the physical and emotional pain and suffering brought about in the world by wrong ideas and choices. There is plenty of it. Within that large ambit is the pain and suffering Roark will have to endure in the story. Dominique is thoroughly revolted by the smallness, the smuttiness, of what most of humanity selects for their enjoyment. When it comes to humanity’s suffering, well, “as a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity” (PK XII 49). One development from Dominique’s self-punishing marriage to Peter Keating is his painful realization of the void he is, of the nothingness of his self apart from his reflection of others (GW II 449–55). She says softly and honestly to him in this suffering over his hollow marriage and life, “I never wanted to take revenge on you, Peter. . . . / I don’t want you to suffer—I can’t feel anything else—but I feel that much” (GW II 456–57). Peter later squarely faces the fact that virtually all the merit of his buildings has come about by his parasitism on Roark and past creators like Roark. He confesses this sincerely, with dignity, to Roark. Rand’s ideal Howard Roark tells Peter that no forgiveness from him is needed since he has not been hurt in any important way by Peter’s betrayals. Roark has no drive to punish Keating (HR VIII 623). If the terms egotist and kindness do not sit well together, then one needs to rethink these concepts, for Roark is man most egoistic and most kind (HR VIII 631). Then Peter shows to Howard something he has in his briefcase, something not shown to anyone else. Peter has been doing a work entirely alone, purely because he wants to do it. Howard looks at the landscape paintings Peter has made in solitude and now has pulled from his case. He sees sadly what Peter had really already known: it is too late in life for Peter to develop the skills needed to bring what he feels in a scene onto the canvas (ibid.). “When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity. He had never felt this before . . . . This was pity—this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling—his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment upon a man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect. This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.” (HR VIII 631–32) Contrast that feeling with Roark’s spontaneous feeling towards Mallory, “a desire to lift him in his arms and carry him to safety” (ET XI 351). This feeling does not go by the name pity or compassion in Fountainhead. When Dominique first sees the face of Roark, at the granite quarry, she sees “the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity” (ET I 217). That is a statement about his standard countenance, whether or not it is also something peculiar to his immediate attitude in first looking at her, seeing her and her glance. What is in his face responsive to seeing Dominique is a look of ownership, which is to say, the sexual pronouncement, Yes! (HR IV 582). Perhaps there is also some related sexual lack of pity, as in partners who play rough. Eventually, at the end of their months-long love affair, Rand makes another mention of Roark’s lack of pity towards Dominique. This mention is a flag staked against the idea that bestowing love—including romantic love—entails loss of self and flows from pity on the object of love. It is a banner against unselfish love. Roark says to Dominique in the heart-rending scene in which they separate: “I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. . . . I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or pity, but my ego and my naked need” (ET XIV 400). It is a commonplace to say that romantic love needs to be unselfish and entails sacrifice. I am not aware of anyone ever saying that it requires or entails or is even compatible with pity. Nor compassion. It does entail concern for another, but presumably Rand was not challenging that in her challenge to romantic love tied to pity. Perhaps Rand was letting pity here stand for mere concern for another by way of challenging the idea that that concern is more basic to romantic love than is concern for oneself. Then again, perhaps Rand was relying on readers knowing romantic love does not rest on pity and hoping that would fortify her proposal of pity-free love in general. In Roark romantic love and brotherly love are variations of a god-like, bestowing love. They are loves flowing from the needs of his own life, not from pity (unlike God-the-Father) or sacrifice (unlike Jesus). Howard Roark is a kind person, in a certain sense (HR VIII 631). Ellsworth Toohey poses the question: “What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?” (ET VIII 296). Roark is not kind in that second sense. His brotherhood is not fastened to kindness in that second sense. He expects something of human beings. So there are some human failings that can outrage him (GW IV 475), such as Mallory being driven down to bric-a-brac (PK III 35) or Cameron being destroyed (PK V 72–75; VI 78–80; XIV 185–86; HR V 593), though sometimes he brushes depravity aside and gets back to work (HR I 551–52). Roark is not contemptuous of humanity (ET XII 365; HR XIX 751). And his standing kindness does not entail pity. Peter Keating is a lucky man. He gets to sell his soul three times over. Rather than marry the woman he loves, he sells his soul by marrying a woman who can bring him career advancement and the envy of men (PK IV 51–55; VI 82–84; HR X 650–51). He sells his soul in selling his wife to Wynand for a contract (GW III 468–72). He sells his soul to the control of Toohey in return for contracts, prestige, and consolation. The final installment of this sale is Keating giving over to the soul-breaker Toohey his generous friend Roark, by handing over his secret Cortlandt pact with Roark (HR XIV 686–89, 694). In his best seller Sermons in Stone, Ellsworth Toohey predicts “a better world to come, where all men would be brothers” (PK VI 77). In his newspaper column, he speaks of anonymity and uniformity of brotherhood (ET III 238). This brotherhood is not a brotherhood of nobility or sainthood. It is a brotherhood of comfort, for people who are spiritually nothing by themselves (ET V 261; VIII 296). Saintly spirits, such as Dominique and Roark, are a threat to Toohey’s type of “humanitarianism” in which relations between people are more important than people (ET VIII 297; XIII 387). Toohey is openly unkind to most every particular person he deals with. He preaches otherwise. “Kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. . . . We must be kind to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive” (ET IX 312). Contrast with Roark’s first law (ET XI 349, 352). Contrast with the First Commandment. In his early high school years, while still religious, Toohey talked about God and the spirit, but “he read more books on the history of the church than on the substance of faith” (ET IX 317). He excelled in original oratory and brought his audience to tears on the theme “The meek shall inherit the earth” (ibid.). Boys who were “suffering or ill-endowed” became his friends and spiritual wards. He consoled them with doctrines on the goodness of suffering, its moral superiority to happiness, the blessedness of belief over understanding, and the superiority of being a slower, less-inquiring student (ET IX 318). At sixteen Toohey let go of religion and turned to socialism. Instead of God and the nobility of suffering, he talked about the masses. He preached love of the masses and profound self-sacrifice for them. He argued “that religion bred selfishness; because . . . religion over-emphasized the importance of the individual spirit; religion preached nothing but a single concern—the salvation of one’s own soul” (ET IX 319). In a personal letter in 1946, Rand related her idea of Jesus as proclaiming “the basic principle of individualism—the inviolate sanctity of man’s soul, and the salvation of one’s soul as one’s first concern and highest goal; this means—one’s ego and the integrity of one’s ego.” One great corruption of that individualism in Jesus’ teachings comes with the code of ethics put forth as the means of saving one’s soul: “One must love or help or live for others.” Who put forth this second doctrine? “Jesus (or His interpreters).” One of the first books Rand bought after coming to America was Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ. Within this work, Nietzsche sets down differences he sees between the exemplar to be read from the life of Jesus and morality proclaimed by institutional Christianity. One difference is Christianity’s exaggeration of the amount of pity needed in the world. “Christianity is called the religion of