“Ambition” means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal. Like the word “selfishness,” and for the same reasons, the word “ambition” has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But “ambition” as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking “prestige.” So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one’s existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. (“Improvement” is a moral term and depends on one’s standard of values. An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact, lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

Question: What is the Objectivist view of reality?

Answer: “Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.” ( Ayn Rand , “Introducing Objectivism,” The Objectivist Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 8, August 1962, p. 35)

Objectivism holds that there is one reality, the one in which we live. It is self-evident that reality exists and is what it is; our job is to discover it. Objectivism stands against all forms of metaphysical relativism or idealism. It holds it as undeniable that humans have free will, and opposes metaphysical determinism or fatalism. More generally, it holds that there is no fundamental contradiction between the free, abstract character of mental life and the physical body in which it resides. And so it denies the existence of any “supernatural” or ineffable dimension for spirits or souls.

Let’s consider each of these points in turn.

RELATIVISM AND OBJECTIVE REALITY

Today, especially in university departments of literature, there are some fashionable “postmodernists” who claim that we create reality with words, in our own minds. This view is an instance of a position that has frequently reappeared in philosophy: metaphysical relativism or idealism. It is the view that, ultimately, nothing is real except in relation to our perceiving it or thinking of it.

Reality exists, regardless of whether we want it to or not.

But reality is not a function of our ideas. It exists, and it is what it is, regardless of whether we want it to be or not. Denying this is the intellectual equivalent of closing one’s eyes while driving down the highway. Car crashes do not happen just because one believes they do; they often happen even when we wish them not to. Facts are facts, independently of us. This is why things happen that surprise us. It is why science has been the process of establishing the truth about nature without regard for our preconceptions. It is why babies have to learn; they are discovering the world “out there.” Things in reality have real properties and exert causal powers without regard for us and our knowledge of them. Ayn Rand summed up this attitude to reality as the principle of the primacy of existence.

As Ayn Rand wrote in “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made” (Philosophy: Who Needs It): “The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity.

The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge by looking outward.” Consciousness (i.e., the mind) is in essence a faculty of awareness. We are aware of the world around us through sense-perceptions, of course, but even in our abstract and theoretical knowledge we function primarily through identification of how things are. To give a simple example, we decide whether to say “that is a yellow house,” but we know that what makes that statement knowledge, rather than hot air, is whether or not it identifies a house that really is yellow.

FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM

Through our senses we see and feel a material world. It has physical characteristics such as form and mass. But our thoughts seem free: We choose by our own lights what we should do, even how we should move our bodies, and we can rove with our minds into worlds of fantasy and imagination that never existed. Our legs can be made to flinch by the tap of a hammer on our knees. But we can make up our minds unflinchingly to do whatever we must, even if it costs us our lives.

Many philosophers and scientists believe in metaphysical determinism. This is the idea that everything in existence proceeds ineluctably from cause to effect, like a computer program, the orbits of the planets, or the motion of billiard-balls on a pool table. According to determinism, the universe was set in motion somehow, perhaps in a Big Bang, perhaps by God, and everything that has happened since has had to happen; nothing else was possible, the outcome is determined.
In this view, we may feel like we make choices, but underneath our choices there lies some process that proceeds like clockwork: our genetic development, social and environmental factors, or perhaps something else or all of the above. Whatever the causal story given, in this view our actions and even our thoughts happen in the one and only way they can.

Objectivism holds, in contrast, that man has free will. We have the ability of choice, not over every aspect of existence, of course, but over a range of actions within our power. Every day we do things that we might have done differently. Our freedom to choose our actions is of the essence of what it means to be human: It underlies our need for moral guidance and is a major cause of our fallibility, but is also at the root of our ability to progress by imagining and creating improvements on the brute forms of nature.

The fact of free will is self-evident.

The fact of free will is self-evident; each of us knows we have the ability to control our own minds, to focus our thoughts on one issue or another, and to direct our own actions. Some fear that admitting we have free will amounts to denying causality, thereby rejecting the scientific worldview. After all, science has ably demonstrated that most things in reality function deterministically. Mechanistic theories of physics and chemistry, for example, work brilliantly because they are true; planets do not choose their orbits, and DNA molecules do not recombine out of delight in making life.

But the idea of free will doesn’t deny causality or science, it just points out that for at least some of the things you do, you are the cause. We may not yet understand scientifically how the chemicals in the brain and nervous system give rise to this capacity, but science can no more explain away the fact of free will than the germ theory of disease could explain away diphtheria. Science doesn’t eliminate real features of existence, ones that we experience in every moment; it explains them.

