"Thinking in Essentials" by Leonard Peikoff

Good morning. I want to start with one comment about questions in general. I want this recorded for reasons that you'll see. Professor Buechner suggests to me that there are some people who are hesitant to ask questions on the feeling that they will be bad questions and that I will not be responsive or receptive or that they will be laughed at. And therefore, the safest thing is not to ask. And there was a couple of times last time where I said, is there any questions? And no hands went up, which is always a bad sign. So he asked me to give my standard statement on bad questions, which I would like to do. Lecturers always say there are no bad questions in order to encourage an audience to ask questions. I don't believe that. I think most questions that people ask are bad. But I take a different view. I think you can learn more 9 times out of 10 from a bad question than from a good question. And I certainly asked Ms. Rand more bad questions than Goodwin. That is, questions that astounded her, made her indignant, baffled her completely. As opposed to the good questions where you say a question which is right on the context exactly follows from what you said. It's obvious that this is the next step. You say, that's a good question. It's perfectly logical. If you can get to ask a good question, you don't really need to learn that much more. But when you ask a bad question, that's exactly what indicates that you're out in left field, to switch the metaphor. You're swimming completely. You don't know where you're going. And your question reveals this chaos that everybody has to go through in some form at some point. And it enables the lecturer and you yourself to come much quickly, more quickly to an understanding of what your problem is. So a lecturer should welcome bad questions. And I do. And I did say something that I have to apologize for, because I did the worst thing. That's what I wanted. This on the tape an author can do. Somebody asked a perfectly good question, which I had one sentence in my book which by implication would have answered that if I had written the essay that it implied. And I couldn't resist making this terrible statement. You obviously haven't read my book carefully because it's covered in there. Because it wasn't really covered in there. There was one sent was in there. And a statement like that would necessarily be paralyzing, because my book, in some sense, is about everything. So anything that you say, I could just as well say, well, it was covered in the book that you read it. So I promise never to make that statement again. And the only thing I can say is if you do ask a question that is covered in that form across 40 pages, I will try and sum up gentle way to suggest that you review that chapter. But I'm going to play that down now because I see that that would be absolutely intimidating. Okay, today we are thinking in essentials. Or rather we're thinking about thinking in essentials. I was thinking when Professor Pitker gave his introductory list of announcements which were by their nature completely disconnected from each other. What would you say if I asked you to summarize the essence of what. And it would be physically impossible to do because there was no common denominator, there was nothing that would boil it all down. It was just spread out all over the place. But what we want to do now is that's no criticism of him because he had to make those announcements. What we want to do is find out what you're thinking. You cannot have just a flood of detail like that. You have to think in essentials. And let's plunge in with a definition of essential or of essence. The word essence. Now this I'm taking from the Oxford English Dictionary. That which constitutes the being of a thing, that by which it is what it is, That which constitutes the being of the thing, that by which it is what it is. And of course it comes from the Latin essay the infinitive to be or being. So the essence is the being of something, that which makes it itself. Now, different philosophies interpret this term and its application differently. Objectivism holds that it does not. It is not a metaphysical but an epistemological term. In other words, metaphysically we do not believe in discrimination against some features of an entity in favor of others. Every feature that an entity possesses constitutes the being or part of the being of that thing, and none can be thrown aside as non essential. For example, man has a heart and that is part of him, even though it's not distinctive to him. And it doesn't appear in the definition of man. Metaphysically it's as essential, in fact, more essential than certain other things. Even having five fingers is part of the being of man. It's an essential. Metaphysically, it's not an accident. It has its causes in the whole evolutionary development and the other organs. So every feature of man, and this would be true of any entity, makes it what it is. You can't distinguish the essential from the non essential metaphysics. But for objectivism, essence of the essential is an epistemological category. So I would reword. The Oxford definition follows as follows. The essential is that which constitutes the being of a unit, That by which something is a member of a concept, That by which it belongs in a certain class. In other words, the essential for us are characteristics that you take in order to conceptualize in some form, in order to break the whole perceptual field up into groups, which you then abstract away the differences and unite and make a concept, or if not a concept, then a class that you describe by a number of concepts. And this is specifically a human function. We pick the attributes that are to be essential. Of course, we do it objectively, not subjectively, but nevertheless, we have to do it. It depends on our context of knowledge and our cognitive purpose. And what is essential