On the Nature of Human Nature

Theories of human nature underly theories of political and economic systems.
 
Some people attempt to justify capitalism with the Calvinist theory that says, because of Original Sin, the inherent tendency to evil, we should do our duty by working hard to absolve those sins and ensure acceptance into Heaven. This is the gist of the Protestant Ethic. 
 
Others attack capitalism by saying it assumes an inherent goodness in human beings, at which point they cry hypocrisy and list all the evil that goes on in the world.
 
Sigmund Freud’s theory of human nature is more sophisticated, albeit based on determinism. It says we have two fundamental drives, analogous to hunger or sex, that determine our behavior, namely the life or positive self-assertion drive and the death or destruction drive. The latter gives some of us a strongly aggressive personality that culture—civilization—must control. Hence, our “discontent” that results from living in civilization.
 
The theory of human nature best representing a free society holds that human beings possess free will, are self-responsible, and possess the ability, if they so choose to exert the effort, to raise themselves up from their original stations in life, that is, for example, to achieve and enjoy a higher standard of living than that of their parents.*
 
The theory does not describe human beings as inherently evil or inherently good, or as helpless victims of genes and environment—those theories deny free will.
 
Freedom of the will means that a person’s choices are the essential source of both good and evil, though culture—the environment we were reared in, especially family and education—are also important sources of our thoughts and behaviors. (See my post “On the Nature of Evil.”)
 
This free-will theory is sometimes said to be neutral, meaning we are born neither good nor evil. We have the equal potential for both. Nevertheless, we can challenge this complete neutrality by considering whether humans by nature have a stronger tendency to do good than to do evil. How so?
 
Just as the human body has a tendency to heal itself, so also does the human consciousness.
 
A minor cut on the finger or hand, for example, in most people clots and heals itself in a few days. The tendency to heal ourselves psychologically derives from the biological function of consciousness to use reason to perceive our selves and environment correctly, then choose values and take actions necessary to sustain and enhance our lives.
 
This tendency to goodness can be called, with qualifications, the will to do the right thing. We see this desire in children from their earliest years, depending on parental influence, eagerly seeking to live their lives in a healthy and happy way, and often continuing through adolescence and adulthood even after being confronted with major unpleasant environmental obstacles.
 
This will gives most people in a civilized society a benevolent intention in their lives and slants the theory of human nature more toward an inherent goodness.
 
What precisely do I mean by “the will to do the right thing”? Fundamentally, it is a psychological requirement for our consciousness to function. We have a need to feel right before taking an action. Does this mean we are always right? No. It is a theory based on free will, which means we can make mistakes or do evil things.
 
Psychologically, however, we must believe that we are right each time we select what to do; it is a perception of being right. Otherwise, we will not be able to act.
 
This perception of rightness, that I am calling the will to do the right thing, is analogous to the psychological concept of perceived risk. Just as risk perception varies from person to person, so also does “rightness” vary from person to person. **
 
“Being right” applies to everyone, both good and evil, with a continuum of “rightness” and multiple meanings of the word. Let us now look at some examples along that continuum.
 
The most common usage of the concept “right,” when talking about “doing the right thing,” means doing the morally right thing. It means especially being honest in thought, communication with others, and action. Most people, I submit, at least in American culture, do strive to be honest, so this statement probably can be applied to most Americans.
 
The “right thing,” however, within the science of ethics depends on the moral theory and standard of value one is assuming, though it usually means what we were taught as children.
 
A significant influence on American culture is the ethics of Immanuel Kant, who insists that telling the truth is an unconditional principle that is consistent with his categorical imperative of always acting in accordance with duty, never from inclination. This means it is one’s unconditional duty to tell the truth to a homicidal maniac who comes to your door looking for his or her victim. Kant says there is a difference between doing what is right versus what avoids harm to another person. Telling the truth in this situation is not wrong.
 
Ayn Rand, however, disagrees with Kant and says that both physical and moral principles can and do have qualifications. The statement that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit is not the end of the story. The qualification, varying by air pressure and purity of water, must be added.
 
Similarly, telling the truth does not mean qualifications or consequences be damned (as Kant’s theory says). Honesty means telling the truth unless confronted by direct or indirect initiated coercion, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person.
 
Thus, doing the right thing varies by underlying moral theory, but most people today, I would add (again, in our present culture), are uncomfortable with the strict Kantian ethics of duty over inclination and to a great extent with the concept of Original Sin.
 
Hence, as I continue to say, most people try to do the right thing, however they may understand it, at least on a practical level. None probably have ever had a homicidal maniac come to their door and many likely have fibbed to avoid unduly hurting a friend or relative.
 
My father, for example, seems to have been a good Kantian in ethics, though I am certain he had never heard of Immanuel Kant. He said to me once, “You do your work because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.” He was raised Protestant on a farm and worked most of his life as a clerk in the post office. His intentions and honesty were decidedly right—and I do think he enjoyed his work.
 
Some people with psychological problems may, to an outside observer, appear not to be honest. Usually, however, such problems are not moral failings.
 
Psychological problems—typically involving self-doubt and the emotion of anxiety—trigger the strong need in us to allay, reduce, or blot out that feeling by adopting defensive habits, such as withdrawal, hostility, or a compulsive behavior. Often, as children, we develop defensive symptoms subconsciously, not knowing how we got them. Nevertheless, the purpose of a defensive habit is to give us the feeling of doing right while also assuaging our anxiety.
 
The psychological need to feel right is the source of what I am calling the tendency to do the right thing—however one might define “right.”
 
The extreme example on the negative end of the continuum of “rightness” is the criminal personality. Rationalization—excuse-making to feel right—seems to be the primary defensive habit of criminals whose self-esteem is low. As one put it, “I am a nothing. If I thought about it, I would have to kill myself.” Thus, the rapist says, “She really wanted me” and the murderer says, “He deserved it.”
 
Rationalization also describes dictators, as they are criminal personalities who must believe (rationalize) they are right in every action they take. See Ayn Rand’s comment, 246, on Nikita Khrushchev’s need to justify his behavior by reciting the mantra of dialectical materialism, and my use of Rand’s comment in Applying Principles, 314, where I attempt to explain why facts don’t matter to many people, including, or especially, dictators.
 
Doing the “right thing” for the criminal is definitely not the objectively moral thing to do, nor is this statement a justification or exoneration of criminal or immoral behavior. It is a psychological observation that criminal behavior feels right to the criminal and explains his or her actions.
 
Surely, then, one might assert, there are people who knowingly do the wrong thing. Yes, as a double standard. This is the criminal personality who enjoys getting away with the forbidden. Yes, the criminal says, I know it is illegal, but that is who I am. The criminal’s identity is such that he or she feels right to rob banks, and worse. 
 
Or, as one criminal said incredulously to a psychologist, “You expect me to get a job to buy what I want when I can just go into the store and take it?” Paying for goods in a store is for suckers, he said. He believed or felt, as his rationalization, that he was doing the right thing.
 
Only suckers, according to the criminal, obey the law. What he does is right, according to his rationalization-infested mind. (See Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind.)
 
Most people, as I continue to maintain, exhibit a will to do the morally right thing, indicating that human nature has built into it a tendency to do good, meaning most people can and do exhibit varying degrees of good intentions.
 
According to the theory of human nature presented here, I put most people on the scale of honesty and goodness.
 
Both values are required for a lasting free society.
 
 
* Psychiatrist William Glasser (chap. 1) assumed a similar theory when treating his patients. He said, “We choose our own misery. Thus, we can choose our own happiness.” His goal as therapist was to work with patients to help them choose healthier and happier behaviors.
 
** Perceived risk, also called subjective risk, means, for example, that some people need alcoholic beverages before getting on an airplane, while others like to walk on wings for a living. Risk perception exists along a continuum, which means we can now draw an analogy between epistemology where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be true­—and what is true, and ethics where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be right—and what is right. In both cases, people vary considerably according to what they believe to be true and right—and what is true and right.

Masculinity and Femininity: The Differences Are Not Arbitrary “Social Constructs”

Following is a repost from August 8, 2018. The issue today needs to be restated.

 

Masculinity and femininity are emotional styles that express our sexual self-confidence as a male or female person in relation to the opposite sex.*

They are psychological achievements that derive from our different anatomies and physiologies. Deficiencies in masculinity and femininity, that is, diminished confidence in oneself as a male or female person, are signs of an arrested development.

