Given the appropriate conditions, the appropriate physical environment, all living organisms—with one exception—are set by their nature to originate automatically the actions required to sustain their survival. The exception is human beings.
Human beings, like plants or animals, must act in order to live; like plants or animals, they must gain the values their life requires. But a human being does not act and function solely by automatic chemical reactions or by automatic sensory reactions; there is no physical environment on earth in which a person could survive by the guidance of nothing but involuntary sensations. And being born with no innate knowledge of what is true or false, we can have no innate knowledge of what is good for us or evil. We have no automatic means of survival.
Our basic means of survival is our mind, our capacity to reason—and the exercise of that capacity is volitional. We must discover what will further our life and what will destroy it. If we act against the facts of reality, we place our life in jeopardy. We must discover the principles of action required to guide us in dealing with nature and with other human beings.* Our need for these principles is our need for a code of values.
We need a moral code in order to live, but in order to know what are the values and virtues that will permit us to achieve that purpose, we require a standard. We properly choose our values by the standard of that which is required for the life of a human being, which means we hold “man’s/woman’s life” as our standard. Since reason is our basic tool of survival, “mans/woman’s life” means the life appropriate to a rational being.
To live, we must think, we must act, we must produce the concrete values our life requires. This, metaphysically, is the human mode of existence.
Just as we are alive, physically, to the extent that the organs within our body function in the constant service of our life, so we are alive, as a total entity, to the extent that our mind functions in the constant service of our life. A person encased in an iron lung, whose own lungs are paralyzed, is not dead; but that person is not living the life proper to a human being. Neither is the person whose mind is volitionally paralyzed.
We are free to act against the requirements of our nature, to reject our means of survival—our mind—but we cannot escape the consequences: misery, anxiety, destruction. Our life depends on achievement, not on destruction. Mindlessness, passivity, parasitism, or brutality are not and cannot be principles of survival; they are merely the policy of those who, not wishing to face the issue of survival, live off the thinking and achievements of others.
To hold life as a standard of value means a good deal more than survival for the next moment of time or what is sometimes called “mere physical survival.” It means recognition of and respect for the life principle, the ongoing process by which life sustains itself and advances.
The physician who lets a patient die because she, the physician, has chosen to remain ignorant of any scientific discoveries made since she left medical school; the businessman who goes bankrupt because he believed that once he had established himself, no further development was necessary and he could safely rest on yesterday’s effort; the laborer who holds the same job for twenty years because he felt that once he had learned the motions of his task it was unfair to expect anything more of him—these are persons who implicitly resent the human mode of existence and who ultimately depend for their survival on those who do not resent it. Life, for a human being, is a constant process of thought, of motion, of purpose, of achievement; it is not the state of merely not being dead.
The criminal who attempts to survive by violence specifically seeks to escape life as his standard of value. He wants to reverse the nature of reality and to survive, not by producing, but by destroying. He expects to exist by means of those who will practice a code opposite to his own—those who produce that which he seeks to expropriate. The terror that is his chronic state is not primarily fear of retaliation at the hands of the police; it is terror at the dimly sensed and frantically evaded knowledge that he is attempting to survive by means of a contradiction, that he has betrayed his status as a human being, betrayed his self-esteem, made himself into something inappropriate to life.
The person who makes terms with the rulers of a dictatorship, who willingly delivers spouse, parents, family, or closest friends to destruction in exchange for being allowed to survive, does not hold life as the standard of value. Such a person’s motive is terror of dying, not passion for living. This person is willing to live without values.
In contrast, the person who consciously and willingly risks his or her life in the attempt to escape a dictatorship, the person who dies in the effort to achieve freedom, knowing that freedom is the only condition proper to human beings, is acting on the premise of life as the standard. Such a person knows what human existence is and is unwilling to accept anything less, unwilling to endure and to regard as normal a state in which proper human life is impossible.
The life appropriate to a human being—the life appropriate to a rational being—is not a luxury above the basic requirements of survival. It is the basic requirement of survival. On the individual level, the person who refuses to think, to act, to pursue values, either perishes outright or exists as a parasite on the efforts of persons more rational than him- or herself. In this state, the person is neither living fully nor dying immediately, is incapable of healthy self-esteem and incapable, therefore, of enjoying life. On the social level, when the men and women of an entire nation are forbidden to think and to translate their thought into action, when they are denied freedom to pursue their values, to take chances, to explore, and to create, the result is stagnation, disintegration, and paralyzing terror.
