At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
In physical warfare, you would not send you men into a booby trap: you would make every effort to discover its location. Well, Kant's system is the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy - but it's so full of holes that once you grasp its gimmick, you can diffuse it without any trouble and walk forward over it in perfect safety.
Those who seek to destroy this country, seek to disarm it - intellectually and physically. But it is not a mere political issue; politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas.
The assignment I gave myself for tonight is not to sell you on my philosophy, but on philosophy as such…What is my selfish interest in the matter? I am confident enough to think that if you accept the importance of philosophy and the task of examining it critically, it is my philosophy that you will come to accept. Formally, I call it Objectivism, but informally I call it a philosophy for living on earth.
Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival - so that for you, who are a human being, the question "to be or not to be" is the question "to think or not to think".
The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them...
Not all philosophies are evil, though too many of them are, particularly in modern history. Now you may ask: If philosophy can be that evil, why should one study it? Particularly, why should one study the philosophical theories which are blatantly false, make no sense, and bear no relation to real life? My answer is: In self-protection - and in defense of truth, justice, freedom, and any other value you ever held or may ever hold.
In your own profession, in military science, you know the importance of keeping track of the enemy's weapons, strategy and tactics - and of being prepared to counter them. The same is true in philosophy: you have to understand the enemy's ideas and be prepared to refute them, you have to know his basic arguments and be able to blast them.
Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man's every thought, feeling, and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it" What should I do? By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It is self-evident. What should I do? Here they are not too sure - but the usual answer is: what everybody else does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy - and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an unidentified guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of.
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions - or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.
But the principles you accept (consciously or subconsciously) may clash with or contradict one another; they, too, have to be integrated. What integrates them? Philosophy. A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence.
As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, unidentified contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.
Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired...
Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one’s lifespan, it is a part of one’s life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it.
In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade the effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival.
It is crucially important to grasp the fact that a concept is an "open-end" classification which includes the yet-to-be-discovered characteristics of a given group of extents. All of man's knowledge rests on that fact.
The truth or falsehood of all man's conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.
A definition is the condensation of a vast body of observations - and stands or falls with the truth or falsehood of these observations.
The battle of philosophers is a battle for man's mind. If you do not understand their theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them.
The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero.
An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it.
We hold that all great teachers are servants of God, inspired men appointed to instruct the children of God according to the condition in which they are found; therefore, it is not obnoxious to us to regard Confucius as a servant of God; nor Buddha as an inspired teacher of a measure of truth; nor the Arabian prophet as inspired who turned his people from worshiping idols to a truer conception of Deity. And so with the sages of Greece and Rome, and the Reformers of the early Protestant times.
My love for the gospel grows out of the partial knowledge I have of the great truths it contains. In it I feel the presence of a marvelous system of truth, a philosophy that gives unity to all history and proper relationship to all existing things; that fills life with a real meaning, and makes existence desirable. And if I could only intelligently grasp these great truths…and reduce them to some orderly system which I am sure they are capable of, I would account myself most happy…
The reader should understand that Joseph Smith himself made no attempt to create a ‘system’ of philosophy. His philosophical utterances were flung off without reference to any arrangement or orderly sequence…These utterances, were given out at various times, and were often separated by long intervals of time…It is our present task to put some of these and other independent utterances into something like orderly arrangement that will suggest a system of thought or philosophy in the teachings of the Prophet of the New Dispensation...and which, when they are finally arranged in proper order, will constitute a system of philosophy worthy of the enlightened age in which it was brought forth…
Every true philosopher, so far as he understands the principles of truth, has so much of the Gospel, and so far he is a Latter-day Saint, whether he knows it or not...
If there were not a true coin in existence, how could there be a bogus produced?
That [which we] call eternal philosophy, God’s philosophy, the philosophy of angels—natural philosophy, reason-able philosophy … commends itself to the human mind, to the intelligence that man possesses...
If you are industrious and faithful scholars in the school you have entered into, you shall get lessons one after another, and continue on until you can see and understand the spirit of prophecy and revelation, which can be understood according to a systematic principle…
I was led to reflect that there is no act, no principle, no power belonging to the Deity that is not purely philosophical...
There is no true philosophy in existence which is not embraced in the Gospel, it belongs to the Gospel, it is a part of the Gospel...
This people have embraced the philosophy of eternal lives, and in view of this we should cease to be children and become philosophers, understanding our own existence, its purpose and ultimate design...
I am a witness that ‘Mormonism’ is true upon philosophical principles. Every particle of sense I have, proves it to be sound natural reason...