At birth, our minds are tabula rasa, which means our minds have no cognitive content. At birth, we begin processing the world we live in, which produces an initial cognitive content. As we grow, especially when we begin to talk, cognitive processing escalates.

Our character and personality, in other words, are self-created; genes and environment can influence us, but they do not create us (Applying Principles, pp. 315-18). How well we cognitively process the world in which we live, that is, how objective and rational are the conclusions we draw, determines how psychologically healthy we will be in adulthood.

How well we process the world depends, in large part, on how well we have been taught by our parents and teachers about psychology, especially about how to introspect our developing psychologies to catch and correct errors in the processing.

Throughout history, and especially in today’s culture, the answer to the question “How well have we been taught?” must be: “not very well, if at all.” Thus, most of us reach adulthood with mental inhibitions, that is, deficiencies in self-esteem, often expressed as anxiety and defensive habits (defense mechanisms) to cope with the anxiety, for example, depression, obsessions, compulsions, projection, rationalization, hostility, and so on.

In today’s culture, consequently, most of us reach adulthood with arrested development in many areas of our psychologies, in varying degrees, not necessarily extreme. An arrested development, nonetheless, combined with mistaken ideas in the culture, may lead us to conclude that we are controlled by genes and environment.

To be sure, environment influences us in both helpful and hurtful ways, but we remain the ones who must process the events of the environment, draw conclusions about ourselves in relation to them, then act to deal with the situations.

This applies to the development of our masculinity and femininity. Thus, depending on our upbringing and schooling, we may conclude that masculinity means to be a “macho man,” with big biceps, and that femininity means to be a “clinging vine” or a fashion model.

Behavioral manifestations can and do express our masculinity and femininity, but they do not define them.

The essence of masculinity and femininity, according to psychologist Nathaniel Branden, derives from our respective sexual roles in a heterosexual relationship, and that, in turn, derives from our respective anatomies and physiologies. Men, says Branden, in addition to the obvious sexual differences, are bigger and stronger—they have stronger upper-body muscle, while women have broader hips. Geneticists, indeed, say there are over 6500 genetic expressions that differentiate men from women, and the differences begin in the womb. “Society” has nothing to say about these differences.

In the romantic-sexual relationship (and only in the romantic-sexual relationship), Branden goes on to say that the man is more active and dominant. “He has the greater measure of control over his own pleasure and that of his partner; it is he who penetrates and the woman who is penetrated (with everything this entails, physically and psychologically” (The Psychology of Self-Esteem, p. 206).

Healthy—fearless and guiltless—self-assertiveness, strength, and self-confidence, says Branden, are desirable in both men and women. Pride in oneself and one’s achievements and admiration of one’s partner are prerequisite to a healthy romantic-sexual relationship.

The difference is that the man feels his masculinity as romantic initiator and, more generally, as protector of the woman, while the woman feels her femininity as challenger and responder.**

To put this difference in the vernacular, the man’s job is to make the woman feel “real good.” In this process, the man also feels, or should also feel, if psychologically healthy, “real good” in performing the role. The woman’s job is to feel sufficiently free and confident to accept and experience the man’s offer of total trust and security, not to mention the pleasure he is giving her (and the reciprocal pleasure she gives him).

The romantic-sexual act of intercourse between a man and a woman truly in love becomes a feeling of total integration, an experience of being one, a union. Branden describes this as “the most intense union” and highest form of pleasure available to human beings (p. 136).

Behavioral manifestations of a confident masculinity and femininity become highly desirable, for example, to “look nice” for the opposite sex, and for men to hold the door open for a woman and for the woman to look up to and admire the man by saying “thank you.”***

Size of biceps, length of hair, and whether or not a man or a woman wears a skirt or pants do not define masculinity and femininity. These are just socially arbitrary conventions.

It is not unfeminine for a woman to run a railroad (as does Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged), nor is it unmasculine for a man to wear tight pants and excel as a world-class ballet dancer (as did Mikhail Baryshnikov).

Masculinity and femininity are objective, reality-based psychological achievements. An arrested development means self-doubt about our sex in relation to the opposite. A young man scared to death to talk to girls, let alone ask one for a date, is one example. A young woman who is afraid to respond to a young man’s rational advances, a man the young woman might actually admire, is another.

The objective, reality-based meaning of masculinity and femininity raises a question that will have to be deferred to another post. Is same-sex attraction and behavior psychologically healthy? [Posted September 7, 2018] I immediately hasten to add that such attraction or behavior is not in any way immoral or a sin.

But is it healthy?


* “Sexual self-confidence” is the term used by psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 6, section 2). Other psychologists have used the words “gender esteem,” an interesting narrowing of the broader “self-esteem.”

** Branden uses the terms “romantic dominance” and “romantic surrender,” but by using the above concepts I am trying to avoid the older, historical connotations of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress. “Initiator,” “challenger,” and “responder” are words used by Branden.

*** Tradition says a man walking on the outside of the woman, nearer to the street, originated in the days of chamber pots being emptied into the roadway. The man, as a gentleman, eagerly sought to protect his lady. Today, it is simply a pleasant gesture for the man to perform—and for the lady to accept.

Freedom of Speech Presupposes Private Property Rights

The right to free speech does not mean you can say or write anything anytime, anywhere. Private property rights have primacy over speech rights.
 
This means you may not say anything in my house if I dislike it. I may ask you to leave and if you don’t, I can have you arrested for trespass. If you make a vocal fuss, say, on my front lawn, I can press the additional charge of disturbing the peace. Your speech right has not been violated. My property right has.
 
What did Ayn Rand say? “Without property rights, no others are possible.” Why don’t we hear about property rights in today’s environment? Because leftists—socialists—deny the right to property. Free speech has been hung in the air, so to speak, without connection to its foundation in property.
 
After all, “Property is theft,” said the nineteenth century socialist Proudhon.
 
When free speech is disconnected from property rights, what is left? The irrational assertion that anyone who prevents me from talking or writing is violating my free speech rights.
 
Let us take a few problems.
 
Falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is not free speech. It is criminal assault. Epistemologically, assault is the fundamental concept providing the dividing line between free speech and criminality.
 
Practically speaking, unfortunately, assault laws vary from state to state, but epistemologically it means an overt verbal threat to harm you—“I’m going to hurt or kill you.”* It does not require touching—that would be battery. Thus, hate speech, “I hate you,” is not a verbal threat, and is protected speech.
 
The problem today is that we do not have a lot of private property. Streets, sidewalks, universities, and the White House press room, for example, are either completely or partially owned by a government entity.
 
The adage, “whoever pays the bills calls the shots,” is relevant here. It means the city, state, and federal government can impose rules on what can be done or said on their property, provided the rules do not violate other rights. So, a city can control parade rights on its streets by requiring permits, but if you lie down in the street to block traffic or stage your own, unpermitted parade (protest), you are breaking the law, violating the rights of the other citizens, their rights of free passage. The same is true with blocking students’ entry to class and shouting down speakers. The acts are criminal, and arrest is called for. **
 
The refusal to clear the streets and protect the rights of students and audiences is governmental assault on person and property and de facto censorship of speech.
 
In 1977, the Nazi Party of America was allowed by the US Supreme Court to march in the city streets of the heavily Jewish Skokie, IL, on grounds that they were expressing their right to free speech. I disagree, because streets are made for driving and walking, as sidewalks are made for walking, not for giving speeches (protests alleged to being a form of speech). If the city does not provide a specific location for such speeches, then the Nazi Party should be obliged to rent its own venue from a private party or buy its own venue.***
 
Protests on city streets are essentially free advertising for an ideology. To allow it is to say that I must allow interlopers on my front lawn to preach ideas I disagree with.

 
Current “Hot” Issues
 
The White House Press Corps. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has said that once any members of the press are invited into the White House briefing room, the First Amendment walks in also, meaning the White House cannot exclude any media organization on the basis of its viewpoint. The White House can dictate decorum and protocol for visitors, but not content of speech.
 
Visa and green card holders (1, 2). Both have the same rights as citizens, with certain restrictions, and do not have to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Green card holders who seek citizenship must take the oath. Both, however, are subject to immigration and other laws, such as the one representing threats to US foreign policy. This last is particularly fuzzy, striking me as falling into the vague and overly broad category, though the US government is the “owner.” Students expressing disagreement with US foreign policy are not posing a threat. Blocking Jewish students from attending their classes, interrupting classes, shouting down speakers, and physically threatening and striking other students are acts of assault and battery, a deporting offense for visa and green card holders.
 
