The only thinking that exists is present thinking. This insight is, by necessity, utterly obscure to naturalism. Let us see why. When I talk about a friend’s thinking, or my own thinking from the past, or Galileo’s thinking, this “thinking” is actually always—without exception—an object , something thought about in some presently ongoing thinking. In short, the nature of thought is performative. An object of thinking is not truly thinking.
“So what?” common sense asks. “Those abstract objects might still refer, or point, to a real thinking performed by my neighbor, or by myself in the past, or by Galileo.” Indeed? Let us analyze what happens when I make someone else’s thinking an object of thought. I cannot take Galileo’s idea without constructing, bit by bit, this theory in my own mind. Thoughts are not received—they are built. Every so-called “theory” that I’ve ever studied is something I built myself, in my own soul. And yet, if my mind stopped there, it would consider itself the author of every theory it encountered—of every philosophy. And it would not be wrong, from an ultimate standpoint. The history of philosophy exists solely in present philosophizing; poems exist in the thought which builds and feels them today; human history itself is the work of the present historian. And yet, don’t these creations of my soul stand, as it were, “in front of me” with the same objectivity as a chair or table? Of course—because it is the very nature of thought to “naturalize” itself. Thinking is a unity between what was already thought (the category of fact) and the present thinking which develops and advances it. In other words, thinking is the creation of new history by considering old history.
Naturalism, therefore, does not see that all that is present to consciousness—to thought—is self-created. Such is the situation with someone like Rand or Peikoff, who would consider past thought a “natural fact,” an instance of “existence exists.” But “what was thought” (the fact) is never in isolation from “what is being thought” (present thinking in act).
And yet, how could we explain idealism to a naturalist? Even Rand and Peikoff “validated” their axioms by ostensive proof from “the given,” a.k.a. perception. Fine. Ask them, “What validates perception?” and they reply, “Every word and concept is derived from perception; so in asking, you’re already relying on it.” Really? Is the concept of validation derived from perception? Is the concept of perception derived from perception? Nice way to hand-wave such foundational matters. No—it’s clear that answers to life’s questions are not going to be obtained in this uncritical manner.
The perceptual level is authoritative because it’s “given,” say Rand and Peikoff. But if we look closely (and this escaped Rand), “givenness” and “alterity” are not objects—not something perceived—they are relations, abstractions. The so-called perception of alterity is, in fact, a making-of-alterity: an active separating of self from other. That is thinking—and therefore, thinking is always the proper starting point. When Descartes performed his famous meditations, did he not start precisely by stripping away everything that was not his thinking itself? Fitting, as that’s the nature of thinking: to forget itself in the objects it makes. We do not passively receive anything. In the world of thinking, all is by labor. Thinking “exists” just insofar as it creates, makes, builds something. I think—therefore I am.
And what is this “I?” When something is thought, we have an object (such as Michelangelo’s aesthetic philosophy) and the thinking itself, which is the “I.” This needs stressing. The “I” is not an object; it is what realizes itself just insofar as it produces an object. And that object—the original and foundational object—is the obiectum mentis, our body. The “I” is not separate from the object; it is the act which exists because it realizes itself in that object. Hence, mind and body are united, but not in the manner naturalism wants them to be. Space is not a container of the body but rather a creation of the boundary of this body—without which it would be indeterminate, not thinkable. This space is indefinite, meaning it is just “this” boundary—but every boundary is itself in need of an additional boundary in order to be “that” boundary, ad infinitum. Space stretches just insofar as our inquiry stretches. Of course, space is NOT a container, but just the boundary between multiples—between objects. Alongside my body, I posit many objects.
As soon as I consider those objects, they cease to make sense if I adopt a naturalistic perspective. Each object is just a name for another one. A pillow is a name for feathers and cotton. A feather is a name for two types of keratin, ad infinitum. Kant unwittingly showed another absurdity when he considered the manifold to be originally un-unified. What does it mean to have an un-unified multiple, if not that the elements reciprocally exclude each other—and that is what s_pace_ is_!_ Kant’s multiplicity is unthinkable; in thought, all is absorbed in the synthesis. We also have time—an abstract timeline. But time is just a form of thought. When I read a book, each past moment of reading is preserved—otherwise, each newly read word would be an utter cacophony. When I think history, past, present, and future all converge in present thought.
It behooves us to consider the relation between the particular and universal, for Rand, Peikoff, and many others have missed it. When we grasp that 2 + 2 = 4, we take it to be true for all minds, because mind is the very ground of universality. The universality of the laws of mathematics and other abstract laws is the universality of thought. However, the ancients—Plato and Aristotle—misplaced this universality in the products of thought (ideas, general archetypes), not seeing that it is not ideas which are universal, but the forms of thinking themselves. The structure of thought is universally valid for all possible thinkers—and hence different people will not have different mathematics, for example.