Traditional religionists have declared that if God did not exist, morality would be unnecessary—everything would be “permissible.” Secular moralists have declared that if Society did not exist, morality would be unnecessary—any course of action would be as valid as any other. Would it? It is not for the purpose of satisfying the wishes of a supernatural being that we need a code of moral values, nor for the purpose of satisfying the wishes of our neighbors. Morality is a practical, selfish necessity. Alone on a desert island, an individual would face constant alternatives requiring moral choice: to think or not to think; to perceive reality, identify facts, and act accordingly, or to sulk and pray; to work and produce, or to demand a miracle that would spare the effort; to act on independent judgment, or to surrender to terror. The fact that we live among other human beings should not obscure the intimately personal nature of our need for a code of ethics. Our self-esteem requires it, our happiness requires it, our life requires it.
Life as the standard has been the underlying premise of every word I have written in this book. What we are concerned with here is the justification of that standard. By identifying the context in which values arise existentially, we can perceive the fallacy of the claim that the ultimate standard of any ethical judgment is arbitrary, that normative propositions cannot be derived from factual propositions. By identifying the roots of the concept of “value” epistemologically, we can see that not to hold life as one’s standard of moral judgment is to be guilty of a contradiction in logic. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. Life is the basic value that makes all other values possible; the value of life is not to be justified by a value beyond itself. To demand such justification—to ask, “Why should a person choose to live?”—is to have dropped the meaning, context, and source of one’s concepts. “Should” is a concept that can have no intelligible meaning if divorced from the concept and value of life.
Contrary to the prevalent belief that morality is needed to curb the natural human inclination toward self-interest, it is self-interest that generates the need for a moral code.
If life on earth is the standard, then it is not the person who sacrifices values who is moral, but the person who achieves them; not the person who renounces, but the person who creates; not the person who forsakes life, but the person who mak
es life possible.
If man’s/woman’s life is the standard, a person properly exists for his or her own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor sacrificing others to self.
Life is the standard of morality; our own happiness is the purpose. Happiness is an achievement that demands an understanding of, a respect for, and a nurturing of the life process. Life and happiness are two aspects of the same attainment.
No belief is more prevalent—or more misguided—than that we can achieve our happiness by the pursuit of any random desires we experience. To live for our own happiness, we must learn what that happiness objectively requires.
Rational egoism does not consist of doing whatever we feel like doing, a policy that can clearly lead to self-destruction. Morality exists for the individual, the individual does not exist for morality; but without reason, thought, and knowledge, egoism is meaningless. The purpose of ethics is not to transcend egoism, but to identify the means by which egoism is optimally fulfilled.
In approaching ethics from this perspective, we can see that it would be as reasonable to declare that the purpose of morality is to liberate a human being from the self as it would be to declare that the purpose of medicine is to liberate a human being from the body.
This analogy is singularly apt, since medicine, too, holds life as its standard of value. Rational medicine can never consist of asking an individual to act against the well-being of his or her body. Rational ethics can never consist of asking an individual to act against the well-being of his or her person.
Such is the underlying ethical orientation that, early in my own intellectual development, provided the doorway through which I first began to approach the theme that has occupied me as a psychologist for more than a quarter of a century: self-esteem as the ultimate ground of consciousness and therefore the ultimate ground of our being.
Given the fact that self-esteem pertains to our experience of being appropriate to life, it is not surprising to find many parallelisms between the virtues espoused throughout this book and those we find entailed by the standard “the life appropriate to a human being.” I want to comment briefly on some of these parallelisms.
Neither a wish nor a hope nor a prayer will grow food or build a shelter or maintain a business or invent an airplane or discover a cure for a disease or devise a proper political system or preserve and protect a marriage. All of the values on which our life, well-being, and happiness depend require a process of thought and effort. A morality that holds life as the highest value also holds rationality as the highest virtue.63
And all the other values of human existence—career, love, art, friendship, philosophy, recreation—are values only because they serve and are the expression of the ultimate value: the life appropriate to a human being. And all such other virtues as independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride are virtues only because they are expressions and consequences of the basic virtue of rationality.63
Rationality is our unreserved commitment to perceive reality to the best of our ability, a commitment to being conscious—an acceptance of reason as the ultimate arbiter and guide in matters of knowledge, values, and action.
Independence is reliance upon our own mind and judgment, the acceptance of intellectual responsibility for our own existence.
Honesty is refusal to seek values by faking reality, by evading the distinction between the real and the unreal.
Integrity is loyalty in action to the judgment of our consciousness.
Justice is the practice of identifying persons for what they are and treating them accordingly—rewarding the actions and character traits that are prolife and withholding rewards and/or condemning those that are antilife.
Productiveness is the act of supporting our existence by translating our thought into reality, of setting our goals and working for their achievement, of bringing knowledge, goods, or services into existence.