Israel. A note on the Jewish state of Israel and the recent toleration of antisemitism. The current climate is about as disgusting as one can think, far worse than most of the actions of the left in the 1960s. Apologists use the moral equivalence argument, saying that Israel is no better morally than the terrorists. And many actually insinuate, or state explicitly, that Israel is worse. Israel, however, is the most civilized state in the area, with many Arab people willing to live in Israel rather than anywhere else. By far, Israel is morally superior to the terrorists who hide behind women and children. See philosopher Jason Hill on the disingenuous accusations of genocide that are made against Israel.
 
Yes, the conservatives should not pass laws forbidding speech criticizing Israel. That is censorship.
 
Universities. If universities do not like having the US government telling them what to do, they should be obliged to adopt the policies of Hillsdale College in Michigan. In 1984, Hillsdale stopped accepting federal student loans and in 2007 stopped all Michigan state aid. Private universities today, because of the federal and state aid they receive, are hybrid institutions. Whoever pays the bills, calls the shots, and, as far as I am concerned, no so-called non-profit institution should be tax exempt. This is not an issue of free speech. If you make a deal with the devil—the government, federal or state—you must accept the consequences.
 
The fact that certain prestigious universities with multi-, multi-billion dollar endowments are whining over the government’s withdrawal of a couple of billion dollars, claiming it is a free-speech issue, is beyond farce.
 
 
* You can advocate the violent overthrow of the US government, as did the Communist Party of America in the 1950s, but you cannot talk about and recommend specific methods of doing so. The Smith Act, governing this was amended several times before it became more aligned with the “overt act” notion of the First Amendment.
 
** This does not differ from the 1960s students who staged an alleged protest by sitting down in the registrar’s office. The better chancellors and presidents, such as mine at the University of Denver, expelled and arrested the students.

*** Ayn Rand discusses this in the June 1977 issue of “The Objectivist Calendar” and says it is a “complex issue.” She addresses and dismisses as nonsense the notion, popular at the time, of “symbolic speech,” but more importantly, points out that advocacy of genocide of the Jewish people, as the Nazi Party advocates, is not a violation of free speech. The content of speech, she says, is irrelevant when discussing the right of free speech. Freedom of assembly, however, presupposes private property rights. (Excerpt here.)

Positivism

The philosophy of positivism—also called logical positivism and logical empiricism—has for decades been the bane of science, especially the human sciences.
 
The concept “positivism” that I am using is broader than the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle in the1920s–1930s, which attempted, but failed, to find Immanuel Kant’s noumenal world through symbolic logic applied to sense data. Positivism (495–98), as it is still used today and derives from the work of August Comte, means the use of the so-called scientific methods of physics and chemistry to attempt to discover laws of human behavior and events.
 
All science, that is to say, must be quantitative, and if it is not quantitative, it is not science. The post-Kantian premises of positivists, in their attempt to defend science, are the following: the entire branch of philosophy called metaphysics is meaningless—that is, the concept cannot be “empirically verified”—and universals, facts, values, and, especially, truth are similarly unknowable and therefore meaningless. Awareness of reality is restricted to directly perceived concretes. At best, say the positivists, we can try to come up with “successive approximations” of statistical probabilities, but we will never reach “absolute” certainty or “eternal” truth, and, of course, all science must be “value-free.”
 
Thus, an endless parade of statistical studies to incrementally—and slowly—pretend to develop science, never achieving the status of universality because universals, well, as stated above, are metaphysically meaningless. This method, or epistemology, is gospel in the so-called social sciences today, which I prefer to call human sciences, the sciences of homo sapiens that emphasize and study the animal that possesses a volitional consciousness. The human sciences, in other words, study human nature as the being who exercises, or does not exercise, the capacity to reason.
 
The two fundamental special sciences of human nature are psychology and economics, that is, respectively, the science of the motivation and behavior of individual human beings, healthy or unhealthy, and the science of cooperating individuals in a social setting the aim of which is to generate and produce peace and prosperity.
 
Austrian economists do not agree with the positivist mantra, preferring the method of logical reasoning, the process of identifying correct concepts and integrating them into principles, then integrating principles into theories—leaving Newtonian-type algebraic equations to the physicists and chemists. Sigmund Freud essentially did the same thing in the development of psychoanalysis.
 
Austrian economist F. A. Hayek in his 1974 Nobel laureate address did not use the word “positivism,” but did say that scientism and the scientistic attitude of insisting on using the methods of physical science in the social sciences “quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.” Scientism is a close synonym of positivism and is defined by Hayek as a pretense of knowledge.
 
Positivism over the years has been criticized, notably for its contradiction that metaphysics is meaningless—because that statement itself is a metaphysical assertion.
 
What positivism in particular lacks, among its many other faults, is a sound theory of universals and theory of abstraction from abstractions, which I have written about in previous posts (1, 2, 3).
 
According to Ayn Rand, universal concepts are formed by omitting the measurable differences of the concept’s referents—length, width, and height, for example, of several perceived, concrete objects we come to identify and label as “tables.” After identifying other similar but, in some respects, different perceived concretes—such as chairs and beds—we omit the measurements of size and focus on, but also omit, the different purposes of tables, chairs, and beds, retaining their use in a human household to form the concept “furniture,” which is an abstraction from abstractions.
 
When we move to broad abstractions in psychology and economics, such as depression and the business cycle, we require focused attention on the chain of abstractions from perceived concrete to broad abstraction—and back to the perceptual level. This mental effort—and it is mental effort—is precisely what is lacking in positivism because, as they say, the abstractions are “analytic,” arbitrary constructs, subjectively defined. Only “synthetic” perceived concretes can be true or false.
 
The mental effort in forming and correcting our abstractions from abstractions is precisely what led Ayn Rand (67–68) to say, rather pointedly:
 
Like a spoiled, disillusioned child, who had expected predigested capsules of automatic knowledge, a logical positivist stamps his foot at reality and cries that context, integration, mental effort and first-hand inquiry are too much to expect of him, that he rejects so demanding a method of cognition, and that he will manufacture his own “constructs” from now on.
 
Karl Popper (chap. 1) denied that he was a positivist though his premises are positivistic. He attempted to defend science by proposing the still widely accepted criterion of “falsifiability,” that is, the notion that a concept is valid only if it can be falsified.
 
Meaning precisely what? In the human sciences, the answer to this question is that concepts, or rather “constructs,” must be “operationalized” in order to test them using the experimental-statistical methods of the physical sciences. If that cannot be done, the concept cannot be falsified.
 
Operationalization means to make measurable. What is the measuring instrument to be used in the human sciences, where volition is the fundamental premise? Well, first of all, volition is not relevant because it cannot be “falsified” and, besides, real science does not acknowledge such “pseudoscience,” which, as Popper might say, is akin to astrology.
 
Therefore, following the Popperian method, such constructs as “attitude” from psychology and “utility” from economics must be measured by administering a “paper and pencil” instrument called a questionnaire to a sample of five hundred or more people. The collected data is then analyzed, perhaps using sophisticated multivariate statistics. Probability estimates and confidence intervals are calculated. Universals are never discussed or considered relevant or possible.
 
If a concept cannot be measured using this method, it cannot be falsified. It is therefore meaningless and invalid.
 
Popper states that science begins with highly informed guesses” (conjectures) and then attempts to falsify or refute them (chap. 3; my italics). Similarly, economist Milton Friedman (14) says that economic research, in the positivist-Popper tradition, begins with “wildly inaccurate” assumptions that we test and attempt to “empirically verify,” or rather “falsify.”*
 
The problem here is that the terms “guess” and “hypothesis” do not have the same referents. A hypothesis begins with significant evidence about what we are studying, but not enough to draw a definite conclusion. A guess has little or no evidence.
 
 “Empirical verifiability” of the positivists and Popper’s alternative of “falsification” are not essentially different. They both constrict science—all science, not just the human sciences—to perceived concretes and the experimental-positivistic-behavioristic methodology, essentially dismissing broad abstractions and logical reasoning.**
 
As Rand’s theory indicates, the essence of science is measurement omission, not measurement, and the proper method of doing science is conceptualization. The criterion of what is true or false, that is, the correct identification of reality, is Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Whatever violates the law in the name of science should be called pseudoscience.
 