in one context can change in the other. Now, let us briefly quickly review the theory of definition that objectivism holds. So we understand how essence is applied to definition. But of course, in this lecture we're thinking more broadly than definitions. But I'm going to start by reminding you of the theory of definition. And the problem of concepts is that at the very beginning you can define concepts or keep them clearly demarcated from each other and clearly connected to objects in reality simply by pointing. That's what's called an ostensive definition. You point to instances of it. But after some of this, at the early stage, you get so many concepts and so many higher level concepts, including so many unions of concepts of matter with concepts of consciousness, that pointing will no longer keep your concepts separated from each other and clearly connected to something in reality. And that's the point where you need explicit definitions. And if you remember Ms. Rand's discussion of definition, there are two basic acts, two basic processes that you have to engage in to reach a definition. To reach an essence, you have to choose a distinguishing feature. Now, I'm not going to keep saying, because it's very awkward, feature or features, you can just put the parenthesis s on the wall next to and think of it every time that you want the plural. But you have to choose a distinguishing feature that sets the entity apart from everything else. You know, you might in some context say man talks and nothing else does, and that would distinguish him, and that would be okay in that context. And then if and when you get many distinctive features, you choose among them the one which is the key word here is fundamental, the one which underlies, makes possible or leads to the rest of the distinctive features, or if not all of them, at least a larger number than anything else explains. So that the process of Arriving at an essence involves the two processes that are essential to all cognition in some form. And those two processes are taking apart and putting together, or differentiation and integration, which is the objectivist terms for now, differentiation in this case consists of selecting a distinctive characteristic. You differentiate not just perceptually by seeing this versus that. You differentiate by listing the thing's characteristics against the other things you know, and then picking one and saying this is what sets it apart. That's how you differentiate. And integration in this case is done via fundamentality, which means done via what? Principle of metaphysics? The law of causality? Exactly. By finding an attribute which is in some sense underlying a whole group or the cause of a whole group, and thus carrying along the whole group in your mind. As one token, I want you to notice here, which is very crucial, that both these processes, as they apply to forming an essence, involve a form of unit reduction. Now you know that the essence of the conceptual level, according to Ms. Rand, is unit reduction. The pro. Epistemology, the need to compress as much information as possible into the fewest units possible. Now, essentials, forming essentials is one crucial way of accomplishing this conceptual purpose in both of its aspects. How does it enable us to perform unit reduction? First of all, you face a massive sprawling data, say about human beings. The first thing you do in order to reach a distinctive characteristic is discarded. You discard part of the data as irrelevant as not distinctive to the phenomenon being discussed, being studied as non essential. This right away reduces the number of units that you have to focus on. If you came to man to stick to that example and define him, and you know you want to distinguish him, and you say, let's say I want to distinguish him from dogs and cats, that right away all of his attributes as a physical entity, that he's three dimensional, that he has a certain kind of height, and you know that he attracts every other man with a force directly proportional, etc. Etc. All the things from physics get discarded. They don't get evaded, but they get discarded as this is not essential, because I want what distinguishes man from such and such. And they all have that. So already the sheer act of looking for a distinction helps you to get rid of all kinds of data that you don't have to focus on, otherwise you would just sit there paralyzed. Now you further reduce the data once you've got the distinctive characteristics by selecting one. And here again, it's a one out of the many, although it's a different many and therefore a different kind of one. You select the one which underlies all or most of the elements that you've retained. That's the fundamental. So now you need of all those that you retain, you need to retain only that one if you see that it leads to all the others. If you do classify your concepts and define them in those terms, then you will be able to instantly to recall the whole totality that you were selecting from as against. If you remember the example in the book defining man as a being who has a thumb, even if that's distinctive, it doesn't lead to any other of its characteristics, it hasn't been processed by you as a signal or symptom or indication of 50,000 other facts. And therefore it just floats free as, oh yeah, he's something that's got a thumb and doesn't take you anywhere. Whereas if you first see the 50 characteristics of man reduced to rationality, and then you define him as a rational being, whenever you think of man, the moment you sum up the definition of that definitional characteristic immediately carries in its weight all the rest of the distinguishing things and brings the full entity before you. Now, I had a student at one point who was now a faculty member here, Linda Reardon, and she wrote a very good sentence on this in a paper that she did for our class. And I thought, rather than paraphrase