How to Make One World Out of Three
How to Make One World Out of Three
Chapter 4
Author’s Note: Below is the fourth chapter of my book, where I examine how causation applies to our ability to grasp the world through the use of abstractions. If you’re still catching up, here is the Preface, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3.
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Here’s the chapter.
Chapter 4: How to Make One World Out of Three
After urging us to “take what you want and pay for it,” Ayn Rand adds: “But to know one’s own desires, their meaning, and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.” She describes rationality as a “demanding moral discipline.” This assumes that there are rules and principles we can derive from observation of the world. Invoking a virtue of rationality assumes our ability to form valid generalizations to reason from.
Not everyone assumes this. There is a whole school of philosophy called Pragmatism, which holds that there are no rules or principles, no universally valid generalizations, and that all truth is derived ad hoc, case-by-case, based on social consensus about the convenience of an idea’s practical results. There are many people who are pragmatists in this sense without ever having studied philosophy, who go by their “gut” and adhere to no consistent principles.
It is revealing that the most formal, systematic philosophical presentation Ayn Rand ever offered was in response to this particular question.
The main text we’re going to be referring to in this chapter is her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, originally published as a series in The Objectivist from July 1966 to February 1967.1 Just about every other major philosopher sits down and writes a treatise, something on the order of 300 to 700 pages setting down their big ideas systematically. By contrast, Ayn Rand presented virtually all of her philosophy in bits and pieces, as speeches in her novels and later as individual articles, often written as commentary on the news of the day, that were gathered into collections.
The Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the closest she ever got to writing a classic philosophical treatise, and it’s interesting that she chose to do this specifically on the question of abstractions, of how it is possible to derive broad and general principles.
The Active Mind
Rand begins with the same issue we have been grappling with already: the causal nature of consciousness. Consciousness has to be causally connected to the reality it observes, without altering or creating that reality. Consciousness must be, in all important respects, on the downstream end of causation, and we have already described this with regard to the senses.
Yet in dealing with consciousness on the level of concepts or abstractions, it is clear that the mind is itself a cause. It is not just perceiving what exists in the world. It is categorizing it, re-arranging it, making connections, and imagining new things.