If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. . . . Life has never been normal. . . . Humanity . . . wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. . . . The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermophylae. This is not a panache; it is our nature.
We are not grounded in the wisdom of the world or the philosophies of men.
Obviously, we know that there must be something, because we're here. If there were nothing, we couldn't ask the question. But why? Why is there something? Why is the universe not a featureless void? Why does our universe have matter and not only energy? It might seem surprising, but given our current theories and measurements, science cannot answer those questions.
The nature and the fate of the civilization are determined by the content of its philosophy. That if reason and individualism and capitalism perish philosophically – that is to say at the hands of philosophers – in not too long of time they will perish culturally and existentially as well.
Did you never see little dogs caressing and playing with one another, so that you might say there is nothing more friendly? but, that you may know what friendship is, throw a bit of flesh among them, and you will learn.
It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?...Context matters.
If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that - then what else are we missing?
From this it is plain that we are not called to preach the philosophies of men mingled with scripture or our own ideas or the mysteries of the kingdom, nor are we called to bring forth new doctrine. The president of the Church will do that. But we are to stick to the basic fundamental principles of the gospel.
...his [Joshua Bell] playing does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.
What about their ability to appreciate life?...British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world...not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them. This is about having the wrong priorities...
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
We understand in part the things of earth; when we see things as God sees them, we shall then understand the philosophy of the heavens: the mysteries of eternity will be unfolded and the operations of mind, matter, spirit, purposes and designs, causes and effects and all the stupendous operations of God will be developed and they will be found to accord with the strictest principles of philosophy, even the philosophy of the heavens...
...that they were depending on the prophet hence were darkened in their minds from neglect of themselves...
Let us here observe, that three things are necessary, in order that any rational and intelligent being may exercise faith in God unto life and salvation. 3 First, The idea that he actually exists. 4 Secondly, A correct idea of his character, perfections and attributes. 5 Thirdly, An actual knowledge that the course of life which he is pursuing, is according to his will.—For without an acquaintance with these three important facts, the faith of every rational being must be imperfect and unproductive; but with this understanding, it can become perfect and fruitful, abounding in righteousness unto the praise and glory of God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is an honor to save yourselves---all are responsible to save themselves.
If you don’t have free will, well then all of your investigation of free will is pre-determined, so you’re done, and any ‘decision’ you make isn’t actually yours to make. Conversely, if you do have free will, but agonize about not having it, you’re wasting your time...
Whenever you detect an inconsistency or error, you have found a tiny something of value. Not (of course) absolutely valuable, but another mutable piece of an infinite jigsaw. There are always new errors to hunt. You can never become bored!
Not all systems are of equal value. We’re currently so paralysed by the ‘relativist’ view that in some way “all cultures and ideas are similarly valuable” that we tolerate utter nonsense because we don’t want to be seen to be politically incorrect.
If you blindly trust philosophers, they’ll let you down even more rapidly than other purveyors of wisdom. Particularly useless are philosophers who have lurked in universities their whole life.
Intellectual clarity is not given to man automatically.
A man cannot do much with his faculty of vision until his eyes are in focus. Otherwise, his eyesight gives him only a blur or haze…A similar concept applies to the mind. In regard to thought, as to vision, the same alternative exists: clear awareness or a state of blur, haze, fog in which relatively little can be discriminated.
If one tries the random approach, then questions (which one has no means of answering) simply proliferate in all directions.
To satisfy this need, one must recognize that philosophy is a system of ideas. By its nature as an integrating science, it cannot be a grab bag of ideas. All philosophic questions are interrelated.
When a definition is contextually revised, the new definition does not contradict the old one. The facts identified in the old definition remain facts; the knowledge earlier gained remains knowledge. What changes is that, as one's field of knowledge expands, these facts no longer serve to differentiate the units. The new definition does not invalidate the content of the old; it merely refines a distinction in accordance with the demands of a growing cognitive context.
Our knowledge grows in stages, and we organize at each stage only the facts that are available.
Conceptual knowledge is not acquired in a state of total ignorance or from a vantage point of omniscience. At any stage of development, from child to sage and from savage to scientist, man can make conceptual differentiations and integrations only on the basis of prior knowledge, the specific limited knowledge available to him at that stage. Man's mind functions on the basis of a certain context. The context, states Miss Rand, "is the entire field of a mind's awareness or knowledge at any level of its cognitive development.
Although definitions are contextual, they are not arbitrary. The correct definition at any stage is determined by the facts of reality. Given any specific set of entities to be differentiated, it is the actual nature of the entities that determines the distinguishing characteristics.