MIND AND BODY

Free will is just one way in which the mind seems quite different from physical matter. The spiritual realm of thought, imagination, values, and aspirations seems far removed from the realm of material objects, physical forces, and biological need. Many philosophers have puzzled over questions such as whether a thought has weight or what the size of the mind is. One simple way to answer to these questions is to suppose that the mind is somehow radically distinct from the body: that there is a dichotomy between the two.

In different forms, the mind-body dichotomy underlies many traditional ideas about human nature. Religious thinkers, for example, see the mind as an immortal soul that transcends the mortal husk of the body. They posit a spiritual life that is higher, freer, and better than material existence. This dichotomy has led to the tradition of asceticism, i.e., abusing the body for the sake of spiritual purity, and to the ideal of chastity, the experience of love unconnected to sex and the other lusts of the body. It also exists in secular forms, such as the division between reason and emotion symbolized by Star Trek’s unemotional Vulcans; the rational self is the mind, in this view, which must struggle to be free of the irrational passions that arise from our physical nature. In sum, it projects a view of man at war with himself, an angel imprisoned in the body of a beast, at once both Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

Like many classical Greek philosophies, including Aristotelianism, Objectivism rejects this entire conception of man. There is a difference between the mind and body, to be sure, but no dichotomy or conflict. They are both aspects of human nature. We are living organisms, and all our faculties, mental as well as physical, work together to keep us alive.

What we call the mind is the set of capacities to be aware, to perceive the world, to think about it, to feel, to value, to make choices. How do these capacities arise? In many respects, the answer to that question must come from science, not philosophy. But everything we know indicates that they are the product of biological evolution and that they depend on our physical sense organs and brain, as well as on the many other support structures that the body provides.

We have spiritual needs for values, principles, ideals, aesthetic experience, and love.

What we call our spiritual needs, moreover, are not in conflict with our physical or biological needs. They are rooted in the same basic need to maintain our lives through purposeful action. Human beings lack sufficient instinctive drives to survive without thinking, learning, and making choices. Reason is our most important tool for survival. But it is a complex and highly demanding tool. According to Objectivism , our spiritual needs for values, principles, ideals, aesthetic experience, and love are requirements for the healthy functioning of a rational, volitional mode of cognition.

In the course of life, we all encounter specific conflicts between our spiritual and our physical values (as well as conflicts within each category), but there is no inherent, global conflict between these aspects of our nature. Indeed, our most important activities serve the needs of body and soul, together. We live best when our reason and emotion are in harmony, for example. We know true love when we combine mental esteem with physical passion. Productive work is both a means of earning our daily bread and an expression of our creative powers.

NATURAL VS. SUPERNATURAL

The idea of exalting the spirit over the material existence of the body has long been tightly connected in religious thought to the idea that there exists some reality beyond the material world we know through our senses, a world our spirits long for as an escape from the needs of the body and the constraints of physical reality. In many traditions, this is a heaven, a place beyond all physical law to which the spirit can travel and in which many or even all things are possible. Many religions attribute this supernatural kind of existence, this existence beyond nature, to their God or gods.

Objectivism holds that it is simply nonsense to speak of anything “supernatural”—literally beyond or above nature. The term “nature,” in the broadest sense, refers to the world we perceive, the world of objects that interact in accordance with causal law. If we discovered some dimension or universe that had radically different properties from the environment we live in, it would still be part of nature. If we could discover it or it could affect us, it would have some real, specific properties and would interact with our world in some way. However strange it might be, its characteristics could be compared in meaningful ways with things we already know, and it could be measured somehow. In fact, science has already explored some very weird and alien realms, as compared with the level of reality we see and hear. To pick just one example, light functions in ways so strange that we are not sure how to describe it: wave or particle? But even so, we know a tremendous amount about it, and use it to banish the night and communicate around the globe in the blink of an eye.

The supernatural is supposed to be beyond human comprehension, to exist in no particular way, to affect our reality miraculously, beyond any and all physical laws. And indeed, supernaturalists make great hay out of the areas where science is silent either because the question is not really scientific or because the scientific jury is still out. It is as if they resent science for not yet explaining every single issue to their satisfaction, and yet insist that their most precious beliefs be immune to rational scrutiny.

In effect, the supernaturalists want to have their cake and eat it too. They claim that gods, angels, and devils exist, but are not anything in particular. They hope to go to a heaven by some means, but not any specific means. And heaven must be a real place (some even say it is a lush garden stocked with virgins or a cheerful land in the clouds), but it isn’t anywhere real. The Buddhists even go so far as to deny that the realm beyond—nirvana—is any place at all. In fact, supernaturalism amounts to a brazen advocacy of contradictions. But, as Ayn Rand pointed out over and over, contradictions can exist only in the human mind, not in reality as such. No fact is essentially contradictory.