pity. . . . Pity makes suffering into something infectious; sometimes it can even cause a total loss of life and of vital energy wildly disproportionate to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the Nazarene). . . . Pity wins people over to nothingness! You do not say ‘nothingness’: instead you say ‘the beyond’; or ‘God’; or . . .” (AC 7; further, 17, 18, 26, 32, 33, 39–43). There are several views of Nietzsche expressed in this work that Rand maintained in The Fountainhead, while leaving aside other Nietzchean doctrines, such as those I have replaced with ellipses points in the preceding quotation. Rand’s sensitivity to the possibility of incongruity between Jesus’ life and teachings, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other, may have been taken home from The Anti-Christ. The particular doctrines in conflict in Rand’s eye, stated paragraph before last, are not among those in Nietzsche’s eye in Anti-Christ, but there is a prelude to the particular opponent-doctrines Rand stresses in Daybreak (132). Notwithstanding Toohey’s omitting talk of God, his socialist sayings are generally warmly familiar to the religious. Hopton Stoddard found everything Toohey preached “in line with God’s law: charity, sacrifice, help to the poor” (ET X 335). Toohey continued to preach the blessedness of belief over understanding, belief over thought (ET X 388; GW VI 507; HR XIV 692). Mysticism and dialectical materialism, Toohey says, “are two superficially varied manifestations of the same thing. Of the same intention” (HR VI 600). Toohey is speaking for Rand when speaking of the continuity of religion and socialism. This idea was big with Nietzsche. “Who do I hate most among the rabble today? The socialist rabble . . . . The anarchist and the Christian are descended from the same lineage . . . . / Christians are perfectly identical with anarchists: their only goal, their only instinct is to destroy” (AC 57–58; see also D 132; Z IV “The Last Supper” 16; BGE 202). Notice that Rand does not take religion to be uniformly against thought. Like Leibniz before her, Rand is pleased with the story and idea of humans being created in the image of God, specifically, in their capability for reason. “‘Man’s first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought’” (HR XIV 693). Though he would not say it publicly, Toohey in no way intends to carry that value forward: “‘We’ll have neither God nor thought’” (ibid.). Near the end of Fountainhead, Toohey is safe finally to bare entirely his true aims and methods and his true self to Keating. In the world Toohey works to bring about, he would “let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy” (HR XIV 694). Catherine Halsey had been drawn to a career as a social worker because she wanted to help people (ET XIII 387), because she enjoyed helping the helpless and unhappy (ET IV 251–52). Catherine seeks her Uncle Ellsworth’s approval in all her choices. Once she developed a friendship with another girl who was a social worker. This girl was “intelligent, capable, gay and loved the poor” (ET XIII 383). Toohey did not approve of the friendship, and Catherine drops the girl. As time goes by, Catherine succeeds in giving up all her selfish desires (ET XIII 387). She comes to hate the poor people she serves (ET XIII 386). Toohey reveals to Keating that altruism is a great tool for bringing people around to being ashamed of saying “I want,” thereby killing their joy in living (HR XIV 691). “Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal” (HR XIV 690). Catherine and Peter were truly in love when they were young. Peter jilted her for the social advantage of a marriage to Dominique. Six years later, Catherine has a government job in DC. By chance Peter runs into her in New York, and they have lunch. He tries to look back together with her on the true, first love they had and on the suffering he caused her by dropping her. Catherine responds, without feint: “‘Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterwards. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, . . . and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles’” (649). Peter thinks to himself. “He had not known there was something worse than a living memory of pain; a dead one” (ibid.).* Self-pity is widely spurned in the world. It is spurned as well by Rand’s Roark (ET I 214–15). In popular culture, one sometimes sees pity upon another spurned as disrespectful by the one who is object of the pity. It is spurned by Joyce Heath in the movie Dangerous (1935) and by Police Chief Gillespie in the movie In the Heat of the Night (1967). American Heritage Dictionary states two related meanings of the term pity: 1.Sorrow or grief aroused by the misfortune of another; compassion for suffering. 2.Concern or regret for one considered inferior or less favored. It is that second one that is sometimes portrayed as disagreeable and is sometimes be discouraged in popular culture. American Heritage lists the following synonyms having in common that they designate grief or concern felt for someone in misfortune: pity, compassion, commiseration, sympathy, condolence, and empathy. It goes on state the differences in the usage of theses terms. “Pity implies a disposition to help but little emotional sharing of the distress. Compassion always favorably connotes broad or profound feeling for the misfortunes of others and a desire to aid them. Sympathy is as broad as pity but connotes spontaneous emotion rather than considered attitude. Empathy, with literary and psychological overtones, is a conscious involvement with a person’s situation in the sense of vicarious identification” (1976). The preponderance of translators of Nietzsche into English render his Mitlied as pity, rather than as compassion. Josefine Nauckoff’s translation of The Gay Science alone plunks for compassion over pity. Nietzsche wrote against the elevation of Mitlied, against making it a virtue, such as had been done by Christianity and by Schopenhauer (D 132–33, 142; GS 251; Z IV “The Cry of Distress”; AC 7). Major translators of Schopenhauer, E.F.J. Payne and R.E. Aquila, render his Mitlied as compassion. David Cartwright (1988) has argued that Mitlied in Schopenhauer should be rendered compassion and that in Nietzsche Mitlied should be rendered pity. I should mention something about Nietzsche that I have left only implicit for too long. His call for ever-new tables of good and evil exempts the virtues of courage and intellectual honesty. His charges against good and evil are not charges against the noble and base. (I am indebted to Prof. Pippin for that point.) Courage and intellectual honesty belong to the essence of the noble. Pity does not. Note * Rand has tucked a personal image as a sign of true love into her literature. In his appeal to Catherine to share in the memory of how they were, Peter speaks of a precious moment when they were alone together sitting on a bench in Washington Square. It was snowing. He speaks of her woolen gloves. “‘I remember—there were drops of water in the fuzz—round—like crystal—they flashed . . .’” (HR X 651, PK VI 85). On the night Roark will first come to Dominique and take her, just before she hears his steps, “a spilled drop of perfume remained on the glass of the dressing table, a drop sparkling like a gem” (ET II 229). In We the Living, Leo and Kira meet a second time, on a snowy night, in front of the deserted mansion. As they part, he takes off her mitten, raises her hand to his lips, and kisses her palm. He departs, “while she was still standing motionless, her hand outstretched, until a little white flake fluttered into her palm, onto the unseen treasure she was afraid to spill (WL 75). In Atlas Shrugged, after John and Dagny first make love, on the sandbags in the Taggart tunnels beneath New York: she saw him stretched out beside her, in the granite vault, “as if his body were fluid in relaxation, she saw the black wedge of her cape flung across the rails at their feet, there were beads of moisture twinkling on the vault” (AS 957). References Aquinas, T. d.1274. Summa Theologica. A. C. Pegis, trans., V2, 1997 (1945). Hackett Cartwright, D.E. 1988. Schopenhauer’s Compassion and Nietzsche’s Pity. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 69:557–65. Nietzsche, F. 1881. Daybreak. R.J. Hollingdale, trans. 1997. Cambridge. ——.1882 & 1887. The Gay Science I–IV & V. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. ——. 1888. The Anti-Christ. J. Norman, trans. 2005. Cambridge. Rand, A. 1959 (1936). We the Living. Signet. ——. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill. ——. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House.