And yet, is individuality not itself a type of universally valid structure? This escaped the ancients because they treated the particular and individual as two separate “objects” of philosophizing. In truth, every mathematical number is both “this particular number” and “this number in general.” There is no universal that is not realized as a particular, nor is there a particular that is not a sort of “type” or “kind.” We see this most intimately in the individual person—the empirical I. Every thought we think, we think as though it were valid for all minds, for all times. Even our deepest self-doubt is asserted as absolute truth. When we cherish a piece of music, or someone who stirs our soul, we cannot help but feel that anyone who doesn’t feel it too is somehow missing something. It’s puzzling: the individual, whose mind is “subjective” by virtue of being just one among many minds that can disagree with him, experiences the deepest universality in precisely its most personal thoughts. Fitting, because universality realizes itself only in the particular, and the particular only makes sense through the universal. Rand’s conceptualism is utterly myopic in this regard, repeating the nominalist error of not seeing that essences are indeed present in objects. What she considers a “universal” is actually a concept—a.k.a. the abstract universal. She is right to say those don’t really “exist,” but does not see that the particular and universal are sides of the same coin. Just as something is only useful if it conforms to a truth (contra Pragmatism), a concept is valid only if it correctly grasps an actual type, kind, or archetype that can exist, as we’ve shown, only in the individual—and vice versa.
Thinking cannot be conceived in freedom, its acts possessing a certain value, except by seeing it from the point of view of other minds. Thus we are forced to posit that, beyond this subjective mind, there is another—be it another person, a God, a transcendental I. We even need this other to watch over us and prevent us from going astray. Thus, inside us, there is our “wiser self” nudging us to be better; there are the inspirational people that have already lived; there are our friends, our mentors. But to know this “other” is also to understand that their thoughts and my reconstruction of their thoughts are one and the same object—for me. When I debate someone, the debate is actually between two sides of my own self: the one animating my own belief, and my reconstruction of the other’s thought. Individuality is not the “mind-independent” factum posited by naturalism, which would be an absurdity (like Kant’s un-unified manifold, each part excluding the other “for real” rather than in the synthesis of thought). Philosophical labor pushes us to see everything as Spirit—even individuality and separation are not in isolation from universality and synthesis.
Thinking, let it be stressed, is not many. It is a synthesis that develops itself into many moments and thoughts. Try to simply “be,” to observe the “given” without any thinking; when this “pure” moment of experience comes, how do you recognize it as “pure” without distinguishing it from a thought-saturated one? That distinction is a form of thought. Because thought is continuous, perennial. It is not one “experience” among others—it is that which unifies everything into a cohesive narrative.
Nor can we agree with Rand’s separation between sensibility and thought. As our dreams at night amply show, thought is what gives rise to experience in the first place. Rand might reply that the dream is constructed from perception—but this raises the question: do I “perceive” the landscapes of my dream? Contra Rand—and even Eastern philosophy—treating thought as something passively “seen” by consciousness is absurd. That’s just naïve realism in disguise: it reifies consciousness into a hard, solid screen, a camera, an inner eye watching mental images. But that only materializes consciousness and leaves the problem unresolved: whence those objects? How are objects to appear to consciousness unless, at the most basic level, thought is consciousness itself—and “to make is to know,” “to create is to be conscious”?
Kant’s system, Dante’s poetry—those are born now, in the thought which rebuilds them. History is not what has happened, but what is considered today from the standpoint of contemporary interest. Therefore, we must answer the mystics too, who imagine the individual to be lost and annulled in the being of the Absolute. In truth, the Universal “I” realizes itself precisely in individuality—a poem, a historical figure, a philosophy. Those are eternal, outside of time, always existing solely in the present thinking that builds them anew. Sensing this, we yearn for the immortality of our individual selves in the form of leaving a legacy—some value in the dance of thought—for reality is history, and history is thinking. The immortality of the transcendental ego is the mortality of the empirical ego.
The active, creative nature of Spirit viscerally recognizes the error of Parmenides and naturalism. A being that is—finished and done with—means that only one thing is possible: the actualization of some dormant potential already present from eternity in the constitution of being. It is what is referenced when Michelangelo says that he is only bringing out the statue already present in the rock; or the marking on a violin where the luthier writes, “I [the violin] was dormant in the wood”; or the Preacher says, “There is nothing new under the sun,” for what is possible has been fixed and done with from eternity. We are, so to speak, metaphysical puppets. We might bring out the perfection already implicit in being—or not. Either way, it does not matter, for what is possible has already been set in stone. Our moral nature becomes the duplication of a script written by no one, for no one. Reality shows no increase in being, no development, no true history.
It is absurd. Reality is not the presupposition of thinking, but the very development of thinking itself. Thinking (and therefore reality) is becoming, not being. Reality is ours to shape through inventiveness, promptitude, creativity.