So there is no world beyond nature, nor any life beyond this one. But in contrast to the supernaturalists’ view of nature as a vale of tears, an oppressive prison for the soul, Objectivism holds that we live in a “benevolent universe.” We are beings well-adapted to the real world in which we live, with the free will to carve our own path and the ability to achieve happiness and even exaltation. Reality does not watch out for us, and there is no reason to think any deity does so either. In fact, we must watch out for reality, as Ayn Rand recognized when she summed up her metaphysics with Francis Bacon’s dictum “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” But command nature we can, and this is what makes the universe essentially benevolent: It is propitious to beings like us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

William Thomas

William R Thomas writes about and teaches Objectivist ideas. He is the editor of The Literary Art of Ayn Rand and of Ethics at Work, both published by The Atlas Society. He is also an economist, teaching occasionally at a variety of universities.

Talk about a quote decades ahead of its time (Thanks Richard Bramwell):

“It is a tragic irony of our time that the two worst, bloodiest tribes in history, the Nazis of Germany and the Communists of Soviet Russia, both of whom are motivated by brute power-lust and a crudely materialistic greed for the unearned, show respect for the power of philosophy (they call it “ideology”) and spend billions of their looted wealth on propaganda and indoctrination, realizing that man’s mind is their most dangerous enemy and it is man’s mind that they have to destroy–while the United States and the other countries of the West, who claim to believe in the superiority of the human spirit over matter, neglect philosophy, despise ideas, starve the best minds of the young, offer nothing but the stalest slogans of a materialistic altruism in the form of global giveaways, and wonder why they are losing the world to the thugs.”

~Ayn Rand, Introduction to “Ominous Parallels” (1982) by Leonard Peikoff

Today, we live in the Age of Envy.

“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.

This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.

Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in the codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself: What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one—it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.

They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.

A disastrous intellectual package-deal, put over on us by the theoreticians of statism, is the equation of economic power with political power. You have heard it expressed in such bromides as: “A hungry man is not free,” or “It makes no difference to a worker whether he takes orders from a businessman or from a bureaucrat.” Most people accept these equivocations—and yet they know that the poorest laborer in America is freer and more secure than the richest commissar in Soviet Russia. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

The difference between political power and any other kind of social “power,” between a government and any private organization, is the fact that a government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.

What is economic power? It is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced. In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, “democratic” vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself “the voice of the public” and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.

Evading the difference between production and looting, they called the businessman a robber. Evading the difference between freedom and compulsion, they called him a slave driver. Evading the difference between reward and terror, they called him an exploiter. Evading the difference between pay checks and guns, they called him an autocrat. Evading the difference between trade and force, they called him a tyrant. The most crucial issue they had to evade was the difference between the earned and the unearned.

You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns—no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now.

One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment.

Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.

It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?

But to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind’s judgment of the facts of reality—so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.

The precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged” . . . is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.

There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.

The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”

The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one’s feelings, “instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one pronounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer “Why?” and to prove one’s case—to oneself and to any rational inquirer.

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life . . .

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.

Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not of psychological diagnosis. Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on perceivable, demonstrable facts. A man’s moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions—not on the basis of inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious.

A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious. His psychological problems are his private concern which is not to be paraded in public and not to be made a burden on innocent victims or a hunting ground for poaching psychologizers. Morality demands that one treat and judge men as responsible adults.

This means that one grants a man the respect of assuming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are—not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning. One neither speaks nor listens to people in code.

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism’s life.

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.

Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: “I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.” An individualist is a man who recognizes the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.

Certain” represents an assessment of the evidence for a conclusion; it is usually contrasted with two other broad types of assessment: “possible” and “probable.” . . .

Idea X is “certain” if, in a given context of knowledge, the evidence for X is conclusive. In such a context, all the evidence supports X and there is no evidence to support any alternative . . . .

You cannot challenge a claim to certainty by means of an arbitrary declaration of a counter-possibility, . . . you cannot manufacture possibilities without evidence . . . .

All the main attacks on certainty depend on evading its contextual character . . . .

The alternative is not to feign omniscience, erecting every discovery into an out-of-context absolute, or to embrace skepticism and claim that knowledge is impossible. Both these policies accept omniscience as the standard: the dogmatists pretend to have it, the skeptics bemoan their lack of it. The rational policy is to discard the very notion of omniscience. Knowledge is contextual—it is knowledge, it is valid, contextually.

“Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” Bertrand Russell’s gibberish to the contrary notwithstanding, that pronouncement includes itself; therefore, one cannot be sure that one cannot be sure of anything. The pronouncement means that no knowledge of any kind is possible to man, i.e., that man is not conscious. Furthermore, if one tried to accept that catch phrase, one would find that its second part contradicts its first: if nobody can be certain of anything, then everybody can be certain of everything he pleases—since it cannot be refuted, and he can claim he is not certain he is certain (which is the purpose of that notion).