Laughter Leo means lion. Leo of We the Living laughs in his first encounter with Kira. It is a cold and empty laugh (WL I, §IV). His laugh is not that of Nietzsche’s laughing lion, the overman (Z IV “The Welcome”). Leo is the sort of character Nietzsche might well call a higher man. Zarathustra is the physician and teacher of such men. In Leo’s second encounter with Kira, we are told he is a man come down to one desire: to learn to desire something (WL I, §IV). In the end, Leo is spiritually defeated. The hero in his soul has perished (Z I “On the Tree on the Mountain”). The Fountainhead has two principals who fit the Nietzschean designation of the higher human: Gail Wynand and Dominique Francon. Like the higher men of Zarathustra, they are spiritually convalescent. They are learning their way towards recovery in the course of the novel. In June 1938 Rand wrote the opening of The Fountainhead. “Howard Roark laughed.” In final form (1943), the text continues “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. . . . The stone had the stillness of one brief battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion” (PK I 9). Below him the lake into which he will dive reflects the sky. “So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff” (ibid.). Earlier that morning, he had been expelled from architecture school. He laughed at that and “at the things which now lay ahead. / He knew that the days ahead would be difficult. There were questions to be faced and a plan of action to be prepared. He knew he should think about it. He knew also that he would not think, because everything had been set long ago, and because he wanted to laugh” (ibid.). Roark is not without roar. Is Howard Roark Nietzsche’s laughing lion? No. Roark is not the overman, not the higher man, and not Zarathustra. I stated in the preceding installment that what “had been set long ago” was (i) Roark’s life-purpose, architecture (since age nine), and (ii) the constitutional plan of his soul. Is his soul and course of life set in a predetermined way by his body? Roark’s body is center of the opening scene. Later, during a period of his struggle in which he has no contracts he passes by a construction site in New York and thinks he will never be entering such a site for a building of Howard Roark, architect. “It’s true, he would tell himself; it’s not, his body would answer, the strange untouchable healthiness of his body” (PK XIV 183). Years later, when Roark has become successful and Peter Keating’s success has died out, Keating meets with Roark to hear Roark’s decision on Keating’s proposal for winning the big Cortlandt contract. Keating thinks to himself of Roark: “It’s in his whole body, that look of a creature glad to be alive. And he realized that he had never actually believed that any living thing could be glad for the gift of existence” (HR VIII 630). That was part of Roark’s laughter in the opening scene of the novel. He wants to laugh partly from the joy of his existence. In Zarathustra laughter is often emblematic of Nietzsche’s campaign against “the spirit of gravity” (Z I “On Reading and Writing;” IV “On the Higher Man” 16, 18, 20; “The Awakening” 1). There is some of the laughter against the spirit of gravity in the laughs of Roark. However, in laughter against the spirit of gravity, Nietzsche includes laughing at oneself and indeed at anything serious (Z IV “On the Higher Man” 15; “The Awakening” 1; GS 1, 382; BGE 294). This is something Rand speaks against in Fountainhead. Roark seldom laughs (ET IV 253). He laughs as the face of an associate reveals a dawning comprehension of something in Roark’s motives (PK XV 202). He laughs over the prospect, when he has to close his architectural practice, that his enemies will gloat over him being reduced to tradesman work (PK XV 207). He laughs soundlessly at turns in his first bedding of Dominique (ET II 225, 230). He laughs soundlessly upon learning, from Joel Sutton, that Dominique is the one who has persuaded Sutton to decline Roark as his architect and that Dominique told Sutton to tell Roark she was the one (ET VII 288). He laughs softly when Keating finally comprehends that to be able to say “I built Cortlandt” is a gift possible only from oneself and is worth more than any money, fame, and honor that one might receive from others on account of the accomplishment. That soft laughter “was the happiest sound Keating had ever heard” (HR VIII 630). Robert Mayhew observes that right after Roark’s laughter at the opening of the novel, there enters something arresting of attention and laughter. “He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in the awareness of the earth around him. . . . / He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters” (PK I 9–10; Mayhew 2007b, 210). When it comes to his work, his life-meaning, and his essential person, Roark does not laugh. Rand gives to villain Ellsworth Toohey the idea that an ability to laugh at oneself, and at anything one holds to be important, is a good thing (ET III 242, 246–47; IV 251, 257; IX 326; XIII 385). Shortly before Roark’s soliloquy in the courtroom for the Cortlandt destruction, Rand gives Toohey a soliloquy, which includes the following: “‘Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It’s simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul—and his soul won’t be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man. One doesn’t reverence with a giggle’” (HR IX 636). Rand was not the first to note that laughter can be used to kill. Nietzsche has the ugliest human (he who had been the object of pity for his ugliness and who had taken revenge for it by murdering God, who had super-pitied him) say to Zarathustra “‘But I know one thing—it was from you yourself that I once learned, oh Zarathustra: whoever wants to kill most thoroughly laughs. / “One kills not by wrath, but by laughter”—this you once spoke’” (Z IV “The Ass Festival” 1). But Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, unlike Toohey, has not the slightest intent to kill, by laughter or otherwise, the truly sacred in men’s souls, the hero in man. It is an earlier writer who observes the thoroughly vicious use of laughter we find admitted in Toohey’s soliloquy. In The Man Who Laughs (1869), Hugo’s Gwynplaine takes his stand for humanity in a speech in the House of Lords, and these his most serious, most sacred words are laughed into dust. When the mountebank Gwynplaine had been in shows, performing as a freak, laughter had applauded him; but here, on solemn matters of real life, elevated to Lord and addressing his peers, “here it exterminated him. The effort to ridicule is to kill. Men’s laughter sometimes exerts all its power to murder” (VII 610–11). Zarathustra’s disciples interpret a dream of his. They put it to him this way: “‘Like thousandfold children’s laughter Zarathustra comes into all burial chambers, laughing at these night watchmen and grave guardians, and whoever else rattles about with dingy keys. / You will frighten and lay them low with your laughter . . . . / And even if the long twilight comes and the weariness unto death, you will not set in our sky, you advocate of life! / You allowed us to see new stars and new splendors of the night; indeed, you spanned laughter itself above us like a tent’” (Z II “The Soothsayer”). The grave guardians of whom Zarathustra’s disciples speak are they who have renounced life. We have seen that Kira counter poses belief in God to belief in life. Similarly, Roark counter poses belief in God to love of the earth (PK III 45). This much Rand coincides with Nietzsche. “My brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak of extraterrestrial hopes! . . . / They are despisers of life . . . .” (Z I “Zarathustra’s Prologue” 3). We learn eventually that Zarathustra’s disciples had gotten his place in real life wrong in their dream interpretation. The sun that he heralds also sets. He is herald of no everlasting ascent from the spirit of gravity and no everlasting ascent from the human to the overman. He reports what he has seen in a vision. In a “cadaver-colored twilight,” he climbed a hard mountain, forcing his foot upward, upward “in defiance against the spirit that pulled him downward, the spirit of gravity, my devil and arch-enemy” (Z III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 1). On his shoulder sat a dwarf