"You Can Leave Your Hat On"

[Boydstun]

That song by Randy Newman includes the line “You give me reason to live.” As the reader knows, the song is the expression of one in the throes of a sexual romance. 

Ayn Rand writes “My morality, the morality of reason, is contained on a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live” (AS 1018). The moral is correct value that is chosen and understood, in Rand’s view.

Animal consciousness has the function of preserving life of that sort of animal. For humans the feature of rationality in consciousness has the function of preserving human life.

It would make as little sense to speak of a goodness preceding the occurrence of life in the universe as to speak, in general metaphysics, of any features at all beyond existence. That said, the makeup of existence by its traits differs from the makeup of life by its ends-seeking traits. The unity of ends-seeking parts to the whole that is a living thing is unity of a different order than unity of sodium and chlorine in salt. Among ends-seeking traits of a living thing are an ensemble of them necessary for making up that particular species of life and its individuals. Paramount among such traits for human life is rational consciousness.

We can have rationality before knowing what it is and knowing we have it and that one can modulate it. We can experience sexiness in human life before knowing about reproduction and psychological cravings for sexual romance and biological function(s) of those cravings. We can be choosing life and rationality before knowing much about what they are and much of why they are good to choose. Before knowing one could and should not remove one’s living activity that is rationality. Before knowing one has been making life continue and directing choices to that end. Including dancing in celebration, inspiration, and worship of that end.

Coming to know one can choose to end life, one comes also to know one can choose to continue life, along with its requirements, as one has been doing heretofore less consciously. Now one is four-square in choice to live or die as a moral choice, that is, choice with understanding. In some circumstances, choosing to end life is the morally right choice. Decision for that alternative will have in mind also the other alternative, and its requirements, as precedent and surround in that human life.

In choosing that there be life, we can have rationally chosen that there be value, a value-occasion, but not what are the requirements of value, which is something not open to our choice (to borrow from Nozick 1981).

Edited November 5, 2023 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

See also:

Newman

Hartford

Nozick

Rasmussen and Den Uyl

 

Edited November 5, 2023 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

The question of what can be a reason to choose to live had a forerunner in the Medieval question of what reason(s) God might have for choosing to create the world. The obvious problem is that since God lacks nothing, It could have no reason to alter Its situation. God is described as a living being by many a writer. I think that ascription of life is due to an unconscious knowing that (as Rand pulled into consciousness) value has to be based in living things, that intelligence requires a living-existence, and that human relationship to an inanimate thing is not much in comparison to living things, especially persons. But God's essence is its existence; It cannot not exist. That is an enormous difference between the living existence of God and the living existence of a human.

There are Biblical texts saying or implying that God created the world to show its glory. To stay self-consistent, it should not be thought that God was in need of a display of its glory. Perhaps a better idea is that God accidentally created the world, one that displays its glory and naturally elicits human praise. It seems, however, that God should not have accidental activities, for that seems an imperfection. It's fine that we have accidents in the course of our living existence, but God is not a being with our limited knowledge and power.

We should notice that Howard Roark creates buildings that show his glory, and he is in love with them, but the glory lies in his integration of a building's function and its beautiful form. There is a function giving him reason to design the particular building. It's hard to see how God could have any function outside Its own necessary living- and knowing-existence. One might think God would be bored since all that is to be known—Itself and, by the lights of Newton, co-eternal space—is already known to It. But God is something of an eternal instant, which ameliorates such problems (or fogs them over). And time gets going only upon creation of the world. Moreover, God could not have such an imperfection as boredom.  

Aquinas has it that God created the world on account of God's perfection, eternity, and love. God cannot sing along with the Beatles "I need someone to love." But God—what with Its living, intelligence, and perfection—could have the great out-flowing sort of love and choose to open that gate, creating others (us) with active intellect, with saturation in love, and having free will, making them (us) genuine companions. And creating a world for them to be.

All actual living-existence is aside the alternative of death. A necessary eternal living-existence is a contradiction. All living intelligence is fallible. Infallibility and omniscience are nought. But the human out-flowing of love for living things, including self, and the out-flowing of creative intelligence are conditions of our lives (out-flowingness in anything living was discerned by Guyau in his 1885). Having reasons for choosing continuation of one's life is under one's out-flowing living nature and the circumstance that life worth choosing is life having its own justification, a wholeness, a completeness. In choosing suicide literally, one is judging that one's best-made life ends now. In choosing any irrationality in one's life, one is departing from human life that is best.

Edited November 17, 2023 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

Restored link for Newman.

[Boydstun]

Additional Thought on the Choice to Live

The choice to live is at hand not only in moments of contemplating suicide. One is in a continuous ongoing choice to think and to value, and these are choices to live. One’s thinking and valuing in one’s actions of the day are operations peculiar to life form, to those parts of the world that are living things. Nonetheless there is a bit from wider metaphysics than living things for consideration, a bit recurring in the question of any rational bases for choosing to live.