Definitions are determined by the facts of reality - within the context of one's knowledge. Both aspects of this statement are crucial: reality and the context of knowledge; existence and consciousness.
Concepts do not pertain to consciousness alone or to existence alone; they are products of a specific kind of relationship between the two.
Concept formation and use is precisely the realm that is not automatic or infallible, but volitional. In order to conceptualize, a man must expend effort; he must engage in the kind of mental work that no stimulus can necessitate. He must struggle to relate, connect, process an ever-growing range of data - and he must learn to do it correctly.
Every type of question reduces to: "What is it?" For example, "Why did a certain event occur?" means: "What is the nature of the cause?" "How?" means "What is the process?" "Where" means "What is the place?"
The final step in concept formation is definition. This step is essential to every concept except axiomatic concepts and concepts denoting sensations.
No matter what his emotions, a sane man retains the power to face facts. If an emotion is overwhelming, he retains the power to recognize this and to defer cognition until he can establish a calmer mood.
Unlike the basic choice to be in or out of focus, the choice to evade a specific content is motivated, the motive being the particular feeling that the evader elevates above reality.
To an evader, a feeling of some kind is more important than truth. A man finds a certain fact or policy to be unpleasant, frightening, or guilt-provoking. Reality to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not want the fact to be real or the policy to be necessary; so he decides to blank out the offending datum. Or a certain idea or policy gives a man pleasure, reassurance, or relief, and he wants to believe in or practice it, even though he knows reality is against him in the issue; in Ayn Rand's words, place an "I wish" above an "It is".
No one can think or perceive for another man. If reality, without your help, does not convince a person of the self-evident, he has abdicated reason and cannot be dealt with any further.
For a philosophic idea to function properly as a guide, one must know the full system to which it belongs.
...knowledge is knowledge of reality, and existence has primacy over consciousness. If the mind wishes to know existence, therefore, it must conform to existence. If thought created reality, no science offering guidance to thought would be applicable; consciousness could assert whatever it wished, and reality would obey.
There can be no advice where man has no power to choose his course of behavior.
The process of evasion, as we will see, is profoundly destructive. Epistemologically, it invalidates a mental process. Morally, it is the essence of evil. According to Objectivism, evasion is the vice that underlies all other vices. In the present era, it is leading to the collapse of the world.
A proposition can have no greater validity - no more of a relation to reality - than do the concepts that make it up. The precondition of the quest for truth, therefore, is the formulation of proper definitions.
Whenever men expect reality to conform to their wish simply because it is their wish, they are doomed to metaphysical disappointment.
The thinker who accepts the absolutism of the metaphysically given recognizes that it is his responsibility to conform to the universe, not the other way around.
Ayn Rand explains some of the steps necessary to achieve a conscious, rational philosophy. She teaches the reader how to identify, and then evaluate, the hidden premises at work in his own soul or nation. She makes clear the mechanism by which philosophy rules men and societies…
Existence, consciousness, identity are presupposed by every statement and by every concept, including the concept of disagreement.
Philosophy, in Ayn Rand's view, is the fundamental force shaping every man and culture. It is the science that guides men's conceptual faculty, and thus every field of endeavor that counts on this faculty.
Philosophy is not a bauble of the intellect, but a power from which no man can abstain…The reason is that man, by his nature as a conceptual being, cannot function at all without some form of philosophy to serve as his guide.
To Ayn Rand, philosophy is the fundamental factor in human life; it is the basic force that shapes the mind and character of men and the destiny of nations. It shapes them for good or for evil, depending on the kind of philosophy men accept.
Now you may ask why make a metaphysical catastrophe out of the fact that we are going to die one day?...If you know Epicurus from the ancient world he took care of this whole problem of death very well with the following argument. He said Death should be nobody’s concern at all because no one will ever encounter it. Death is not a problem of the living because they are alive, and it is not a problem of the dead because they are not. Consequently no one will ever know any state other than life and there’s no point groveling before the fact of death.
Existence is Identity; Consciousness is Identification.
Consciousness is a faculty of discovering identity. This is so because existence has primacy; it sets the terms and consciousness obeys.
So long as men remain ignorant of their basic mental process, they have no answer to the charge leveled by mysticism and skepticism alike, that their mental content is some form of revelation or invention detached from reality.
The drifter does not integrate his mental contents; the evader disintegrates them, by struggling to disconnect a given item from everything that would give clarity or significance in his own mind. In the one case, the individual is immersed in a fog by default; he chooses not to raise his level of awareness. In the other case, he expends energy to create a fog; he lowers his level of awareness.