monster murmuring in his ear “‘You stone of wisdom! You hurled yourself high, but every stone must fall!’” (ibid.). Zarathustra lightens the load by stopping the climb, having the little monster off his shoulder, and spelling out what is the deep abyss drawing down his spirit: The present moment, and every present moment, is connected to an infinite past and an infinite future. Whatever occurs now must have occurred before in such an infinite past and must occur again in such an infinite future. Over and over, it goes (Z II “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2). “The knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs—it will create me again! I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. / I will return . . . not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: / —I will return to this same and selfsame life, in what is greatest as well as what is smallest . . . . / . . . / to once again teach the eternal recurrence of all things” (Z III “The Convalescent” 1). Zarathustra is teacher of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence (GS 341). This idea is false if taken literally (and I suppose Nietzsche took it literally; contra Williams 2001, xvi) because not all infinities are equally large. The fire in the fireplace yesterday is one among an infinite potential of particular fires-for-a-day. That infinity is larger than the infinity of infinite time. That fire need never occur again, even in an eternity. Indeed the chance of it is nil. But Nietzsche is under the gripping spell of the eternal recurrence. Let us follow his thought under this spell. In Zarathustra laughter is not only emblematic of Nietzsche’s general campaign against the spirit of gravity. It is emblematic more particularly of reconciliation with the chains of determinism and more particularly still with eternal self-returning determinism. There is a laughter to be longed for, the laughter of one “no longer human,” a being “transformed, illuminated . . . . / Never yet on earth had I heard a human being laugh as he laughed!” (Z III “On the Vision and the Riddle” 2; contrast my treatment of this passage in relation to Roark with the treatment in Milgram 2007, 31–32.) That laughter was only in a vision, in which a shepherd in the field wakes to find a snake has entered his mouth and lodged its bite in the his throat. The shepherd bites off the head of the snake, spits it away, and laughs the laugh beyond the human, the laugh so much to be hoped for. It was the laugh of a character in a vision, not the laugh of an actual overman. It was not Zarathustra’s laugh either. The abysmal thought of the eternal return continues to gnaw at him. “I have not been strong enough for the lion’s final overreaching and cheeky mischief. / [Abysmal thought,] your gravity alone was always terrible enough for me; but one day I shall yet find the strength and the lion’s voice to summon you up!” (Z III “On Unwilling Bliss;” further, Z IV “The Sleepwalker’s Song” and “The Sign”). In a still hour before sleep, Zarathustra has been told, by the clock of his life, when it drew a breath, that the one who is needed most by everyone is “‘the one who commands great things.’ / And I answered ‘I lack the lion’s voice for all commanding’. / Then it spoke to me again like a whispering: ‘The stillest words are those that bring the storm. Thoughts that come on the feet of doves steer the world’” (Z II “The Stillest Hour”). Later in the adventure, Zarathustra: “Here I sit and wait, old broken tablets around me and also new tablets only partially written upon. When will my hour come? / . . . / This is what I wait for now; signs must come to me first that it is my hour—namely the laughing lion and the swarm of doves” (Z III “On Old and New Tablets” 1). At the close of Zarathustra, his higher men have begun to learn to laugh against the spirit of gravity, and he has given them his song “One More Time.” His hour has come. His midnight of joy deeper than the deep pain of the world wants it all again, wants deep, deep eternity. Zarathustra lastly rises glowing and strong in the morning. His signs have come. His doves are a cloud of love about his head. His lion has come and chased off the higher men. Zarathustra’s last sin, his pity for the higher men, is gone. His lion is near to him. His day and work begin. The ringed determinism binding the human will is a very hard one in Nietzsche’s understanding. “If ever a breath came to me of creative breath and of heavenly necessity that forces even accident to dance astral rounds: / If ever I laughed with the laugh of creative lightning that follows rumbling but obediently the long thunder of the deed: / . . . / Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the mystical ring of rings—the ring of recurrence! / . . . / For I love you, oh eternity!” (Z III “The Other Dance Song” 3; see also I “On the Three Metamorphoses;” II “On Redemption.”) Nietzsche, loving life and the world, reaches yet for joy even with all the pain and heavy chains of necessity (Z IV “The Sleepwalker’s Song” 8–10; cf. BGE 9). When Howard Roark laughs at the opening of The Fountainhead, shall we say determinism—determinism binding his life course by nature and his body—is among the objects of his laughter? Does the author see a need for her hero, by his laugh, to be biting off the head of that snake? It is likely Rand had always rejected the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism (Milgram 2004, 12; Ridpath 2004, 91). “The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence determines their consciousness” (Marx 1897 [1859]). In Fountainhead, Rand gave to Toohey the proclamation “there was no such thing as free will, since men’s creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived” (PK VI 77). To the villains, too, goes proclamation of the type of determinism accepted by Nietzsche. Toohey says “‘we are merely the creatures of our chemical metabolism and of the economic factors of our background . . . . There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Merely apparent. When circumstances delude us into thinking that free action is indicated’” (HR VII 615). A writer in Toohey’s circle writes a novel whose point is that there is no such thing as free will (GW I 421). A distinguished critic in Toohey’s circle remarks “‘talent is only a glandular accident” (GW VI 503). Nietzsche, of course, would not make small of the creative individual. He would elevate in spite of the chains of determinism. I suggest that Rand’s stress on the untouchable healthiness of Roark’s body is a matter of conferring an esthetic integrity on him and a way of saying that the base of life given to man by the earth is good. Roark is one who keeps that goodness. So do other Fountainhead characters, such as Heller or Lansing, so far as we are told. The character Roark is styled to reflect innocence never lost. After viewing Roark’s drawing for the Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit, the conversation includes Mallory saying to Roark: “‘Do you know what your secret is? It’s your terrible innocence’. / Roark laughed aloud, looking at the boyish face. / ‘No’, said Mallory, ‘it’s not funny. . . . It’s because of that absolute health of yours. You’re so healthy that you can’t conceive of disease. You know of it. But you don’t really believe it’” (ET XI 352). References Hugo, V. 1869. The Man Who Laughs. Translator unknown. 2006. Norilana. Marx, K. 1997 [1859]. Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. N.I. Stone, translator. 1904. Charles H. Kerr. Mayhew, R., editor, 2004. Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. Lexington. ——. 2007a. Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Lexington. ——. 2007b. Humor in The Fountainhead. In Mayhew 2007a. Milgram, S. 2004. From Airtight to We the Living: The Drafts of Ayn Rand’s First Novel. In Mayhew 2004. ——. 2007. The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel: The Composition of Ayn Rand’s First Ideal Man. In Mayhew 2007a. Nietzsche, F. 1882 & 1887. The Gay Science I–IV & V. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. Ridpath, J. 2004. Russian Revolutionary Ideology and We the Living. In Mayhew 2004. Rand, A. 1959 (1936). We the Living. Signet. ——. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill. Williams, B. 2001. Introduction to The Gay Science. Cambridge.