Which seems to be an appropriate descriptive of positivism.
 
 
* Friedman, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Friedman, however, apparently regretted writing this essay.
 
** The experimental-positivistic-behavioristic terminology is psychologist Abraham Maslow’s disapproving description of positivist epistemology (xlvi).

On the Nature of Evil

“Evil” is a strong word.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary says it derives from Old English and, when applied to a person, is “the most comprehensive adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike, or disparagement.” It means the person is “bad, wicked, vicious” and causes harm.
 
The concept is on the extreme end of the continuum of immorality. Ayn Rand says that evil people are a small minority in any culture, though their evil is often unleashed by appeasers. Let us take a look at the source and meaning of the concept of evil.
 
Ayn Rand’s moral values and virtues (16) are those that sustain and enhance our lives as rational beings. We are the animals that possess a volitional consciousness and therefore must choose to exercise our rational faculty to successfully live our lives. Some of her derivative values are honesty, courage, integrity, and justice.
 
Most decent people, I would say, think of morality in terms of telling the truth (honesty) and being fair to oneself and others (justice). Lying and unfairness are immoral. What is this continuum of immorality and where does evil lie?
 
Every concept, according to Rand’s epistemology, identifies a range of referents that are similar to each other, such as large and small tables, but different from others, such as beds and couches. The concept table identifies a range, or continuum, of measurements, specifying its essential distinguishing characteristics without the measurements—flat surface with supports designed to hold smaller objects.
 
The continuum of immorality ranges from someone who occasionally tells minor fibs and sometimes treats oneself and others unfairly to the seriously wicked and vicious person who might be justifiably called evil. I put the criminal personality in this evil classification, though the concept of evil is itself a continuum, ranging from the bungling burglar who leaves his identity behind to the murderer who enjoys watching the blood ooze from his victim’s body.
 
The criminal personality, as identified by Yochelson and Samenow, is someone who lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden (348–57). It is the criminals’ way of thinking—their thinking errors—that causes them to become criminals.
 
Working for the courts, Yochelson and Samenow for years interviewed criminals who had claimed the insanity defense.* They found few who were psychotic, especially when committing crimes. Interestingly, the criminal’s departure from reality was often a psychosis of conscience (voices and delusions) that prevented them from committing crimes. When the psychosis lifted, they returned to crime (476–81).
 
Also, the authors reviewed the literature on the notion of “psychopath,” concluding that the research is confusing and fails to describe a separate personality that is psychopathic (89–106). They even quote one investigator who says the research is a “wastebasket of psychiatric classification” (99).
 
Yet, the range of evilness that is wicked and vicious, I submit, can reliably be called psychopathic, as long as we do not call them psychotic. They are people, for example, who really believe, as does the rapist, “She really wanted me” and the murderer, “He deserved it.” The beliefs are rationalizations, but that is what constitutes the criminal’s way of thinking.
 
On the less extreme side of evilness, though still talking about people who are decidedly not nice, are what Yochelson and Samenow call the “non-arrestable criminal” (chap. 7). Such behavior is not illegal but often leads to illegal activity.
 
The authors call this behavior “criminal equivalent.” The criminally equivalent person seeks power for its own sake at the expense of others, enjoying the excitement of manipulating, bullying, and giving orders (not always cordially). They exist in all walks of life, at home, school, and work. Some are attracted to law enforcement, the military, fire prevention, and politics.
 
Crossing the line of legality, for example, the non-arrestable firefighter may start a fire, then help to put it out.
 
Ayn Rand says that the root of immorality is evasion of thought, the refusal to exercise one’s reason before acting. And one can readily say that there is likely evasion going on in the criminal’s mind, from an early age. But a question I have raised before, is how does one know that someone else is evading? How do we, or can we, judge others without making the hasty-generalization mistake?
 
My answer in the past has been, “Not easily” (1, 2, 3). I question whether we can judge someone as immoral unless we know that person well. Throw in the fact that many criminals are con artists, pretending to be an honest person, and add hyperbole and BS that many honest people like to use in conversation. You can have difficulty drawing conclusions about your conversant.
 
Indeed, I question whether Ayn Rand could readily make the judgment of thought evasion about another person—because psychology plays such a big part in the determination of our behavior, and Rand acknowledged that she did not know much about psychology. She did allow for errors in knowledge, which is where we can classify psychological defenses.
 
What about public figures—politicians and journalists, for example—who seem to lie as a way of life? They may be “criminal equivalents,” but how would we know without personal contact? I would say that targeting one person or organization with what seems like repeated falsehoods is moving in that direction, while frivolous lawsuits and unjust fines and imprisonments have moved across the line, the latter two the legal line.
 
Can we know these persons’ motivations with certainty? I don’t think so, and, to put a point on it, what does it matter to our personal lives, unless we are the target?
 
If we are the target of harmful and seemingly immoral or evil behavior, we must call out that behavior as wrong. But condemning the person as immoral or evil is a serious charge. With incomplete knowledge, I recommend giving the other person the benefit of the doubt. They have psychologies, after all, just as we do.
 
The most frivolous of frivolous discussions today in ethics is what I call the fallacy of moralizing concretes: red meat is immorally unhealthy, drinking water out of plastic bottles immorally harms the environment, and owning a gun means you want to kill people. The appropriate response here, after an exasperated exhale, would be, “Seriously?” Concretes—red meat, plastic bottles, guns—are neither moral nor immoral. The truth of the first two statements is doubtful, though your doctor may recommend a different diet. The moralizer of concretes is possibly a criminal equivalent who wants the power—and excitement—of banning the concretes.
 
Moral values and principles are broad abstractions that each of us must apply to our own lives. Honesty is not Immanuel Kant’s dictum of never lying. It is the principle of telling the truth, unless under duress, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person. And justice means judging oneself and others correctly and, when appropriate, praising or denouncing.
 
The criminal suffers a deep character flaw of enjoying lying, cheating, and getting away with the forbidden. Crossing the legal line makes criminals easier to judge, though even here, one must ask, “Is the law valid that is being violated?” Am I immoral if I refuse to pay my taxes? No, but it is a practical issue. Ayn Rand paid her taxes because she did not want to go to jail. I certainly pay mine.
 
Most laws that criminals violate are crimes against person and property. This makes it easier to judge criminals as falling into the evil classification. Though even here, I am tempted to say that the really bad, wicked, and vicious ones are more on the psychopathic end of the scale, the types who enjoy watching blood oozing from their victim’s body.**

* Yochelson died at age 70 in 1976, but his co-author Stanton Samenow continued their work, and still continues today. Samenow has several books. I recommend Inside the Criminal Mind, The Myth of the Out of Character Crime, and Before It’s Too Late (advice to parents). I have cited this work on the criminal mind in earlier posts. See especially these two in Applying Principles (267–69, 280–83).
 
** Can ideologies and historical figures—such as communism and Hitler—be judged as evil? Yes, but extensive fact-finding must be done before condemning. A topic, perhaps for another blog.
 
Follow-up to last month’s post “On Writing”: I forgot to mention an important form of short writing in business: the conference memo. Say, you and your boss attend a meeting with the client. You, the junior person, will likely be the note taker and writer of the subsequent conference memo. The memo itself is no more than one page and summarizes the essence of the meeting, such as purpose, problem and suggested solutions, and, as the final section, next steps, which states who will do what, when, with a specific deadline for the project.
 
Speaking of deadlines, they do exist, whether for term papers and exams in school or for manuscript submission of books and articles (or, to go one further, for payment of taxes and credit card bills). My advice to students and myself: do the work ahead of time, allowing a chance for reflection on what might also need to be done. This is the subconscious “percolation” I mentioned last month, the process of filtering and integrating the knowledge you presently have. (And the deadline I give myself for these blogs is that it be posted sometime during the month.)

On Writing

Writing is not automatic, and no one is born with the talent.
 
When I was a sophomore in a public high school, I was a student in an honors English class and earned gentlemanly A’s and B’s. For the next two years, I attended a private school.
 
In the first semester of my junior year, Miss K gave me a D- for not being able to write a coherent sentence. I was shocked and humiliated. Miss K said—apparently to make me feel better, and maybe it did—that I write like my brother (who had been a piano teacher at the school the year before). Perhaps this did make me feel better, though I do not recall reading much or any of my brother’s writing.
 