Evasion, by contrast, is an active process aimed at a specific content. The evader does expend effort; he purposely directs his attention away from a given fact. He works not to see it; if he cannot banish it fully, he works not to let it become completely real to him.
If an individual accepts a philosophy of reason, and if he characteristically chooses to be in focus, he will gradually gain knowledge, confidence, and a sense of intellectual control.
One must know the idea's relationship to all the other ideas that give it context, definition, application, proof. One must know all this not as a theoretical end in itself, but for practical purposes; one must know it to be able to rely on an idea, to make rational use of it, and ultimately, to live.
Being implicit from the beginning, existence, consciousness, and identity are outside the province of proof. Proof is the derivation of a conclusion from antecedent knowledge, and nothing is antecedent to axioms. Axioms are the starting points of cognition, on which all proofs depend.
One knows that the axioms are true not by inference of any kind, but by sense perception. When one perceives a tomato, for example, there is no evidence that it exists, beyond the fact that one perceives it; there is no evidence that it is something, beyond the fact that one perceives it; and there is no evidence that one is aware, beyond the fact that one is perceiving it. Axioms are perceptual self-evidences. There is nothing to be said in their behalf except: look at reality. What is true of tomatoes applies equally to oranges, buildings, people, music, and stars.
Mathematics is the only true metaphysics.
Ayn Rand's egoism is untainted by any element of the mind/body dichotomy. On her view, man can achieve happiness by acting in his long-term, rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor sacrificing others to himself. In the long run, a man can erase conflicts within his soul, not by repression, but by an active process of rethinking the subconscious premises on which certain emotions are based. If a man lives a life of integrity -- of non-contradiction between his thought and his action -- his subconscious will have no reason to complain.
Politics is the study of the nature of government. In government, Plato's non-Pagan mystical aspect reasserts itself, as any vestige of egoism is dispensed with. Plato adopts an altruistic politics, one in which the individual must sacrifice himself for the whole -- this is the doctrine of collectivism.
The consistent and logical application of Platonism to life is the sort of existence which mankind experienced in the Middle Ages. In that time, men cloistered themselves away from mundane concerns, and attempted to gain insight into a higher, spiritual reality. You know what consequences this trend had.
The Renaissance represented a rebirth of reason, thanks mostly to the Aristotelian thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aristotelianism has always represented the antithesis of Platonism. When Plato saw forms in another dimension, Aristotle looked at the real world. When Plato sought refuge in intuition, Aristotle looked to logic. When Plato urged men to merge themselves with the collective, Aristotle stood for individualism. When Plato advocated a communist state, Aristotle advocated a sane polity, where law, not men, would rule other men. These ideas were the foundation of the Renaissance, and the subsequent periods of Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, and Industrial Revolution.
Perhaps we have noticed that the course of history seems to be determined by the ideas which men choose to adopt;
Reason and emotion are not at war, because emotions are based on intellectual value judgments, held either implicitly or explicitly. If you sense a reason/emotion conflict, what you sense is actually a conflict between two different ideas in your mind: one conscious, the other subconscious.
It seems quite unlikely that that problem could have offered difficulties to any but a trained philosopher.
In case of emergency: please be advised that your philosophy can be used as a hammer. To break the dreams behind the glass. #gutenacht
The legitimacy of philosophy requires the conjunction of knowledge and action.
Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers, read, study, think a great deal of life...
...self-interest and ethical behavior are consistent with sustainable prosperity. Flouting the law and screwing customers and partners have never been viable long-term growth strategies.
Charity is not an emotion or an action. It is not something we feel or do. Charity is who the Savior is. It is His most defining and dominant attribute. It is what enabled Him to endure the Garden and the cross for you and me. It is one of the things that makes Him God. Thus, when we plead for the gift of charity, we aren't asking for kind feelings toward someone who has wounded us. We are pleading for our very natures to be changed, for our character to become more and more like the Savior's, so that we literally feel as He would feel and do what He would do. This is why Mormon said that when the Savior appears, those who have been gifted with charity will be like him, for they will "see him as he is."
In any case, the things I don't yet understand do not negate what I do know: that Joseph Smith was a prophet, foreordained by the Lord to restore His gospel, and that we have a living prophet today; that the priesthood has been restored to the earth; and that priesthood keys literally unlock God's power in behalf of all of us.
Knowing more enable us to do more and to do better.
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
Many philosophers criticize physical explanations of how the universe arose from nothing, claiming that they merely beg the question.