|
3712a97
|
An individual can be hurt in countless ways by other men's irrationality, dishonesty, injustice. Above all, he can be disappointed, perhaps grievously, by the vices of a person he had once trusted or loved. But as long as his property is not expropriated and he remains unmolested physically, the damage he sustains is essentially spiritual, not physical; in such a case, the victim alone has the power and the responsibility of healing his wou..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
c09427f
|
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.... Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence--some supernatural realm--you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and say..
|
|
reality
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
3632e82
|
The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
889e3c2
|
The artist is the closest man comes to being God.
|
|
god
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
763043e
|
In any compromise between food and poison," Ayn Rand writes, "it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
ec63a9b
|
There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man's destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, "I can't prove these claims are true, but you can't prove they are false, so the only proper conclusi..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
defc22c
|
Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective--society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.--is the unit of reality and the standard of value.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
c4b138a
|
The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
a993430
|
The victim's submission to utter senselessness becomes the defeat of sense. His obeisance to absurdity becomes the refutation of logic.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
49485fa
|
The rational (the good) has nothing to gain from the irrational (the evil)," observes Ayn Rand, "except a share of its failures and crimes. . . ."17"
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
e21418e
|
Man, Aristotle held, must first grasp the appropriate facts of reality; on this basis, he can then set the goals and course of his action. Pragmatism represents a total reversal of this progression. For the pragmatist, the order is: man acts; he invents forms of thought to satisfy the needs of his action; reality adapts itself accordingly (except when, inexplicably, it resists). First, action--second, thought--third, reality.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
30420da
|
The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
8a56c23
|
Ayn Rand defines "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep."3 "Value" denotes the object of an action: it is that which some entity's action is directed to acquiring or preserving"
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
05f01dc
|
The Germans, therefore, practiced them. In order not to be eaten alive by the next round of legislation, virtually everyone joined or identified himself with a group (since an isolated individual had no chance against large, vocal blocs). And every group knew only one policy: to demand new economic benefits from the government and/or new legislative sanctions against the other groups.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
37a80f6
|
The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, "is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life...." The goal is to foster the child's "social capacity"--by, among other things, "saturating him with the spirit of service...."21"
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
2ed7f2f
|
In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
d5c182c
|
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
cd81c9e
|
The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
095520d
|
Racial subjectivism holds that a man's inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions--and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
6e40e90
|
Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil is consistent in only one regard: its essence is consistently at war with all the values and virtues human life requires.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
066e523
|
A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
ba3e8f6
|
has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals...
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
55bc035
|
This is the actual answer to Auschwitz. We are told insistently to remember the Holocaust. Eloquent, horrifying books describe the facts to us in every detail. The truth about a monstrous, historic evil virtually screams out from hundreds of thousands of pages. But few, including the authors, seem to hear the scream. The commentators do not say that the camps are the final, perfect embodiment of all the fundamental ideas which made Hitler p..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
93dedf5
|
An interest," writes Kant, "is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
692627a
|
I say close down the schools of education. At most, all that is required is a one-year post-high school course on practical advice: tips on motivating;
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
f9c6aec
|
Vice, in the Objectivist view, is not a rewarding policy; it is unconsciousness-willful, self-induced unconsciousness, while one continues to move around and function. To a conscious organism no course of behavior can be more dangerous.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
b1b331b
|
The authority of the Fuhrer is not limited by checks and controls, by special autonomous bodies or individual rights, but it is free and independent, all-inclusive and unlimited," said Ernst Huber, an official party spokesman, in 1933." --
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
2b5a93e
|
Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are nonmaterial entities in another dimension, independent of man's mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume--the concretes that make up this world--are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality. Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were la..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
7f4757d
|
Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas--implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions--from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and mores.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
254ccdb
|
The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
48e2849
|
The Social Democrats continued all the longtime traditions of their party and sought support in essence from only one segment of the electorate: the "proletariat," i.e., the urban workers. The party's goal, in the words of one resolution, was "to unite the entire strength of the proletariat in the struggle against the common enemy, capitalism and reaction."1 The purpose of the struggle, Social Democratic leaders told the workers, is to achi..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
9ec2f06
|
Hannah Arendt, the best and most philosophically inclined of the commentators, is also, in regard to her ultimate conclusions, the worst, i.e., the most perversely wrong-headed. In a final warning, she singles out for special attack the attitude which she regards as a major source of the Nazis' evil and of their success: an unswerving commitment to logic. The Nazis, she says, and the masses attracted to them, were "too consistent" in pursui..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
61ea260
|
All of these men and movements contributed the notes, the chords, or the screeches that fused into the Horst Wessel song. And they are merely some of the obvious voices in Germany from a chorus sustained across hundreds of years and gradually rising in volume. If the brutes finally rose from the gutters and stamped a swastika across the doctrines of the centuries; if, plucking the naked essence of those doctrines from the atmosphere, they b..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
9248e40
|
The aspiring dictator may not be able to identify in philosophic terms the clash between reason and his particular schemes. But he, too, is aware of it. In some (usually unverbalized) form, he knows that he cannot demand unthinking obedience from men, or gain their consent to the permanent rule of brutality, until he has first persuaded his future subjects to ditch their brains and their independent, self-assertive judgment. He knows that h..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
da452e1
|
Germany has been called "the land of poets and philosophers." But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
014229e
|
Social justice" in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
4c4a015
|
The system which Hitler established--the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure--the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz--was: the "total state." The term, from which the adjective "totalitarian" derives, was coined by Hitler's mentor, Mussolini."
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
34a699b
|
Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism--the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies--which has characterized most of human history.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
2ce13be
|
In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
7518d29
|
Providence," said Hitler to Rauschning, has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.45"
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
c6fa55d
|
Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany's largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler's sta..
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
625f21e
|
We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
2f8b000
|
No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy--not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams--which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |
|
2024859
|
The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs. And not one of their central beliefs was original. They found those beliefs, widespread and waiting, in the culture; they seized upon them and broadcast them at top volume, thrusting them with a new intensity back into the streets of Germany.
|
|
|
Leonard Peikoff |