it, I'll give her the credit and read her sentence. This is just one sentence she wrote for a paper some time ago, but it captures this point very nicely. Thinking in essentials is the indispensable process of programming the subconscious mind for the instantaneous recall of everything one knows about a subject. Whenever the need for such recall arises. The recall of this information is the formation of a context. Should I repeat that? All right. Thinking in essentials is the indispensable process of programming the subconscious mind for the instantaneous recall of everything one knows about a subject. And that's whenever the need for such recall arises. And then her next very good sentence, the recall of this information is the formation of a context. In other words, we said before, you must keep man integrated, or whatever you're thinking about integrated by holding the whole context. But how do you summon up that whole context? Well, if you just thought of man as a thumb hammer, you know, nothing much is there to remind you of all the other knowledge you have. But if you bring up the essential that brings up everything you know about man, and in contrast to all the other things you know, it provides you with the whole ready made context of the ties, the hooks between this and everything else that you know that's essentially similar or essentially different. And so this is an essential way of keeping the context or of keeping your knowledge integrated. So you can put the division of labor like this. In lecture two, we stress the importance of keeping knowledge integrated. But today we are discussing one of the techniques by which you do it. You can't just do it by goodwill and say, I really want to keep things integrated. You have to know where to start looking, what do you integrate to. And one very essential element in this process is looking. Putting your knowledge initially into your mind in terms of essentials, and then when it comes out, it comes out with the context that will give you the leads as to how to integrate essentials is really a technique of integrating a specific type of technique to enable you to achieve the goal of integration. Now, so far we've been talking about essentials in the standard sense of how they apply to the theory of definition. But I want to broaden the application of this now, much beyond defining a concept. It'll be the same basic process, setting aside, discarding, and then trying to find a fundamental that unites, but it's not restricted to a concept. I'm using the term essence, therefore, much more broadly than Aristotle or In most cases, Ms. Rand did. But for what I regard as the same process. I think, for instance, you can say what is the essence of a specific book you see, which is not a concept, not book as such, but some particular book like the Critique of Purely, or what is the essence of a certain movie, or what is the essence of a certain person, etc. What is essential if you're going to engage in a certain activity. And those are all, in my opinion, essentially the same as what you do when you form a definition. It's the same process, only the result is not an essence, but a certain kind of highly stylized description which enable you to know exactly what you're dealing with. Now, let's start on a rather simple case. The essence of the Critique of Purer Reason. I don't mean simple in that you know the ideas are simple, but simple in the sense that you must. You all generally know the doctrine of that book. So the first thing you have to do, set aside everything that is not distinctive. Now, Kant is full of things that are not distinctive to him, as is every philosopher, because if every sentence was unique, you couldn't even make any communication. For instance, Khan is in favor of the American Revolution, not in the Critique, but elsewhere. So when we put down that he's a revolutionary in favor of freedom, obviously not he, certainly that is not distinctive to him. And further, when you read down, he contradicts it all over the place. But leaving out the contradiction that has to be discarded as nonessential to what is distinctively Kantian. It would be essential only if you could show that what is really essential inexorably involves being for the American Revolution. But in Kant's case, in fact, it's the reverse. How about the fact that Kant comes out staunchly against lying? Is that an essential? No, it's not an essential because all kinds of people have come out against lying. The question is why does he come out against lying? How does he validate coming out against lying? What is Kantian about that? Objectivists are in favor of most lies. And there's been lots of what they call deontologists who think you should never lie and you're not yet Kant yet. Well, how about Kant believed that our experience takes place in space and time, whereas mystics say that it doesn't. That they enter another dimension without space and time. Is that distinctive to Kant? Well, it sets them aside from a certain kind of mystic, but obviously there's vast numbers of people. How about Kant thinks all knowledge starts with the evidence of the senses. Is that the statement? Certainly not. Pullowy believes it. How about Kant lays great stress on the conceptual faculty? No, Ayn Rand does, Aristotle does, Plato does. And yet all of these are two of him. So it's not necessary that we're throwing all of these out, but there must be some kind of interpretation of these things that is distinctive, that sets him apart from everybody else. Otherwise he's just an eclectic hodgepodge where everything came before. Now, who would have an idea of what is distinctive? Let's just take cons view of space and time, the senses and concepts. What is distinctive about his view? He thinks we have to use all of these things we have to perceive in space and time, and we have to start with sensory data. We have to use the all concepts. And