Miss K suggested that I enroll in her sophomore composition class during the second semester of my junior year, which I did.
 
Miss K was the first significant person who taught me how to write. She did it by insisting, “You can write anything to any length,” and she made us prove it, with six weekly assignments: (1) write three pages, (2) same topic, condense the three pages to three paragraphs, (3) condense the three paragraphs to one. New topic: (4) write one paragraph, (5) same topic, expand the one paragraph to three, (6) expand the three paragraphs to three pages.
 
As I recall, we went through two cycles of these six weekly assignments.
 
Writing at any length has never come easily to me, but the expansion part of these assignments was far easier than the condensations. To expand, one must add material, which usually requires more research.
 
Miss K taught us important condensation techniques. With my present knowledge of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, I would say that the essential technique is, well, essentialization. Miss K did not use those words.
 
She taught us that we must decide what to eliminate from the paper—whatever is not essential. I do not recall discussions of themes and topic sentences, though they are a place to begin. I believe Miss K assumed we knew about them from earlier grades. The next step is to reduce the several paragraphs to fewer sentences. This is accomplished by combining two or more sentences into connected independent clauses or sentences with one subordinate and one independent clause. If more condensation is required, begin by removing words from the sentences. Then change an independent clause into one that is subordinate. Reduce further by turning a subordinate clause into a prepositional phrase, then a prepositional phrase into an adjective or adverb. Finally, eliminate—if not essential to the condensed version of the work.
 
An important form of condensation writing is what used to be taught, unfortunately no longer, many decades ago, as précis writing. To learn it, I recommend finding a book from the 1930s or ‘40s, or even earlier. Here is one from 1913 by F. E. Robeson (9). Indeed, Robeson says, “The writer of a précis should constantly put himself in the position of a person who has not seen the original documents and yet wishes to have a clear knowledge of all that is essential in them.” His three requirements of the précis writer are to produce a “consecutive narrative” while including only what is important and excluding what is unimportant. An excellent example of précis writing is Ayn Rand’s chapter summaries (83–87) of her theory of concepts.
 
Another form of condensation writing is the law brief, which also requires essentialization but follows different rules than that of the précis. I did not attend law school, so will not comment on the brief.
 
The other significant influence on my ability to write (and to succeed in college as I thought of it) was Mrs. E in my senior year of high school. Mrs. E was my tutor to help me learn to write. The most important thing she said was, “What is it you are trying to say?” I cannot emphasize how important that question was for me. Many teachers and tutors will often take a look at what you have written, then say something like, “This is what you should say” or “This is how you should write it.” The teacher or tutor is now writing the paper, not you. And, I have to say, this is precisely what “peer reviewers” of academic papers do. As one journal editor said, “All of my reviewers want to recreate the papers in their own image” (Applying Principles, 130–32).
 
A tip I no longer recall where I found it, to overcome writer’s block, is to start writing anything . . . anything, such as, “I don’t know what to write” and write it over and over. If you are a student, add something like this: “This is a stupid assignment” and/or “This professor is an idiot!”
 
I have followed this advice a few times but have not gotten far before ideas begin coming to me. Keep an active mind during the process and let your subconscious percolate ideas, that is, filter and integrate the knowledge you have to generate possible themes. If nothing comes after a few (or many) lines, you may need to do more research. More research and more reading have worked miracles for me.
 
A question my younger colleagues would sometimes ask, surprising me, was, “You wrote a book! How did you do that?” My answer was that if you can write a paper—my colleagues were academics, so I am talking about academic papers—you can write a book. A book, I said, is a series of papers, connected by theme, transitions, and other appropriate editing. Students can think of long papers as a series of chunks, or thoughts, to be communicated.
 
Finally, do not let your initial thoughts and outline tell you the finished product must include all of those thoughts and must follow what is in the outline. When I first began drafting this post, the second and third paragraphs were the beginning, as one paragraph. I then thought, I need something else at the beginning, hence the one-line paragraph. Outlines for my books go through four or five often quite different iterations. And topics I initially thought were great insights (which itself in retrospect is questionable) never made it into the finished book. And, of course, I also have many “great insights” that never make it into my blogs.
 
A line attributed to various writers runs like this: “No one enjoys writing. Everyone enjoys having written.” I cannot say that I dislike writing, though I enjoy having written more. It is thanks especially to Miss K and Mrs. E for teaching me the techniques of writing. I think my enjoyment comes about by doing the research, thinking about how I might use this information in a book or blog, testing and trying various themes and organizations of the material.
 
Writing has been said to be like putting a puzzle together. I do not particularly like putting puzzles together, but the analogy applies. It is rewarding when the pieces fit.

 

Postscript. My experience in the private school, and its difference from the public, was not lost on me. I had already known about capitalism and the arguments for a free market in education. The rest of my courses in those two years, as well as my reading of Ayn Rand, also helped me survive college.

The Meaning of Logic

Aristotelian logic has been variously defined as the science and art of correct reasoning, of making correct inferences, or of correct thinking.
 
Ayn Rand makes the concept “correct” precise and fundamental by defining logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification” (p. 36). By “art” she means practice, or the practical application of concepts and principles to achieve a specific goal. Logic is therefore what she calls a concept of method, similar to such applied sciences as engineering and medicine, and even to the branches of philosophy, ethics and epistemology. All are concepts of method or, as one might say, “how-to” disciplines.
 
The goal of logic is to achieve true knowledge of reality, “true” being technically redundant, though we do sometimes talk about false or mistaken knowledge. The essential means of achieving knowledge is the correct—i.e., non-contradictory—formation and application of concepts, ensuring that the “in here” contents of our consciousness correctly recognizes what is “out there” in reality.*
 
For example, if I look to the side of my computer and identify the object sitting there as a little bearded man making shoes, when in fact the object is my glass of water, I have incorrectly identified reality. That is, the “in here” content of my consciousness that says there is a leprechaun on my desk has contradicted the “out there” facts. I have violated Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction and am holding a delusion of reality in my mind. Reality says glass of water; my mind says leprechaun.
 
Ayn Rand’s formulation of logic, I submit, focusing on the “in here” in relation to the “out there,” radically challenges the tradition of logic textbooks that have concentrated, in some cases exclusively, on the syllogism and deductive reasoning.
 
Over the centuries this tradition has given us both Scholastic and modern rationalism that is obsessed with deductive reasoning disconnected from the facts—such as endless debates about angels on the head of a pin, naked monads, or brains in a vat. The rules and validity of syllogism, a great discovery of Aristotle’s, are valuable to know in the construction of valid and true knowledge. And this includes discussions of contradictions in terms and argument consistency.
 
Rationalism, however, is a narrow focus on deductive reasoning at the expense of reality. This includes the unreality of economic theory that says capitalism must fit the mathematical formulas of “pure and perfect competition.” And the faux intellectual’s mistake that claims criminals by definition cannot be intelligent because they are irrational.
 
Rationalism can be described as a linguistic game of pushing words around. Proper syllogistic thinking and rationalism have certain similarities, namely relating one or more concepts to another, but a correct syllogism, in one of its forms, relates the subject of a conclusion to the predicate of what is called the major premise: all dogs have four legs, Fido is a dog, therefore Fido has four legs.
 
The textbooks spend huge amounts of time on these syllogistic forms, with mnemonic names like “Barbara” and “Celarent” and their propositions as “contraries,” “contradictories,” “subalterns,” etc., that only Medieval Scholastics would remember and use. All the layperson has to do is look at dogs, cats, and Fido to recognize that dogs are not cats, and Fido has four legs.
 
Rationalism, further, is not the deductive process of application that we all use every day, the deduction that identifies “a this as an instance of a that,” that is, the use of our previously formed (and correct) universal concepts to recognize the specific, concrete object that we eat breakfast on is a table. Rand calls this process “conceptual identification.” I call it application, of universals to concretes, and I include both application and the process of concept formation, of coming up with new universal concepts, under the general term of conceptualization.**
 
Excessive attention, however, in logic textbooks to an invalid syllogism that says all dogs and cats have four legs and therefore are the same, ignores or downplays a better, more sharpened focus on concept formation and application. Looking directly at reality means attending to the referents of each concept to identify the respective essential distinguishing characteristics of, say, dogs and cats as opposed to human beings.***
 
In the formation of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify similar existents distinguished from a broader category of other existents into a concept, further identified by a word.
 