There are things within the universe that do not apply to the universe as a whole. Such would be electric potential differences. The universe as a whole can have no potential difference with something not itself because there is nothing but the universe, or what Rand called existence as a whole (e.g. ITOE App. 273). We say that a thing within the universe has no electric potential difference with itself. Whether we think of the concept of a things’s electric potential difference with itself as absolutely nothing or as the limit of a thing’s potential difference with some other thing as the one and the other become the same thing, it is plain, again, that electric potential difference, an existent within the universe, does not apply to the universe itself, as a whole. The universe has no other with which it might have an electric potential, therefore, electric potential difference is not a trait belonging to the universe as a whole. 

There are other things within the universe that apply also to the universe as a whole, at least if the universe is finite. These are things in the universe that can be summed over all the parts of the universe: such as electric charge, mass-energy, or angular momentum.

Our question so perennial in Objectivism is whether value and the value of reason within a human form of life are sensibly ascribed in its moments to a human life as a whole. Is the choice to live, carrying in its wake the choice to value and to live rationally, itself a rational choice, a meritoriously rational one? Is talk of one’s life itself being a good thing actually sensible talk?

The outgoing-beyond-itself of life (emphasized by Guyau 1885), the growth character of anything living (as talked of in N. Branden’s old essay “The Divine Right of Stagnation”), and the fundamental agape character of human love and creativity (as I’ve spoken of in the preceding post) seem characters extendable from within life to the whole of it. Not by summation, but by the characters of life just mentioned. Those characteristics recommend insistently the rationality and goodness of choosing life in the suicide fork and in the actions in each day of waking life down the river.

 

Some Objectivist writings on the choice to live and criticisms of those writings: 

Leonard Peikoff’s OPAR (1991) 211–14, 220–21, 233, 244–48.

Roderick Long’s REASON AND VALUE which is OBJECTIVIST STUDIES V3 (2000).

Douglas Rasmussen’s “Rand on Obligation and Virtue” in THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES (2002, V4N2).

Tibor Machan’s “Rand and Choice” in JARS (2006, V7N2).

Douglas Rasmussen’s “Regarding Choice and the Foundations of Morality” (2006 in JARS V7N2).

Allan Gotthelf’s “The Choice to Value” in METAETHICS, EGOISM, AND VIRTUE (2011).

[Boydstun]

PS – Any choice to live is made from one who is living. Whether it is a square-on choice or an indirect one, it is a choice of one with a living body and the vegetative values within it. Choosing to live in the larger-arch sense doable in conscious human choice is not made from nowhere, and making the choice as drawn by, according with, and overarching the vegetative values of one's body renders farcical all talk of such a choice being arbitrary or any talk of having the value of continued living get its value merely from choice-making.

[Boydstun]

I’d like to mention another point, this one made by Rand, concerning the choice to live as it relates to ethics. That is: having chosen to live, the life is necessarily within the constitution, powers, and limits of what is human life. Human being has a definite nature just as any being has a nature, a definite living nature just as any living being has a nature. Notably, in Rand’s view, and mine, the nature of humans is that either one is rational or, in irrationality, one is making way for fulfillment of the standing condition of life: eventual disintegration of life to stillness, to death. Additional nature of being human would be such things as needs to breathe and to eat and to learn and to have companionship of the mind.

In Rand’s view (and I concur in this point), life is the sole domain of valuations, significance, and meaning. With value arising only where life arises, I slide Rand’s relationship between value and the general world into one of the five kinds for that relationship noted by Robert Nozick in his PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS (1981): we choose that there be value, but the nature of value is not up to us.

About a year ago, the following mathematical feat was accomplished: a tile shape was found that tiles the infinite plane within the problem-rules that patterns of tile fittings do not repeat and there are no overlaps or gaps between the tiles. The tile shape that accomplishes this was initially called the Einstein tile because ein stein means one stone. That tile is now called Hat because its shape looks like the silhouette of a hat. In the 1970’s, Roger Penrose found a tiling of the plane using two shapes of tile. So the more recent mathematical accomplishment goes Penrose one better, we might say. I want now to get physical about these tilings, and this will bring us back round to the point about Rand’s metaphysics of value with which this post began.

Theoretical physicists place theoretically an atom at each vertex of these tiles and see what sort of matter they get. They take the atom-vested tiled plane as a cross-section of a 3D material. A theoretical material.

In the case of the Penrose tiling, the material turned out to be a quasicrystal. That solid material of the Penrose tiles was later found in nature. The matter that would result from the Hat tiling has been found to be a quasicrystal, but it shares properties of the crystal structure called graphene.

As I recall, the pure-carbon crystal graphene was invented in the wake of the invention of fullerene (buckyballs), a sphere-like molecule purely carbon. Fullerene was first theoretically fashioned, then produced physically. Later it was found to also exist in nature.

These coincidences of the artificial and the natural is perfectly fitted with Rand’s metaphysics in Galt’s Speech (in ATLAS SHRUGGED) and in her later essay "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” and in her buddy Leonard Peikoff’s essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy.” These Objectivist founders had emphasized that products of invention have determinate natures just as things occurring in the course of nature. That the former were inventions initiated by free human choices does not mean that the natures in the inventions are any less (or more) necessary than the necessities within the purely naturally given.

The choice to live is choice for human life, and although we have continual and ongoing choices concerning that life, they are made within a human nature not up to us.

 

quasicrystals – https://www.nobelprize.org/.../advanced...

graphene – https://nanografi.com/.../60-uses-and-applications-of.../

 

Edited March 26 by Boydstun