therefore, according to him law, they're determined by the structure of our mind, not by reality. And he knows that. How or how does he reach that conclusion? It's true. He thinks those are all part of the inborn structure of the mind on one level or another, that you don't get any. You don't get the knowledge of them or the faculties themselves from perception of reality. So he comes to the conclusion that since they're all just part of the subjective structure of the mind, anything we learn through these means is. Is what is subjective. Or is invalid or is not indicative of true reality. We only can use the faculties we have. And since we can't escape those faculties, they have to be invalid or non cognitive. Now that certainly makes him distinct. Now, what is the principle going to the issue of fundamentality that underlies this idea? What underlies the idea that if you have to use a certain faculty, you can't rely on it? We have to go through space and time, we have to go through the senses, we have to go through certain concepts, therefore they're not reliable. Well, then we ask what would be reliable? Yeah, identity invalidates consciousness. Well, you said you went right to the heart of the essence there. That's true. Just to get there in a step, though, those faculties would be reliable if only we didn't have to use them. If only we could circumvent them by using other faculties. No, because then we would still have to use those others. So what would be a reliable consciousness, one which had no faculties, no means of knowledge, nothing that it had to do, and therefore nothing that would be distorted except it would then be conscious. By no means, it would be unconscious. So then we get to Mr. Karp's summary. The fundamental principle on which he's operating and leads into all these distinctive tenets is identity disqualifies consciousness. And that of course, was Minister Ann's bring in that observation as to what constitutes the essence of Kant. So you see, in principle, thinking in essentials about a book or a philosophy or a doctrine is the same process as thinking in essentials with regard to defining a particular concept, like man or whichever. You have a whole raft of data, you discard the non distinct, and then you try to see what is it that underlies or leads to or causes what you have retained. In other words, you look for the fundamental. Now, just a word here on terminology. We talk about the fundamental as causing the derivative, but I almost always throw in or underlies or makes possible, etc. And the reason is because there are actually many different relationships that come under what we call fundamental versus derivative. It's used in a lot of different contexts. It's not always simple cause and effect. For instance, we say rationality is the fundamental. The ability to speak French is a derivative. Well, that would be the relationship of attribute to its exercise, you see, or a general capacity to its particular application. That's not the same as cause and effect in the sense that when you strike a match in a room full of gasoline, the effect is an explosion. But you can see in what way one underlies and makes possible the other. Or we can say a basic premise such as identity disqualifies consciousness will lead to and then reel off the results in the Kantian system. Now that is really a deductive consequence. Given that premise, all of those consequences follow. So it's the fundamental is the cause in the sense of at least the necessary condition, but not always the necessary and sufficient condition. In other words, rationality doesn't cause you to speak French, it makes it possible. It's one requirement, and it's in that sense that it underlies the ability to speak French. But you shouldn't be thrown off by this word cause to mean that whenever the fundamental is present, that automatically triggers the derivative, because we use it more broadly than that. The fundamental is a precondition which in normal circumstances will lead to the derivative, assuming that the other aspects involved in the derivative hold true. Now I want to give you some examples from my own thinking. I think you're probably familiar with these, but that's why they're good examples to inject right at this point of. Thinking in essentials, in a sense is broader than definitions. And the experience of it is always like this. First you're confronted by a sprawling mass of data that you can't make anything out of. Something like the list of announcements that you got at the beginning today, I mean, just goes on and on in all directions. Now what you then have to do is discard, get rid of as much as possible as non distinct and then try to look for the causal root fundamental that will tie it together. Whereas thinking in non essentials would be taking characteristics at random, whether they're distinctive or not, and. Or whether they are fundamental, whether they underlie a whole group or not. Now, in my lifetime I've done this many times, but twice I've done it in print. So on a complex example, I want to refer to each of those for a moment. The best example I had in my writing is in the discussion in the chapter in the ominous parallels dealing with Weimar culture, which I regard is by far the best, the second best chapter in that book, but the best epistemologically from this point of view. I mentioned this, I know, in my talk about Misrand, but I wanted to go a little more detail here from the point of view of stressing the essentials. I was going over all these different aspects of Weimar culture and making notes, physics and math and education and literature and painting and music, and I just had a sprawling mass of data. And of course the data doesn't come pure, it comes along with the liberal commentators interpretation of what it means. So you just have a mass of, you don't know what. And having a feeling there's some kind of tremendous common denominator here in