In the application of concepts, to identify means to subsume or classify one concrete existent as a member of an already known and held-in-mind concept.
 
Ayn Rand’s definition of logic makes the “how to” discipline of logic fundamentally connected to reality by emphasizing the distinction between consciousness and existence. Rationalism never gets out of consciousness.
 
In addition to the rationalism of the textbooks, I also question the excessive use by logicians of the word “proposition,” because I think it feeds into their rationalistic thinking. Aristotle’s word in the Greek is protasis and is usually translated as proposition, though the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon adds that the word especially means a premise in a syllogism. Today’s usage makes it a true or false statement.
 
My complaint is not that traditional logic texts are not worth reading—I have read three—I think the excessive use of proposition overlooks the significance of universals, especially thinking in universal principles, and their non-contradictory identification of the facts as Ayn Rand essentializes logic. The proposition and sentence “water with no impurities at sea level boils at 212º Fahrenheit” is not just a proposition or statement; it is a universal principle, with the word “universal” being redundant. (The texts I have read were written by H. W. B Joseph, 1916; Lionel Ruby, 1960; and David Kelley, 1988. They are less rationalistic than the typical logic text.)
 
Hence, my often-made assertion that theoretical knowledge—science—consists mainly of concepts and principles, not concepts and propositions. Yes, all sciences use many concepts that are universal and, at the same time, make many statements that are not universal, but it is the universal principles that give science its power. The science of history is the only exception in that its goal is to discover and report concrete facts of a life or event.
 
The rules of formal logic, in effect, are the grammar and syntax of deductive reasoning, and non-contradictory identification applies, but inductive reasoning requires getting oneself out of discussions of language to look directly at reality.
 
Ayn Rand in her discussion of abstraction from abstractions emphasizes the importance of tracing the links from broad abstractions to their roots in perceived concretes, in external reality. In an earlier post, I demonstrated this with three of Kant’s allegedly “a priori” concepts, namely space, time, and causality, that he said were innate and disconnected from perceptual reality. We perceive the meaning of space, for example, I wrote, by observing “a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was.” These three perceived concretes are the referents of the concept “space.”
 
This activity and, preferably, habit of retracing the links from broad abstraction to perceptual referent is not just what we might call an updated Aristotelian empiricism that says, “open your eyes and look at the world, then introspect to identify how you arrived at the concepts you have in your mind.” It is a means of maintaining a non-contradictory mental organization that requires and allows a sharp focus on the facts of reality.
 
A final note on definitions and thinking in definitions, which unfortunately is the rationalist’s favorite vehicle of argumentation, often by making grossly unrealistic assumptions, such as, “Let’s assume dogs can fly and see where that takes us.” Well-constructed definitions summarize and condense the content of our concepts and keep our knowledge connected both to reality and to the rest of the knowledge we already have. If “by definition” we mean arbitrary, disconnected floating abstractions and flimsily constructed tautologies, knowledge can be anything we want it to be, which is where we are today as consequence of Kant’s philosophy and his positivist followers.
 
 
* Of course, we, and our consciousness, are also a part of reality, which adds complications to the issue. See my discussion of Ayn Rand’s distinction between the metaphysical and epistemological as applied to consciousness.
 
** Rand does not seem to include application or conceptual identification under the term conceptualization. On her use of induction and deduction as the processes, respectively, of forming and applying concepts, see the last two paragraphs of chapter 3 in the Objectivist Epistemology. On her mentions of conceptual identification, see the third paragraph from the end of chapter 3 and page 50 in chapter 5.
 
*** This excessive, rationalistic attention of traditional logic, and the absurd, brain-twisting p’s and q’s of what is called symbolic “logic”—scare quotes intended—is what has given rise to critical thinking courses in today’s philosophy departments. Critical thinking as a concept is the attempt to bring reality and practicality back into logic, though the word “logic” is seldom used in those classes.

Space, Time, and Causality

Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts answers many so-called problems in philosophy. One of these is Kant’s claim that such concepts as space, time, and causality are innate (“a priori”), independent of sense perception and therefore of reality. Whatever we are aware of are phenomena, appearances in our minds, not the noumena of true reality. The positivists took this a step further and declared all abstractions from abstractions “arbitrary constructs.” Let us see what Rand’s theory can say about these broad concepts.
 
An abstraction from abstractions, according to Rand (chap. 3), begins with perceived concretes, such as chairs, tables, and beds. A first-level abstraction from abstractions might be furniture, by identifying the similar characteristics that the three concretes share, namely large objects designed to support the human body and smaller objects. A further abstraction might be household goods when we integrate furniture with furnaces, air conditioners, and kitchen appliances, and, further, the broad abstraction of human-made objects by integrating household goods with bridges, automobiles, and skyscrapers.
 
To keep our knowledge in good order, says Rand, we must be able to trace the steps from broad abstraction back to perceived concrete, in my example from human-made object to chairs, furnaces, and bridges. Consider now Kant’s broad abstractions and alleged innate concepts space, time, and causality.
 
Contrary to Kant, all of these concepts have referents in perceptual reality. Space, to put it rather simply and obviously, is an empty place, such as a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was. All of these concepts are perceptual, metaphysical (out there) referents of the (in here) abstraction from abstractions of “space” and “place.”  Note that my examples of space can be described in geometrical terms, respectively, as three dimensional, two dimensional, or just a point, all perceptually grasped.*
 
Time, said Aristotle, is a “measure of motion” as the cubit is a measure of length.** Ayn Rand says it is a “change of relationship,” of one entity that moves from one place to another in relation to an entity that is stationary (256–60). For example, if I move my water glass from the right side of my computer to the left, I become aware of the passage of time.

Historically, time was discovered as the changing phases of the moon in relation to the earth, then later as the movements of the sun across the earth’s sky. It was measured initially by water clocks and sun dials. Today, we base our understanding of time on the revolutions of the earth around the sun and measure it with more and more precise time pieces.

Because we must know several prior concepts—entity, change, motion, measurement—time is a broad abstraction whose referents can be traced back to perceptual concretes. It is not innate.

Causality, according to Rand, is decidedly an abstraction from abstractions, not an innate Kantian category.
 
For Rand, causality is “the law of identity applied to action” (Atlas Shrugged, 1037).  It is the actions of one or more entities in relation to the actions of one or more other entities. Essentially, this is Aristotle’s formal cause, including his distinction between potentiality and actuality, and a rejection of the view that has dominated philosophy of science since the Renaissance. That view looks only at efficient causation, the so-called billiard-ball causality.

One of Rand’s fundamental propositions is that an entity is all its attributes and that is its identity. There is no substratum or glue holding the attributes together, which would take us back to the intrinsic theory of essences. Thus, to arrive at a causal explanation of an event we have to recognize the nature of the entities involved.
 
A billiard ball, for example, going in the pocket of a pool table is not fully explained by saying the cue stick moved in a certain way to knock it in (efficient causation). We have to know that the balls are hard and roll easily on the fabric of the table and a well-chalked cue stick in the hands of a skilled player with good vision hits the ball at the right angle and speed.

The concepts of a round and hard ball, smooth and flat table, chalk and cue stick, and skilled player with accurate eyesight are all attributes of the respective entities and their interactions to cause this event.

Simple billiard-ball causation is not so simple. As can be seen, Aristotle’s other three causes—material, final (when talking about human and other living action), and efficient are relevant in a full explanation of a cause. But formal cause, the nature or identity of the entities involved, is central.
 
The implication of Rand’s view that causality is identity in action is that essentialization is a grasp of causality. Conceptualization through essentialization identifies causes and effects of the existents that the concept identifies. The essential distinguishing characteristic of an entity and Rand’s rule of fundamentality (45–46) say that to identify the essential characteristic of a concept, we must identify the one or more that explains and causes all or most of the others. Again, this means that the explanation is “in here,” in our internal mental process of consciousness and is epistemological, and the causal relationship is “out there,” in reality apart from that mental process and is metaphysical.
 
Thus, cholera is explained and caused by the essential distinguishing characteristics of the comma bacillus (today called Vibrio Cholerae) interacting with the digestive system of the human body. Dew is explained and caused by the characteristics of water condensation, that is, of water vapor in the air interacting with air temperature such that liquid forms on our cars, windows, and leaves of grass. And tides are explained and caused by the attractions between water on earth to the sun and moon as they move, especially the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans of earth; those oceans that are on the side of earth closest to the moon, and furthest away, “bulge out” and create high tides. The in-between oceans, depending on rotation of the earth, experience low tides.
 