Everyone / No One To the title Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche added the subtitle A Book for All and None. “When I came to mankind for the first time, I committed the hermit’s folly, the great folly: I situated myself in the market place. / And when I spoke to all, I spoke to none. . . . / . . . / You higher men, learn this from me: in the market place no one believes in higher men (Z IV “On the Higher Man”). Howard Roark is given a scene in which “He was addressing everyone. He was addressing no one” (PK XIII 172). Nathaniel Janss of the Janss-Stuart Real Estate Company had come to Roark seeking an architect for his new thirty-story office building to be built on lower Broadway. Roark persuades him that this building should break with traditional styles and ornamentations. It should be like the human body whose every muscle has a purpose. The building should be free of useless accouterments. It should have sense and purpose, like the human body, where “‘there’s not a line wasted; . . . every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man’” (PK XIII 171). Janss worries that the public will want forms and details traditionally taken for beautiful. Roark observes that such things do not make beauty when attached to a modern, steel office building. Roark avers that “‘most people take most things because that’s what’s given them, and they have no opinion whatever’” (ibid.). He urges Janss to simply be guided by his own judgment, rather than by what the public expects him to think they think (PK XIII 171–72). Janss is persuaded, but it is the board of directors who must decide. Roark’s words to the board reach no individual hearing. They strike no note of independent response from any of the twelve members. “He was addressing everyone. He was addressing no one” (PK XIII 172). In the wider public, however, Roark knows that there are individuals who will respond to his approach to modern architecture. “‘You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason, . . . and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia’” (ibid.). Like Kira Argounova (WL II, §VII), Howard Roark has occasions of passing buildings under construction and feeling barred from ever entering that exhilarating work, his life’s work. After expulsion from architectural school, after the death of his esteemed mentor Henry Cameron, after uniform refusals for employment in architectural firms, Roark walks through New York, passes a construction site, and thinks of what he would like to see erected there. “Then he thought suddenly that now, in this moment, according to the city, according to everyone save that hard certainty within him, he would never build again, never—before he had begun” (PK VIII 103). He shrugs at the things happening to him, regarding them as “only a kind of sub-reality, unsubstantiated incidents in the path of a substance they could not reach or touch” (ibid.). Roark opens his own firm, builds a couple of houses, a service station, and a department store. Then, no clients appear. He walks past buildings under construction and feels “the few steps on the sidewalk that separated him from the wooden fence enclosing the construction were the steps he would never be able to take. . . . It’s true, he would tell himself; its not, his body would answer, the strange, untouchable healthiness of his body” (PK XIV 183). Like Andre Taganov (WL II, §III), Howard Roark is one for whom every waking hour of life has a purpose, and he knows his own (PK VII 88). Plato drew analogies between city and soul; Rand draws analogies between building and soul. Her Roark is a designer of buildings whose shape is determined by the building’s site, material, and purpose. The day he leaves school, Roark tells the Dean: “‘Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose’” (PK I 18). A building should seem alive. Its design should be a clean, clear-cut unity (PK X 129). Roark designs a building for the Manhattan Bank Company. The company will accept his proposal, provided a Classic motif is added to its façade. Roark explains to the board of directors “why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any exiting thing or creature . . . . why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity” (PK XV 205). In their architectural careers, in bringing forth designs, creators like Cameron and Roark are following and finding truths within themselves. Rand speaks of Cameron, after long years of struggle, reaching the goal of his life work, finally giving shape “to the truth he had sought” (PK III 41). These creative discoveries are similar to Nietzsche’s commission “become who you are” (GS 270, 335). Roark is not taking up this Nietzschean commission. Taganov and Roark are characters “living past” old moralities (BGE 262). But these are men of fixed moral character. Andrei learns things about himself from his relationship with Kira. The two of them had believed in life, a word “‘that awaken the kind of feeling that a temple does, or a military march, or the statue of a perfect body’” (WL II, §III). It was for that feeling that he fought against the Czar. His own existence had been “‘only the fight and the future. You [Kira] taught me the present’.” Andrei had “‘lived a life where every hour had to have a purpose, and suddenly I discover what it’s like to feel things that have no purpose but myself, and I see suddenly how sacred a purpose can be, . . . and I know, then, that a life is possible whose only justification is my own joy’” (ibid.). That is a substantial self-discovery and self-transformation. It does not fit, however, Nietzsche’s call to be of somewhat variable moral character (GS 296), to continually examine oneself, overcome oneself, and recompose oneself, as if creating one’s next work of art (GS 290; Z II “On Self-Overcoming”). The youthful Roark says “‘Every man creates his meaning and form and goal’” (PK I 18). He laughs in the opening of the novel, because—notwithstanding what had just happened to him and notwithstanding the obstacles ahead in his life-purpose—“the plan had been set long ago and because he wanted to laugh” (PK I 9). The set plan refers both to his life-purpose, architecture, and to the constitutional plan of Roark’s soul. For Cameron and Roark, architecture is “‘a crusade and consecration to a joy that justifies the existence of the earth’” (PK VI 80). Roark has no question of this nor any interest in questioning this. What he esteems is set. He pursues that, not questioning and revising his values and person. Roark does not change, not his sense of lightness, his ease in motion and action, his thought (GW V 495). He is not losing himself as his days go by. He is as an immortal in his unchanging entity (GW V 485). By the constancy of his character, he is no Nietzschean ideal. We have seen the notion of “a joy that justifies the existence of the earth in Rand’s earlier works We the Living and Anthem. I take the primary intended sense of earth here to be as I took it to be in those earlier works. That is, earth as the entire abode of human