all these fields, but I don't know what. So the first thing I have to do is start discarding. The first thing I discard is everything that people tell you this is what it means because they make everything essentially unique and distinct from everything else that you can't do any integrating. For instance, physics was presented as the modern Heisenberg. Physics was presented as devotion to measurement, empiricism and the virtue of humility. You couldn't know. Education was presented as gentleness, progressive education as gentleness, as against the harsh dogmatism of Prussia. So that was what they offered as the essential that we were gentle. And part of being gentle was we didn't force a curriculum on the kids or any knowledge on the kids or any code of behavior on the kids or even any criminal law. You went through like this with every topic, you know, you just have to throw it out. Say that does not explain it. Meanwhile, as you start discarding it, you start seeing that there is something left that is distinctive that ties all these together. Now in real life you don't always first make a list of what's distinctive and then find the fundamental. Usually what happens in most many cases is you discard and what you have left is like you just need Newton's apple. And then you suddenly see what's the common denominator, the fundamental that unites and explains them all. And in this case, as I've already told you or told an audience in another class, this was the Newton's apple in this instance was watching the streaker on TV on the Academy Award. I was with Ms. Rand. And that was the year when this guy ran my naked. And I had been thinking about my chapter on Weimar culture and I couldn't exactly put it all together, but I knew there was something the same. And Mr. Rand asked me what did I think of that. I said, well, you know, the. I certainly didn't approve of it, but it didn't, you know, mean a great deal. So she said, well what? How would you explain I said something? Well, it's completely irrational. She said, no, that's much too broad. Jane Fonda, as I remember, she said is irrational too, but there's a distinction between this type of Eddie. So then I said something like, well, it must be some stupid college prank. She said no, but they went rated panties. That was a college Pranker, swallowed goldfish, you know, but this is a different category than just a prank. So I said, well, he's exhibitionistic. He wants, you know, TV exposure and national attention. And she said, no, that wouldn't be valid. And so do quiz show guests and hosts and, you know, the celebrities that appear on them and so on. And that doesn't explain this behavior. So I could see that I was giving you all these sort of unthinking because non distinctive, nothing tailored to that as an explanation. And I could see that she was taking it very big because she was building up the armament for a real analysis here. In any event, she then went on to describe. She said, now listen, I'm going to describe the situation as it essentially is, stripping away all the non essentials. And then you tell me what it is. Here we have this solemn occasion where Hollywood is trying to be as glamorous as possible. This was still true in those days. I mean, the men had tuxedos and the women had gowns instead of strings. Their hair was on the back of their head instead of the front. There was the expectation of, you know, awards for achievement. It was like everybody was on their best behavior. The most elegant occasion. The whole country was looking in her inimitable words. Here is this preacher who wants to stick his bare ass in your face. Now what does that tell you? She said, that's not a prank or, you know, exhibitionist on tv. He wants to smash this occasion. He wants to do the exact opposite. He wants to destroy the glamour and the importance of the excitement by bringing it down to the exact opposite. The low, the vulgar, the crude. And she said, what kind of motivation can it be? It's the destruction of glamour for its own sake. And from there we got into a discussion of nihilism, of which she took the streaker as an example. And of course, as soon as she said that, I thought that's exactly what's true of all of these different fields, every one of them. The actual essence of them is the destruction of a field for the sake of destruction. Not to put something else in its place, that's better, but just to get rid of. To wipe out it. In the same way the streeter wanted to destroy glamour at the Academy Award. The physicists want to destroy law and the mathematicians want to destroy deductive certainty. And the artists want no heroes and no grammar. Everyone, interestingly, goes to the essence of the field and the essence is to destroy the essence. See, that's what's unique about nihilism. They sense the essence of a certain field, whether art or science or whatever, and then their goal becomes to destroy the field through destroying its essence. They don't prohibit literature. You can still write, but there can't be any plot, intelligible characters, syntax, etc. Not if it's to, you know, be greeted as avant garde. So the goal is to take the essential attributes of literature and obliterate them and that they do it in every field. So that is the fundamental, the one and the many. That is what integrates all of these things. And when you do understand it as vicious and corrupt as the phenomenon is that you're contemplating nihilism dominating the whole culture, it's intellectually very clarifying and satisfying because you go from just unintelligible insanity that you can't make any sense of a connection of, and you suddenly concede the same principle sweeping across everywhere. And then if you can understand that principle, you are at least you're in control intellectually of what's happening. So that, I think, is the best single example in my own experience where I had to perform this on a grand scale. There