Pride (as a virtue rather than as an emotion) is moral ambitiousness, a dedication to achieving our highest potential, in our character and in our life—and a refusal to be sacrificial fodder for the goals of others.
All of these virtues are required for the realization of rational egoism or enlightened selfishness. They are principles of action that support and honor life. They are also, as we have seen, the foundation of healthy self-esteem.
Indeed, with the possible exception of justice, every one of these virtues was implicitly or explicitly anticipated in our discussion of the roots and dynamics of self-esteem, so much so that only a few words of further elaboration are needed here. I want to touch on one or two points regarding rationality and productiveness, then take a closer look at the virtue of justice.
Rationality is an attitude of responsibility toward that which exists, acceptance of the facts of reality. At a time when he was world famous, Albert Einstein, it is said, was asked by a reporter, “How do you feel, knowing that so many people are trying to prove you are not right?” Einstein replied, “I have no interest in being right. I am only concerned with discovering whether I am or not.”
A scientist may want his new serum to be a cure for cancer, because if it is, this will make him famous; a wife may want it to be the case that her husband has not been unfaithful, because her whole happiness depends on his love and fidelity; an individual may want a supernatural being to exist, because he or she is afraid to stand alone and needs the sense of an omnipotent power as protector; a woman may want her partner to be a good businessperson, because the success of her project depends on it—but rationality requires of us that we consider all such desires irrelevant in assessing the facts of the situation, just as a mother would dismiss the clamoring of her child to drink from the bottle marked “Poison” in the medicine cabinet.
Sometimes, however, the appropriate application of rationality is far from obvious. It is imperative to remember that reason or rationality on the one hand and what people may regard as “the reasonable” on the other hand do not mean the same thing. Only a few centuries ago, the consensus was that it was reasonable to believe that the sun revolves around the earth and unreasonable to think otherwise.
The consequence of failing to make a distinction between reason and what people may regard as “the reasonable” is that if someone disagrees with our notion of “the reasonable,” we can think it appropriate to accuse that person of being “irrational” or “against reason.” The temptation to equate our particular model of reality with “reason” is so powerful that we are very prone to dismiss as “irrational” or “antiscientific” any line of thought, any speculation, or even any data that our model cannot accommodate.
Another area of confusion concerns the relationship between reason and emotion. Rationality tells us we must not follow our emotions blindly, that to do so is undesirable and dangerous. Who can dispute that? But such counsel does not adequately deal with the possibility that in a particular situation our emotions might reflect the more correct assessment of reality. A clash between mind and emotions is a clash between two judgments, one of which is conscious, the other of which might not be. We do not follow the voice of emotion or feeling unthinkingly; rather, we try to understand what it may be telling us.
The solution for people who seem overpreoccupied with feelings is not the renunciation of feelings but rather greater respect for reason, thinking, and the intellect. What is needed is not a renunciation of emotion but a better balance between emotion and thinking.
This, I might mention, is an example of where my approach differs from Rand’s. She was far quicker to assume that in any conflict between the mind and the heart, it was the heart that had to be mistaken. Not necessarily—although ultimately only reason can decide.
Admittedly, there are occasions when we have to act on the best of our conscious knowledge and convictions—even when it is hard, even when it does violence to some of our feelings—because there is not time to work the problem out. But those are, in effect, emergency situations, not a way of life. O
ur concept of rationality, well grounded in psychological realism, has to contain this understanding; we must respect the complexities of what rationality can mean in practice.
Productiveness is the basic expression of rationality in our relationship to nature—and it is obvious why a morality of survival would attach central importance to this virtue. Productive work is the supremely human act; animals must adjust themselves to their physical environment; human beings adjust the physical environment to themselves. We have the capacity of giving psychological and existential unity to our life by integrating our actions with goals projected across a life span.
Morally and psychologically, it is not the degree of a person’s productive ability that matters, but the person’s choice to exercise such ability as he or she does possess. It is not the kind of work selected that determines moral stature and psychological well-being (provided, of course, the work is not inimical to human life), but whether or not a person seeks work that requires and expresses the fullest, most conscientious use of mind, assuming that the opportunity to do so exists.
The concept of ability, in its prevalent and popular usage, specifically denotes the achievements of human intelligence and ingenuity in the direct service of our practical needs. And it is to this that we are often morally indifferent, and are encouraged to be so by codes of ethics unconcerned with the happiness of individual men and women here on earth. An ethical code that holds life as the standard will value human ability, will prize and appreciate it, will even exalt it—not in a vacuum, not when it is employed to serve antihuman ends, as is often the case in a dictatorship, but when, in a free society, it advances human well-being.
Honoring the Self Page 24