existence. Roark’s creations bring him and others a joy that can justify the life of man and a man on earth. This joy is the spring of value in the world for man. This joy, however, is not had in just any way. Gail Wynand thinks the foremost moral failing to be “ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond [oneself]” (HR V 595). He is proud, looking back on his five decades of life, to be able to say to himself “I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and the meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted” (ibid.). Nietzsche can agree with Wynand in that outline. Nietzsche countered nihilism, which he saw as weakness and sickness of will (GS 347). Given that “God is dead,” how shall all human desire not fail? (GS 125, 343; Z II “The Soothsayer,” IV “The Song of Melancholy” 2). If nothing of value to us lies ready as value beyond ourselves, how shall we have anything worthy of our esteem? (BGE Preface). You [wisest ones] still want to create the world before which you could kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication. / The unwise, to be sure, the people—they are like a river on which a skiff floats; valuations are seated in the skiff, solemn and cloaked. / Your will and your values you set upon the river of becoming; what the people believe to be good and evil reveals to me an ancient will to power. / It was you, you wisest ones, who placed such guests into the skiff and gave them pomp and proud names—you and your dominating will! (Z II “On Self-Overcoming”). In Nietzsche’s view of reality and human existence, the revered moral values set upon the skiff are not values necessitated as uniquely and unchangingly correct by reality. “Good and evil that would be everlasting—there is no such thing! They must overcome themselves again and again.” The living “must always overcome itself.” It is perpetually “struggle and becoming and purpose and the contradiction of purposes” (ibid.). Howard Roark and his buildings do not embody these doctrines of Nietzsche. Fountainhead character Gordon Prescott takes the pliability of reality and moral values to an extreme well beyond Nietzsche. He says that what are called rooms are emptiness. Architecture puts up emptiness. “‘The architect is a metaphysical priest dealing in basic essentials, who has the courage to face the primal conception of reality as nonreality—since there is nothing and he creates nothingness. If this sounds like a contradiction, it is not proof of bad logic, but of a higher logic, the dialectics of all life and art’” (ET VIII 3ll). Thus spoke Gordon at a meeting of Toohey’s Council of American Builders (also in the case at court over the Stoddard Temple; ET XII 376). The members of Toohey’s Council of American Artists were so-called individualists who “rebelled against the tyranny of reality and of the objective” (ET IX 326). Roark says to Austen Heller “‘A house can have integrity, just like a person’” (PK XI 140). Another client of Roark’s, Kent Lansing says to Roark: “‘Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think’” (ET X 333). Nietzsche: “Will to truth” you call that which drives you and makes you lustful, you wisest ones? / Will to thinkability of all being, that’s what I call your will! / You first want to make all being thinkable, because you doubt with proper suspicion, whether it is even thinkable. / But for you it shall behave and bend! Thus your will wants it. It shall become smooth and subservient to the spirit, as its mirror and reflection. / That is your entire will, you wisest ones, as a will to power; and even when you speak of good and evil and of valuations. (Z II “On Self-Overcoming”) Reality does not lie before us simply susceptible to rational thought and rational valuation, not in Nietzsche’s view. So far as reality is thinkable, it has been made so by us; likewise for value. Hence his diminution of the objective character of what is physical health, which we have noted earlier. Nietzsche knows that living requires constraint. But he sees and wants too much of the constraint to have been set by human will (e.g. BGE 188, 211). With such constraints being set so much by us, their necessity is undermined, and the possibility of their perpetual reconstitution is opened. Nietzsche’s diminution of the extent to which the natural world provides constraints for truth and value in human existence is part of the reason Thus Spoke Zarathustra is “a book for all and none.” Human beings and what will best preserve them will not satisfy Nietzsche’s impetus to value (Z IV “On the Higher Man” 3). Rather, his inspiration is towards a being beyond the human, a superhuman being able to embrace these words: “Whatever I may create and however I may love it—soon I must oppose it and my love, thus my will wants it. / And even you, seeker of knowledge, are only a path and footstep of my will; indeed, my will to power follows also on the heels of your will to truth!” (Z II “On Self-Overcoming”; also Z I “On a Thousand and One Goals”). Objectivity is not a durable liberation or inspiration to Nietzsche’s mind (BGE 207). Reason has some authority, but deep down, moral judgments are irrational (BGE 191). In response to Roark’s defense of integrity in a building’s design, the chairman of the board of the Manhatten Bank Company says: “‘In practical life, one can’t be always so flawlessly consistent. There’s always the incalculable human element of emotion. We can’t fight that with logic’” (PK XV 205). Toohey says to Dominique: “‘Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives’” (ET XII 368; cf. Z III “Before Sunrise” and early Nietzsche. The constraints on buildings designed by Roark are the site, the materials, and the function of the building. The building shall have integrity. That is a constraint. By the building-soul analogy, those are the constraints in the soul of Roark. His buildings are different one to the next, and the souls of good men are different one to the next. “‘Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable’” (GW V 495). All Roark’s buildings have another character too, one discerned by Wynand: “‘Your buildings have one sense above all—a sense of joy. Not a placid joy. A difficult, demanding kind of joy. The kind that makes one feel as if it were an achievement to experience it. One looks and thinks: I’m a better person if I can feel that’” (HR II 560; see also Dominique, ET XII 306; further, Roark, HR IV 582–83.) A day at the site of the house Roark is building for Wynand, Roark tells him the meaning of life is your work—not your strength—your work, “‘the material the earth offers you and what you make of it’” (HR V 596). Roark loves the earth. That he has in common with Zarathustra. However, Roark’s dedication is to ever-remaking the earth for the physical and spiritual needs of man, not to ever-remaking his values and soul. References Nietzsche, F. 1882 & 1887. The Gay Science I–IV & V. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. Rand, A. 1959 (1936). We the Living. Signet. ——. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill.