Which is not to say that the above explanations are exhaustive of the respective causes. Qualifications are often required, as the “simple” explanation that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit requires the qualifications “varying by air pressure and purity of water.” Nevertheless, the many concepts involved, which means the many entities with their specific attributes involved, had to be examined in detail through testing and trying in various experiments to arrive at the final essential distinguishing characteristics.

And the word “final” must be taken advisedly as this does not mean these findings are true “eternally.” Knowledge grows and discoveries increase, meaning that our causal definitions are contextual and may need to be adjusted. Einstein’s theory of gravity in relation to Newton’s is just one example of this “editing” of a previous theory.

Conceptualization by measurement omission, which identifies the cause of an event by singling out the essential distinguishing characteristic or characteristics of the existents involved, is the essence of theory in both basic and applied sciences. Measurement is not the essence of science; it is an aid, which may be extensive in some sciences, to the discovery and application of theory.
 
An appropriate note here is to point out that many controlled experiments performed today aimed at determining cause and effect relationships are superfluous, correlational, or performed with less than sound methodology, such as inadequate assumptions or insufficient study time to identify accurate effects. Many such studies only generate historical data, not theory.

Contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler states that we do not need to conduct RCTs—randomly controlled trials, as they are called in some sciences, such as medicine—to know that “the sun causes sunburn, sex causes pregnancy, or food deprivation leads to starvation.”
 
These examples, Shedler continues, are known by observation because we know their mechanisms (or means) of action. And these examples, I would add, are applications of well-known concepts that illustrate Aristotle’s formal cause and Rand’s theory of causality. “Mechanism of action” means that by identifying the entities and their attributes in a causal situation—sun, skin, and sunburn; sex organs, sex, and pregnancy; nutritional organs, food, and starvation—we can know their actions and effects on each other.

Conceptualization, grasping the essential distinguishing characteristics of the entities and attributes involved, which includes retention of all the knowledge we have learned to date about the entities, that is, the information in our respective “file folders,” as Rand calls them, are key to knowing the operation of any action.
 
 
* Aristotle in the Physics, iv 212a5–31, preferred to use the word “place,” instead of “space.” Aristotle also regarded mathematical concepts as abstractions from abstractions, stating that the mathematician “strips off all the sensible qualities [of perceptual concretes] . . . and leaves only the quantitative and continuous, sometimes in one, sometimes in two, sometimes in three dimensions.” Metaphysics, 1061a30–35. By implication, using Rand’s theory, we perceive the solid object, then abstract from it the concept of plane, then from plane, the concept of line, and finally from line, the concept of point, which is the highest-level abstraction. Cf. Topics, 141b10–11: “A solid falls under perception most of all, and a plane more than a line, and a line more than point.”
 
** Aristotle, Physics, iv 221a1–3. A little later, Aristotle says time is “not motion, but number of motion.” 221b10. Cubit is an ancient measure of length that extends from one’s bent elbow to the end of the middle finger.

Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58).
 
The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious minds well-ordered to guide our lives in moral and successful ways. Focus may be like throwing a switch—a dimmer switch more likely—but the decision to think or not, especially the quality of thinking we generate, can face obstacles.
 
Defensive habits in particular are a significant obstacle to clear thinking. Defensive symptoms of the neurotic type are a form of delusion—though not nearly as serious as the delusions of a person experiencing a psychotic episode.
 
A young man, for example, who is fired from his job and jilted by his lover on the same day may become depressed and conclude, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” * This is not true and can be called a delusion, a false belief about reality. This person, in addition, may, without help, have considerable difficulty doing much of anything for several days or weeks. His thought processes are turned off, partially or completely.
 
Much of what we think, feel, and do as adults has been influenced and shaped by the conclusions we make as children and teenagers. An influential part of our psychologies is what Edith Packer (chap. 2) calls core evaluations about our selves, other people, and the world in general. How well these premises have been formed, meaning how correct and healthy they are, determines how we will act later.
 
This gives rise to a question: how well can we focus our minds to develop a well-ordered subconscious when we experience a host of psychological problems? Not easily is the answer.
 
The formation of these premises depends greatly on our parental upbringing and teaching in school. What we believe and feel as adults is often not as simple as flipping a switch, though generally, absent drug influence or physiological damage to our brains, behavior is controllable. Which means we can refrain from pulling out a gun and shooting someone, or cheating someone through a dishonest act, but certain areas of our lives may not exhibit what an outside observer would call clear thinking.
 
The influence of defensive habits, I believe, is underemphasized in Ayn Rand’s writings, though she does call these types of failures to focus and think errors in knowledge, as opposed to willful evasions.**
 
Technically, this is true. The person with psychological problems does have free will and did in his or her younger years when initially creating the false premises, though the formation of many of these premises occur by emotional generalization and chance.
 
Many false premises become repressed and shaped into habits manifested as symptoms that cloud our perception of reality. Such a person often does not know how to correct the errors. And with the present influential view of determinism by genes and environment, many conclude, “That’s me and I can’t do anything about it.” However, free will as a controllable behavior means we can seek help, professional or personal, or continue to live our lives despite the obstacles. Dealing with our psychological problems is more difficult, especially in today’s culture, than many realize.
 
Alcoholics who want to stay sober, for example, must every day confront strong obsessive urges for a drink. Clouded thinking is often the result. The same is true of people with other psychological problems and their neurotic symptoms.
 
Let me conclude with this quotation from contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler (432) who understands the relationship between psychological problems and free will:

Psychoanalytic therapists believe expanding our understanding of the meanings and causes of our behavior creates freedom, choice, and a freer will [my italics]. People can change, people do change, and psychoanalytic therapy helps people change, sometimes in profound ways. Every legitimate psychotherapist, deep down, believes in the human capacity to grow, change, and experience a greater sense of freedom and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable hardships. If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.

 
* I first used this example in Independent Judgment and Introspection (94).
 
** Rand seems to view our subconscious minds as equivalent to Sigmund Freud’s preconscious, the store of unrepressed knowledge that we are not now aware of but can recall at a moment’s notice. She does not make allowance for motivation by repressed premises and therefore is quick to condemn people as dishonest and immoral. Using her terms, though, non-self-defensive shooting of someone, or cheating, is clear evasion of what is right or moral for decent life. The criminal personality, as Stanton Samenow has well demonstrated, lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden.

The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.”
 
The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.
 
Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream, not separate compartments that can be shut off at will, though the evaluations that stand behind emotions can be repressed.
 
Scientists clearly have emotions, not just in their eureka moments of a major discovery, but in their typical workdays. Emotions are what motivate us.
 
When we acknowledge the presence of emotions in science, and scientists, we acknowledge that evaluations are present.  Behind every emotion the evaluation, as Packer argues, has two aspects, one universal that applies to all instances of a particular emotion, such as joy or anger, and one personal that includes all the concrete details of the moment when we have experienced the emotion.
 
Joy, for example, at the universal level means “I have achieved an important value.” Thus, “eureka”—or “I have found it,” the translation of the Greek—is a form of joy. The scientist’s personal evaluation—“all of my years of research have been worth it”—in the eureka moment might be expressed in behavior as energetic shouting and jumping up and down such that he almost knocks a beaker off the table. This would be a personal evaluation and experience that likely would last a long time in the scientist’s subconscious memories.*
 
It is this inner conversation or voice, as Packer describes personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge. Which means that knowledge, general or personal, is not “value-free” as the logical positivists for decades have insisted it must be.
 
Every emotion exhibits not just an evaluation, but also an action tendency, or urge to act. The scientist who, when young, is given a chemistry set for a birthday may later get excited in high school chemistry class and begin to think about a career in chemistry. Meeting and talking to professional chemists—a chemical engineer and a research chemist, for example—may help the young person solidify his or her career goals.
 
Going to work every day in an office or lab, after all, is motivated by our emotions of pleasure or pain we associate with the work.
 
