After listening to the History of Philosophy: Thales to Hume again, it seemed relevant contrast some thoughts with a portion of the leading article “For The New Intellectual.” 28 pages in, Miss Rand prefaces Descartes with:
From the start of the post-Renaissance period, philosophy—released from its bondage as handmaiden of theology—went seeking a new form of servitude, like a frightened slave, broken in spirit, who recoils from the responsibility of freedom. Descartes set the direction of the retreat by bringing the Witch Doctor back into philosophy. While promising a philosophical system as rational, demonstrable and scientific as mathematics, Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise of every Witch Doctor (a premise he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,” the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness—which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform. What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with the Witch Doctor’s blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—then of perception—then of sensations.
When the medieval Witch Doctor had merely ordered men <ftni_29> to doubt the validity of their mind, the philosophers’ rebellion against him consisted of proclaiming that they doubted whether man was conscious at all and whether anything existed for him to be conscious of.
Peikoff, in his lecture, christened Descartes as the “Father of modern philosophy”, but did not paint him explicitly as a "frightened slave, broken in spirit, recoiling from the responsibility of freedom’. Her earlier reference to the relative political freedom in Ancient Greece was capitalized in Peikoff’s lecture. She stated:
<ftni_22> Philosophy was born in a period when Attila was impotent to assist the Witch Doctor—when a comparative degree of political freedom undercut the power of mysticism and, for the first time, man was free to face an unobstructed universe, free to declare that his mind was competent to deal with all the problems of his existence and that reason was his only means of knowledge.
Peikoff echoed the political difference in Greece from the rest of the world in his opening lecture, minus the Attila/Witch Doctor analogy. What did not come through was the Slavic devotion of Descartes to the Witch Doctors ideology, at least with the intensity imbued by Rand in a terse paragraph. The opening sentence on Hume carries a similar efficacy.
<fthi_29> When Hume declared that he saw objects moving about, but never saw such a thing as “causality”—it was the voice of Attila that men were hearing.
The rationalism of the Witch Doctors and the empiricism of the Attilaists, a division later stated as: “those who joined the Witch Doctor, by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.”
Plato, born between 428/423 BC lived until 348/347 BC. Athens was into its decline by the time of Aristotle 384-322 BC.
A little over five hundred years later, Plotinus (204-270 AD) followed by Augustine (354-430 AD) finish laying the foundation for Plato’s monument to the Witch Doctor’s metaphysics.
Aquinas (1225-1274) enters the scene after Aristotle was rediscovered just under a millennia later. The Renaissance (1300-1700) and Industrial Revolution (1700-1900) soon follow, suggesting the power of Aristotle’s ideas.
Descartes (1596-1650), Hume (1711-1776) and Kant (1724-1804) pined for the good ole days, bereft the responsibility of freedom. Most men do not notice such considerations.
<ftni_39> The men in the other professions were not able to step back and observe. If some men found themselves leaving their farms for a chance to work in a factory, that was all they knew. If their children now had a chance to survive beyond the age of ten (child mortality had been about fifty percent in the pre-capitalist era), they were not able to identify the cause. They could not tell why the periodic famines—that had been striking every twenty years to wipe out the “surplus” population which pre-capitalist economies could not feed—now came to an end, as did the carnages of religious wars, nor why fear seemed to be lifting away from people’s voices and from the streets of growing cities, nor why an enormous exultation was suddenly sweeping the world. The intellectuals did not choose to tell them.
Philosophy is like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Smith used the term to describe the unintended social benefits of individual actions. Is a term ‘an invisible foot’ needed to describe the unintended social detriments of individual actions? Why multiply concepts beyond necessity? Most individual actions are rooted in what individuals believe (rightly or wrongly) to be the right thing to do. In order to get from Plato’s Form of the Good to God, Peikoff half jokingly suggest only need remove an ‘o’. Betwixt the Witch Doctor and Attila, Rand suggested that
<ftni_20> |S|ecretly, each of them believes that the other possesses a mysterious faculty he lacks, that the other is the true master of reality, the true exponent of the power to deal with existence. In terms, not of thought, but of chronic anxiety, it is the Witch Doctor who believes that brute force rules the world—and it is Attila who believes in the supernatural; his name for it is “fate” or “luck.”
A page earlier she observes that “|b|oth of them are incomplete parts of a human being, who seek completion in each other: the man of muscle and the man of feelings, seeking to exist without mind.”
The benevolence of Adam Smith allows for an invisible hand to be extended out to help raise and climb a social extension ladder. To conceive of an invisible hand clenched into a fist can readily be used to pummel an antonym to the previous metaphor.
Ignoring the ‘human ballast’—the rest of mankind—the invisible hand is made somewhat visible here:
<ftni_20> A man’s method of using his consciousness determines his method of survival. The three contestants are Attila, the Witch Doctor and the Producer—or the man of force, the man of feelings, the man of reason—or the brute, the mystic, the thinker. The rest of mankind calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those three are the source which determines the current’s direction.
In Francis Bacon’s poignant aphorism: Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.