A Furnace The Fountainhead includes a remedy of Rand’s very wrong passage in We the Living (1936). Andrei had told Kira that we cannot sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few. She replied: “You can! You must. When those few are the best. . . . What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it [deserve life]? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, . . . And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life?” (WL 1936, quoted in Sciabarra 1995, 101; Mayhew 2004, 211; cf. BGE 258, 265). I remarked in the preceding installment that even if this talk were only of metaphorical burning, say the burning of lifetimes in manual labor for factory owners or mine owners, these were and are words for the trash can. Speaking to Dominique, Gail Wynand says “‘One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to his name’” (GW IV 476). That hatred is a distant relative to Kira’s hatred, but not distant enough for Rand 1943. During the Banner’s campaign against Roark’s newly completed Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit, Roark is interviewed by reporters. “He spoke without anger. He said: ‘I can’t tell anyone anything about my building. If I prepared a hash of words to stuff into other people’s brains, it would be an insult to them and to me’” (ET XII 365). The Banner reports the interview, twisting Roark’s view into one contrary to his. Their account is a report of precisely what Roark did not think: “‘Mr. Roark . . . stated that the public mind was hash’” (ibid.).* To a distinguished and ignoble literary critic in the circle of villain Toohey, Rand gives the line “I have a right to wish to impress my own personality upon people” (GW VI 503). Rand’s respect for the mind(s) of the public expressed by Roark was also expressed by the sympathetic character Sasha in We the Living (II, §II). The editor of the Banner is Alvah Scarret. Of this character, Rand writes that he “had never hated anything, and so was incapable of love” (GW I 437). In this statement about Scarret, the author is stating a general proposition she holds for all human beings. Perhaps this proposition is true. (Leave out of view just now whatever science has yielded on the developmental psychodynamics of love and hate.) I have some doubt that the contrast concept-class hate is necessary for the concept-class love. There are other contrast classes for love within the superordinate class emotion. Wynand states one of those other contrast classes. He says that “love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. . . . [Not] some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference . . .’” (GW IV 476). For the sake of argument, grant Rand’s general proposition that there could be no capability for love without a capability for hatred. It remains that there is no entailment that men eliciting one’s hatred be numerous, let alone be a majority of men. Moreover, there is no necessity that one hate men who do not live up to the title man. Kira, Wynand, and Dominique hate them. Howard Roark does not. Here is the Fountainhead passage in which Rand supersedes her grievous passage in We the Living (1936). There is metaphorical feeding of bodies into a furnace, but without sacrifice of one spiritual class of people to another. At his office, Roark never speaks to his employees, except of their work. “The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first” (ET VI 268). References Mayhew, R. 2004. We the Living: ’36 and ’59. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. Lexington. Nietzsche, F. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. Rand, A. 1943. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill. Sciabarra, C. M. 1995. Ayn Rand – The Russian Radical. Penn State.

Life Undefeated Rand wrote Anthem (1938) in the summer of 1937. In her manuscript for Anthem, she continually tries to suit ideas of Nietzsche to her story, then scratches them out. Naturally, I wonder if she was not also, in some of those same strokes of the pen, writing down ideas of Nietzsche that she had seen attractive as truth, or at least promising as truth, then rejecting them as inadequate to her own grasp of the truth. Writing one’s ideas down and reading them helps one think better. I should mention an interpretive issue concerning philosophy expressed in fiction that Rand finished and submitted for publication. In Fountainhead and Atlas, it is plain that philosophic views expressed by protagonists are those of the author at the time of final composition. What about We the Living (1936) and Anthem (1938)? These works were written before Rand was an established novelist. If you were writing a first novel, would you necessarily create protagonists whose express philosophic ideas were entirely held their creator? I think not, although the life courses one elects for protagonists and antagonists, with their given natures, would very likely express what the creator holds true. I take Rand’s protagonists in these first two published fictions to be always expressing Rand’s then-current view on express matters of philosophy. In his community of origin, Equality 7-2521 had always loved the science of things. He also wants to know the meaning of things, the meaning of existence. He wants to know the secrets of nature, and he comes to suspect there is some important secret of human existence unknown to all. After fleeing his collectivist society, he comes upon a fine house and learns from its books many wonders of the advanced science of the ancient civilization. He discovers the word I. That is, he attains the concept I distinctly and firmly set. He no longer writes “we” or “we alone” or “we alone only” in his journal to refer to himself. A new chapter begins. He writes: “I am. I think. I will. I am, for I know joy in living. . . . / I think, for I judge and choose my truth. . . . / I will, for I know my desires, and I am free in that which I desire. . . (A 1938, quoted in Milgram 2005, 18–19). (Cf. Descartes in Meditations II. “I am, I exist, that is certain. . . . / But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.”) With his fundamental discovery, Equality 7-2521 has become a Prometheus. He continues: “What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer. I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This, my body and spirit, this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning” (A XI). There is one word “which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory. / The sacred word: EGO” (A XII). The quotation from Chapter XII is the close of the story. At the time this story was written, there were no atomic weapons, no nuclear arsenals, and I think it was an ordinary assumption among people not Christian that human kind would continue effectively forever on the earth. Recall, too, that Anthem is a poetic work, and in poetic expression, as in dreams, conjured images condense multiple associations. In the case of poetic expression, the suggested associations are set up by the wider text. To write that the word ego and that which it names cannot be eradicated from the earth might be playing on multiple meanings of earth. One meaning is the third planet from the sun; another is the dwelling place of mortal men, as distinct from mythological realms of immortal beings; another is the collection of human inhabitants on the planet (American Heritage). Rand’s uses of earth with talk of ego in Anthem 1938 can rightly carry those three meanings simultaneously. I think the most salient of three meanings in Rand’s use here is the second one. She is not only making a statement about the endurance of ego among all possible societies (the third meaning). She is most saliently making a statement about ego in relation to all the earth, to all the abode of human existence. “Behold, I teach you the overman! / The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! / I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes!” (Z I “Zarathustra’s Prologue” 3; also Z I “On the Bestowing Virtue” 2). “Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen.” I teach you the overman, or superhuman. Rand 1938 is not teaching something beyond human, higher than human. Rather, she is teaching the human restored to wholeness. “My ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to mankind: No longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things, but bear it freely instead, an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth!” (Z I “On the Hinterworldly”). Rand does not create a superhuman for the meaning of the earth. Does her Prometheous create a meaning of the earth? His namesake does not invent fire. Rand’s protagonist unlocks a type of human that finds the meaning of human existence; not in super-terrestrial personages and their affairs, but in complete human individuals on earth. “I am a man. This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before!” (XI). Nietzsche calls for humans to create (by successive generations of self- and value-creators [yes, with Lamarckian inheritance]), superhuman beings who will be the meaning of the earth. Rand 1938 does not teach humans to create (or to beget) the meaning of the earth, but to discover it. “This spread of naked rock and peaks and moonlight is like a world ready to be born, a world that waits. It seems to us it asks a sign from us, a spark, a first commandment. We cannot know what word we are to give . . . . We are to speak. We are to give its goal, its highest meaning to all this glowing space of rock and sky” (X). I really do not see Rand setting up some sort of