Emotion is the driver of everything we do. Writers of both fact and fiction say they follow their emotions to come up with subjects, themes, and even the phrasing of sentences.  Many write “by ear,” more so than by the current rules of grammar and syntax.**
 
Whatever we have liked or disliked in our past, influences our present. Emotions contribute knowledge to our thought processes.  Those past emotions often are the sources of connections we make in the present, sometimes called creative insight, as well as guidance to follow particular lines of thought and experimentation.***
 
Repressed persons are also motivated by past emotions, though usually negative ones that they seek to avoid. Some who are repressed may appear in the present to experience no emotions.
 
A severely repressed scientist, for example, may exhibit a highly muted reaction to the eureka moment, such as a sober, unexpressive face and words that say, “This is good.” But the emotions, which means evaluations and values, are there at some level. Such a person is often desperately trying to avoid the error and appearance of the fallacy of the appeal to emotion.
 
Where does this fallacy come in to play? It is actually a simple notion that says it makes no sense to say or write, “It is true because I feel it.” This does not mean that we should not be motivated to become a scientist because of our emotions from the past or that we should not get excited over a eureka moment. It is indeed unfortunate that the repressed scientist does not jump up and down.
 
The point of the fallacy is that whatever emotions we have in the process of identifying a fact of reality, we must follow Aristotle’s laws of logic, especially the law of non-contradiction. Ayn Rand defines logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Thus, in our work, we bring up our emotions to see if any of them are influencing our perceptions of reality.
 
If I am feeling that a leprechaun is on my desk instead of a glass of water, I assure you I am committing the fallacy. Or, consider the young man fired and jilted on the same day (in Individual Judgment and Introspection, 66–67); he feels that he will never find another job or lover. This is all the fallacy refers to, a feeling (in here) that contradicts the facts (out there).
 
Thus, scientists, I am quite certain, when coming up with a solution to a problem can, without guilt, go wild and crazy to celebrate!
 
 
* Another example: the universal evaluation of anger says, “An injustice has been done to me.” The personal evaluation would be the specific experiences of the moment when feeling anger at another person or institution.
 
** I have told students who could not come up with a term paper topic to “go with what grabs you,” meaning what your emotions are telling you. See this short essay on writing by ear and Ayn Rand (Kindle, 88): When writing, as opposed to editing, “you go by your emotions.”
 
*** For example, when researching my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a connection between Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Ayn Rand. They obviously do not agree with each other, but they nevertheless exhibit some similarities. See Linda Reardan, Emotions and Rational Values, chap. 4, for the fundamental explanation of how emotions contribute to thought.

On the Feeling of Standing a Foot off the Ground

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, 363–65) titled “Life in Three-Quarter Time,” I wrote that the three-quarter time signature in music, especially as exhibited in the Viennese waltz, represents to me the “expression and symbol of effortless joy.”
 
In a variation on this theme, beyond the three-quarter time signature but still in music, I would like to talk about another feeling or emotion I have experienced in music called the feeling of standing a foot off the ground.
 
I first heard this expression when a professional trumpeter came to my junior high school and to the accompaniment of our band played “Come Back to Sorrento.” I was blown away, to say the least, by his seemingly effortless competence and the reverberations of his sound bouncing off the walls of the auditorium. I remember also that he said to us that when everything in a performance goes right, “you just feel like you’re standing a foot off the ground.” The expression can apply to listeners as well. I know I felt it after his performance.
 
A little later, in the summer of 1962, I attended a Stan Kenton clinic in Indiana. Kenton’s jazz band at the time was larger than most, with an extra four mellophonium players. The instrument, essentially, is a French horn straightened out to look and be played like a trumpet. The first night at the clinic, the Kenton band performed. The venue was packed with enthusiastic teenage wannabe jazz musicians. Yes, the band brought the house down, but the better expression, I am certain, is that everyone in the audience felt like he or she was standing a foot off the ground. The sound bounced off the walls urging us to lift ourselves above the floor!
 
This expression has remained with me all these many years. I have experienced the feeling a number of times, though not at every performance. Several factors are relevant for producing the experience. The appearance of effortlessness in the performers is important, because it usually produces a smile on my face along with a wonderment of “how can they do that”—and the emotion “I am so glad I am here to experience it.” A similarly appreciative and enthusiastic audience helps by vicarious sharing of the experience. And the venue matters, to enhance the resonance of the bouncing sounds—wood on the walls and ceilings being a big plus.
 
A recent experience my wife and I enjoyed was a performance of Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony from behind the orchestra, high up and with only a few percussion players blocked from view by the hanging organ pipes. We felt like we were in the orchestra.
 
The venue was Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, a hall loaded with wood on its walls and ceilings. In its acoustic power the hall has been compared to the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Disney Hall did not disappoint, especially in this performance.* The effortless competence of the players was clearly in view along with their music stands in front of them—I could tell when it was time to repeat a section of the music when the players turned their music pages back to the beginning. We also enjoyed a full frontal view of the conductor (Gustavo Dudamel). All of these factors enhanced our enjoyment of the music and contributed to my feeling of standing a foot off the ground—actually, I was on the edge of my seat and wanted to stand, but did not for fear of blocking someone else’s view.
 
This feeling I am talking about agrees with what Ayn Rand has written (50–64) about music as an art form, namely that it appeals directly to our sense-of-life emotions, bypassing any conceptual identifications that may be involved in the experiencing of other arts. Sense of life, Rand states, is “a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics” (26) that can range from the benevolent and optimistic to the malevolent and pessimistic.
 
Without endorsing Ayn Rand’s hypothesis (57–62) that music lacks an objective vocabulary for esthetic judgment—musicologists do have something fairly extensive—I think she is correct in general that the esthetic tastes of listeners to the type of music I have described express similar senses of life as mine. Similar, but not the same. Emotional responses to music are general, not specific or literal. And, while our senses of life can vary in other parts of our lives, we nevertheless experience a positive feeling during these performances.
 
When I say that our responses to music are not specific or literal, I am, as Rand did, challenging the descriptive terms that have been used for works of music, such as “Tragic” for Mahler’s sixth symphony or “fate knocking at the door” as Beethoven supposedly described (or as was invented by his biographer) the first four chords of his fifth symphony. I did not hear anything tragic in Mahler’s symphony. I hear triumph, as I do in Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Interestingly, Mahler composed the work during a happy period of his life, and it is disputed whether he or someone else labeled it the tragic symphony, either when it was first performed or in later years. The name is for the emotion evoked in certain people, maybe Mahler, or in certain critics, audience listeners, or conductors. And “fate knocking at the door” was the emotion evoked in Beethoven (or his biographer), but not me.
 
By calling these musical responses “taste,” I mean that the physics of music cannot at present be connected with specific emotions we experience, which means what we feel is neither right nor wrong (Rand, 55–56). It further means that not everyone, probably not many, including my wife, would feel like standing a foot off the ground when listening to these particular pieces. My wife sometimes does feel like dancing around the room when listening to certain music! What musicians and musicologists have given us is a method or vocabulary for describing a well-composed and well-performed work of music. What it cannot yet do (perhaps never?—I don’t know) predict that this particular music will evoke that particular emotion. (Cf. “Classical Music Alters the Brain—Here’s How.”)
 
The feeling of standing a foot off the ground is, of course, metaphor, and represents a general feeling of joyous, maybe even ecstatic, pleasure. Musical performers, actors, and opera singers, even public speakers I have observed immediately after a particularly outstanding and appreciated performance seem to have a glow about them that says they are standing a foot off the ground.
 
Vicariously, I translate that feeling to my enjoyment of their performances.
 
To close this post, let me describe a different, but I think, similar emotion I experienced two days after President John F. Kennedy was killed. I was with a group of musicians in the lobby of a dormitory where we watched on a black-and-white television Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s second symphony, labeled The Resurrection. All of us present were still in shock, stunned by the assassination, but that performance was a salve or balm for our painful emotions. Indeed, I found it uplifting, as in “life goes on.” I did not, of course, experience anything religious, as arising from the dead, but I was inspired and moved to get on with my life despite the immediate calamity. Not quite the feeling of being a foot off the ground, but a profoundly positive feeling, urged and encouraged by compelling music to accomplish my values in life.**
 
 
* We have also sat in the last row of the balcony at Disney Hall and enjoyed every minute of the musical performance. The sound reaches every seat.
 
* Customarily, a requiem (by Brahms, say, or Verdi) or funeral march (such as the second movement of Beethoven’s third symphony) is played as a memorial to someone who has died. Bernstein, I think quite appropriately, chose the Mahler.