JASKN, softwareNerd,
The following are the quotes I promised. I have numbered them. I included the numbers so I might comment to the quotes if requested. I’m not interested in a debate..
(1) The Objectivist—September 1970
- The Objectivist Ethics
But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.
Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.
But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.
Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of value. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyer. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destroy the wisher. If a man desires and pursues contradictions—if he wants to have his cake and eat it, too-he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today).
(2) The Journals of Ayn Rand
“13 - Notes While Writing: 1947-1952”
Another interesting point to be noted here: man is given his entity as clay to be shaped, he is given his body, his tool (the mind) and the mechanism of consciousness (emotions, subconscious, memory) through which his mind will work. But the rest depends on him. His spirit, that is, his own essential character, must be created by him. (In this sense, it is almost as if he were born as an abstraction, with the essence and rules of that abstraction (man) to serve as his guide and standard–—but he must make himself concrete by his own effort, he must create himself.)
(3) Atlas Shrugged
Part Three / Chapter VII
“This Is John Galt Speaking”
Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned—that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character—that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind—that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, …
(4) The Letters of Ayn Rand
Return To Hollywood (1944)
To Gerald Loeb
August 5, 1944
I believe that our mind controls everything–—yes, even our sex emotions. Perhaps the sex emotions more than anything else. Although that’s the opposite of what most people believe. Everything we do and are proceeds from our mind. Our mind can be made to control everything. The trouble is only that most of us don’t want our minds to control us–—because it is not an easy job. So they drift and let chance and other people and their own subconscious decide for them. I believe firmly that everything in a man’s life is subject to his mind’s control–and that his greatest tragedies come from the fact that he willfully suspends that control.
(5) The Journals of Ayn Rand, “13-Notes While Writing: 1947-1952”
Man exists for his own happiness, and the definition of happiness proper to a human being is: a man’s happiness must be based on his moral values. It must be the highest expression of his moral values possible to him.
This is the difference between my morality and hedonism. The standard is not: “that is good which gives me pleasure, just because it gives me pleasure”…-but “that is good which is the expression of my moral values, and that gives me pleasure.” Since the proper moral code is based on man’s nature and his survival, and since joy is the expression of his survival, this form of happiness can have no contradiction in it, it is both “short range” and “long range” (as all of man’s life has to be), and it leads to the furtherance of his life, not to his destruction.
(6) The Virtue of Selfishness, “1. The Objectivist Ethics”
“But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting “man’s life” as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking “happiness” as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims—by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know—is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.”
(7)“Playboy’s interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, page 6.
“An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man’s value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows—or makes it a point to discover—the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow—then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction—his own and that of others.”