Fichtean or Nietzschean perspective on the relation of ego and world. She is saying that whatever goals there are in inanimate and animate earth, they reach their final end in their crowning glory: the individual human knower of joy and living; the individual judge of truth; the individual will free over his ends; in a word, the ego. Notice that at this stage of her development only sentient living processes, specifically, human ones, can be ends not for the sake of something else. These final ends are human, not superhuman. Rand’s hero of Anthem is not portrayed as creating by will the human self that is final end and meaning of the earth. He is portrayed as discovering, or comprehending the self. (See also Mayhew 2005a, 38–39). In discovering what gives the earth its highest meaning, Rand’s Prometheus is not one who “first creates the possibility that something can be good and evil” (Z III “On New and Old Tablets” 2). Rand began making notes for The Fountainhead in 1935. She began the writing in the summer of 1938 (Milgram 2007, 3). Her earliest notes specify that the theme of the novel is to be “the conflict between the first-handers who use their own minds to know the world and the second-handers, who ‘shift the center’ of their lives from their own judgments and values to those of others” (7). Between ’35 and ’37, Rand’s notes work on the theme, main characters, and events. “Her notes explain how the motives and actions of Toohey, Keating, and Wynand demonstrate their fundamental dependence on others” (4). Rand selected epigraphs from Nietzsche for the front-piece of the novel and for the head of each of its four sections. (This practice is utilized, for example, by James Baldwin in his novel Another Country.) The epigraph for the section titled “Ellsworth Toohey” was from Zarathustra (I “The Tarantulas”), in the translation by Thomas Common (1917). “Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant-frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for ‘equality’; your most secret tyrant-longings disguise themselves thus in virtue-words!” (quoted in Milgram 2007, 15). For a variety of reasons noted by Dr. Milgram, Rand eliminated all these epigrams from the finished product (1943). In another notebook, her first philosophical one, Rand had an entry in 1934 in which “she commented that liberal democracies are at fault for ‘giving full rights to quantity (majorities), they forget the rights of quality, which are much higher rights. Prove that the differences of quality not only exist inexorably, but also should exist. The next step—democracy of superiors only’” (ibid., 27). Eventually, Rand will transmute this quality/quantity notion of rights into the distinction of individual rights versus alleged rights of any collective. The individual rights will be uniform for all individuals, rather than be attached only to those of noble spirit. This will become Rand’s mature view, coincident with her mature view that ultimate ends in themselves are every individual’s own life itself. Ultimate ends in themselves are not just the selves that are noble spirits and higher life. We see, however, that early Rand subscribed to Nietzsche’s doctrine of two kinds of justice for two spiritual classes of people (BGE 22, 44, 202–3; GS V 377). Kira says “I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal” (WL 1936, quoted in Mayhew 2004a, 211). Nietzsche had written “I do not want to be mixed in with and mistaken for these preachers of equality. For this justice speaks to me: ‘humans are not equal’. / And they shouldn’t become so either! What would my love for the overman be if I spoke otherwise?” (Z II “On the Tarantulas”). Early in their relationship, Kira and Andrei discuss Communism, for which he has sacrificed lives and his own blood too. Kira maintains that the ideal of living for the state is wrong. Andrei asks what better purpose there could be. Kira replies “Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worth leaving alive?” (ibid., 210). Here we see Rand’s idea from the Fountainhead-note that it is not meritorious to center one’s life on valuing others. That is in step with Nietzsche (D 516). Kira’s phrase “those who are worth leaving alive” suggests Nietzsche’s chronic talk about the ways in which calamities like wars get rid of superfluous humans and raise the type man to greater heights (GS I–IV 1, 19, 92; Z I “On War and Warriers”). However, in the situation, it is types like Kira who are not being left alive. So one might have thought that Rand’s 1936 Kira was only pleading: If some people are to be sacrificed for the sake of others, do not sacrifice the best of people, the people who live for themselves. That thought is quickly quashed. Andrei tells Kira that we cannot sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few. She replies: “You can! You must. When those few are the best. . . . What are your masses but mud to be ground under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it [deserve life]? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, . . . And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life?” (WL 1936, quoted in Sciabarra 1995, 101; Mayhew 2004, 211). These words were committed to print prior to WWII and the Nazis’ burning of one race to elevate another, but even if Rand’s talk in ’36 were only of metaphorical burning, say the burning of lifetimes in manual labor for factory owners or mine owners, these were and are words for the trash can. Nietzsche writes: “At the risk of annoying innocent ears I will propose this: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul. I mean that firm belief that other beings will, by nature, have to be subordinate to a being ‘like us’ and will have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question-mark, and also without feeling any harshness, compulsion, or caprice in it, but rather as something that may well be grounded in the primordial law of things. If the noble soul were to try to name this phenomenon, it would call it justice itself” (BGE 265). Nietzsche and early Rand are seriously at odds over what type of characters should be counted as of noble spirit, as the best type of humans. However those two types are to be rightly characterized, early Rand evidently shared with Nietzsche the view that there has to be sacrifice between types higher and types lower. That view is in tension with the ideal Rand was upholding by having Kira say she does not want to be for or against the people; she only wants to be left alone to live. Perhaps Rand was thinking that, in existing human societies, there had to be sacrifice between types of people and that the interests of the masses should be sacrificed to the interests of the superior spiritual class. By the summer of ’37, she was thinking that, at least in ideal social relationships, the best individuals are not dependent on the existence of the masses. That is one of the messages of Anthem. In 1936 Rand may have held, against Marxism, that exploitation is right. However, I do not think her conception of life as an ideal, life undefeated, was the same as the concept of life Nietzsche appealed to in defending social exploitation. Nietzsche writes: "Life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering, the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting . . . . Life is precisely will to power. . . . These days, people everywhere are lost in rapturous enthusiasms, even in scientific disguise, about a future state of society where 'the exploitative character' will fall away . . . . 'Exploitation' does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect society: it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function; it is a result of genuine will to power, which is just the will to life." (BGE 259) Kira says to Andrei “What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something that knows how to want—isn’t that life itself?” (WL 1936, quoted in Wright 2005, 203). She speaks of Andrei’s Communism bringing its “new life” to men by telling them what they should want, what they must want, dictating what the hours and thoughts of their lives must be. Andrei’s Communism “forbade life to the living” (WL 388). Life as the moral ideal in We the Living (1936) is life knowing itself, but what it knows at its heart is not will to power. What it knows is life undefeated, life self-directed and self-caring. Stopping that heart of human life brings humanity not new life, but death. References Descartes, R. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. E.S. Haldane and T.R.T. Ross, trans. In The Essential Descartes. M.D. Wilson, editor. Meridian. Mayhew, R. 2004a. We the Living: ’36 and ’59. In Mayhew 2004b. ——., editor. 2004b. Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. Lexington. ——. 2005a. Anthem ’38 & ’46. In Mayhew 2005b. ——. editor. 2005b. Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Lexington. Milgram, S. 2005. Anthem in Manuscript: Finding the Words. In Mayhew 2005b. Milgram, S. 2007. The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. R. Mayhew, editor. Lexington. Nietzsche, F. 1881. Daybreak. R.J. Hollingdale, trans. 1997. Cambridge. ——. 1882 & 1887. The Gay Science I–IV & V. J. Nauckhoff, trans. 2001. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. J. Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge. Rand, A. 1959 (1936). We the Living. Signet. ——. 1946 (1938). Anthem. In The Freeman 3(1). Sciabarra, C. M. 1995. Ayn Rand – The Russian Radical. Penn State. Wright, D. 2005. Needs of the Psyche in Ayn Rand’s Early Ethical Thought. In Mayhew 2005b.