LITMIR.BIZ

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I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it’s wrongly put.… When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as nonexistent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?²⁴

      Rand would certainly have taken issue with Marx’s solipsistic characterization of egoism. But she too rejected “creation” questions as vestiges of a cosmological perspective. Rand would have greatly appreciated Marx’s reaffirmation of the primacy of existence through denial. Indeed, Rand argued vociferously against those who attempted to disprove the existence of something for which there was no evidence. As Peikoff explains: “The onus of proof is on him who asserts the positive.”²⁵ Objectivists rely heavily on this polemical style of argumentation, utilizing variations of the “boomerang” principle.²⁶ This is apparent in Rand’s critique of the “stolen concept fallacy” and the “reification of the zero.”

      It was Aristotle who first employed the technique of reaffirmation through denial when he asserted that nobody could reject the laws of logic without relying on them in the process. Aristotle viewed these laws at the base of all human activity, reasoning, and language. For Aristotle, such principles were both ontological and logical, grasped intuitively and without need of proof.

      Rand’s teacher, Lossky ([1917] 1928, 8), had used a similar argument in his clash with the atomistic materialists. He claimed that even those who denied the organic structure of the world, implicitly accepted it in their every pronouncement. Since every utterance and action depends on the wholeness and predictability of reality, such organicism could not be escaped. Even though the world is composed of many different elements, each of these elements belongs to the same reality. The organic structure of reality is a metaphysical given which makes the world knowable. Knowledge is never constructed out of wholly independent elements. Rather, these elements are part of an all-embracing network of relations that can be analyzed on different levels of generality.

      Although Rand would not have seen the organic structure of reality as strictly axiomatic, she did reproduce the form of Lossky’s argument. Just as it is a logical error to use what you are trying to prove, the so-called fallacy of “begging the question,” it is equally an error to use what you’re trying to disprove. Rand calls the latter the fallacy of the stolen concept.²⁷ As Nathaniel Branden explains, all of knowledge has a hierarchical structure. Hence, “When one uses concepts, one must recognize their genetic roots, one must recognize that which they logically depend on and presuppose.” For Branden, as for Rand, one does not have a logical right to use “a concept while ignoring, contradicting, or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends.”²⁸

      Rand argued that most philosophers treated higher-level concepts as first-level abstractions, tearing them from their appropriate place in the hierarchy of knowledge, denying their epistemological roots, and ultimately detaching them from reality (Peikoff 1991b, 136). This practice has had far-reaching implications and is one of the symptoms of modern anti-conceptualism.

      Rand’s view of hierarchy is purely epistemological. In reality, all facts are simultaneous. Rand explains: “Regardless of what a given man did chronologically, once he has his full conceptual development, a very important test of whether a concept is first-level would be whether, within the context of his own knowledge, he would be able to hold or explain or communicate a certain concept without referring to preceding concepts” (“Appendix,” 214).

      Though Rand rejected the vicious circularity of the stolen concept fallacy, she grasps that circularity per se is not necessarily wrong. Many of her own arguments have an element of what Rasmussen has called “just” circularity. This grows out of the starkly dialectical character of Rand’s worldview. For instance, Rand saw the aging process as integral to mortality. Though we may never know what ultimately causes people to age, mortality implies aging, just as aging itself indicates mortality. This is circular and tautological. Aging is internal to mortality, which is internal to aging. But in “just” circularity, the reciprocal relationship between terms does not invalidate the statement. Indeed, it merely underscores the relational unity these facts have with other facts. Each element of the whole must both support and imply the others. There is a necessary interrelationship of the parts within the totality (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 9).

      By contrast, Rand rejects what Rasmussen (1980) has called, “vicious” circularity. In the “vicious” case, there is “reasoning from some principle in order to demonstrate that very principle” (68). For Rand, using an arbitrary assertion to confirm itself or a valid principle to deny itself are instances of vicious circularity.

      Adopting the language of internal relations, one could say that such circularity is illegitimate because it is based on arbitrary assertions that attempt to circumvent the hierarchically structured totality of knowledge. Those who make such arbitrary assertions are attempting to make themselves external to an epistemological totality that necessarily involves connections between and among concepts. Those who would deny the truthfulness of an axiomatic concept repudiate principles internal to every other concept in their usage. Such axioms are at the base of, and form the context for, all concepts. Those who would deny them by exempting themselves from the totality within which all others think and act, are trying to attain a synoptic perspective on the whole. This is an attack on the metaepistemological principles that make knowledge possible.

      In Rand’s view, the “reification of the zero” is one of the most notorious attempts to achieve such an internal contradiction. In this fallacy, the speaker regards “‘nothing’ as a thing, as a special, different kind of existent.” But for Rand, existence and nonexistence are not metaphysically equal. Nonexistence can only be defined in relation to existence. The concept “nothing” cannot be removed from the context that gives it meaning; it cannot be reified as a separate thing. Apart from its relational usage, “nothing” is a concept without validity (Introduction, 60–61). There is no such thing as “pure” negation apart from that which it negates. Those who attempt to prove the existence of a negative, or to deny an axiom, step outside the bounds of logic and ontologic, and are defeated by their own denials.

      ONTOLOGY AND LOGIC

      Having articulated the two basic axioms, Rand distinguishes a third, which is a corollary of existence and internal to all elements of reality and knowledge. It is the principle of identity, “A is A,” a variation on Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction.²⁹

      In the Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that permanent negation is not possible. There is an ultimate principle at the base of reason which is both ontological and epistemological. It is not a hypothesis, but a principle that is “true of being qua being.” It is a principle that is “the most certain of all.… It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.… it is impossible for any one to believe the same thing to be and not to be.”³⁰

      Like Aristotle, Rand believes that logic is inseparable from reality and knowledge. She states: “If logic has nothing to do with reality, it means that the Law of Identity is inapplicable to reality” (Philosophy, 17). But, as Peikoff (1985) explains: “The Law of Contradiction … is a necessary and ontological truth which can be learned empirically” (185). Aristotle believed that people learned this principle by intuitive induction (198).³¹ Peikoff (1985) maintains that, for Aristotle, “the Law of Contradiction has … a twofold epistemological character: it is at once an experiential-inductive principle and an intuitive first principle. This characteristic Aristotelian

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