I was trying to find the essence of a culture, of one specific culture. So I wasn't defining a concept, but here again it was the same process of discarding and then uniting through some fundamental. Now I've done it one other time in print and I'm going to read you a paragraph from that because I think this will be familiar to you. This is from why Johnny Can't Think. And again, I had the same experience. That is to. First, you collect data and it's all disorganized. A lot of it is irrelevant, but you don't know what's relevant and what not, so you just take notes. So I went to this progressive institution on bank street in New York, and I'll just read you a paragraph from that because that will give you an idea of what I encountered. For those of you who don't remember or haven't read this talk, it's reprinted in the Voice of Reason. I had said that I was interested in observing how children are taught concepts, and the school obligingly directed me to three classes. The first, for 9 and 10 year olds was a group discussion of 13 Steps in Seal hunting, from cutting the hole in the ice at the start to sharing the blubber with others at the end. The teacher gave no indication of the purpose of this topic, but he did indicate that the class would later perform a play on seal hunting and perhaps even computerized the steps. The next class for 13 year olds consisted of a mock Washington hearing on the question of whether there should be an import tax on Japanese cards. Student played senators, Japanese lobbyists, Lee Iacocca and so on, and did it quite well. The teacher sat silently observing. I never learned the name of this course or of the seal hunting one. But finally I was to observe a meeting described to me as a class. At last, I thought, an academic subject. But no. The book being covered was Robert Kennedy's Thirteen A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. A typical topic for discussion was whether a surgical air strike against Cuba would have been better policy than a blockade. Now the rest of my article details other things that I found, just that I noted as I went by. And each time I tried to explain it on a more limited basis and found that's irrelevant because it doesn't explain, doesn't differentiate. For instance, the discussion on Cuba. At first I was tempted to say, well, they're giving them some current affairs. But then, you know, there's a lot of ways of giving people current affairs. So to say that they're interested in current affairs doesn't tell you anything. Yet there's something specific about getting occurring affairs by reading a book of Kennedy and discussing air tactics than the other ways that you could do it. And then the one about the Eskimos and seal hunting, I thought, well, that's obviously to teach them ethnicity, but why are they teaching it to them in this particular way? And I said there's something in common between the seal hunting one and the Cuban discussion. I didn't know what it was, but there's something in common that had nothing to do with ethnicity or current affairs. And then the same for the mock hearings. Well, they're giving them government was the idea, but again, they're giving them government in a very unique way, not even in so broad a terms as should there be import restrictions or should there be import restrictions in manufacturing. But what is the right answer when Lee iapoko comes again? Mr. Xu and they both want the price to be different, what should it be? Now, how does that tie into the seal hunting one and the Cuban one? Well, getting progressively clear to me that something crucial is omitted. And then I found the look same method where the counter only on memory. And my temptation was to say, well, this is mistaken because they count on memory. But some memory is okay, some memory is unavoidable. So why is this particular form of learning the Alphabet through memory, learning words through memory, what's wrong with that? And then I went to the science class and they were all talking about learning by doing. Well, I knew that this was doing and this is no good, but I thought, well, what's wrong with some doing? What is the essential flaw in this doing? And see, by gradually discarding all of these obvious things, I was able to get down a description, something like current events without any principles, ethnicity with no wider meaning, politics strictly in terms of concrete memory, with no abstractions to guide, doing without the knowledge of any laws to govern. And of course, if you put it that way, what leaps out in all those different formulations, it's concrete without the conceptual level, without abstraction, the anti conceptual mentality. That is the basic approach which leads to all those as manifestations. Now you could read that article if you're interested in seeing it worked out. The relevant point here though is that it was just exactly like the Weimar culture case, where you start with a mass of data you discard and discard as irrelevant. And then they did some things well, I think they said the pledge of allegiance, but I had to, you know, discard that. That's not part of this phenomenon. And there were some survivals from the older education which were good. But I never could have come to this conclusion unless I had discarded that as not distinctive. I mean, the traditional adding and subtracting and writing paragraphs and so on is not why this particular school was famous. And that's not distinctive. That had to be discarded. And then when you get to the distinctive, you try to pull out what is the fundamental that underlies and unites them all. So it is not necessarily an easy thing to do. But if you know where you're going, it's an engrossing subject. If you first steep yourself in enough data, if you try to jump too fast, you don't have enough of an inductive base to know what is distinctive and what isn't. You have to get enough. So you have at least 5 or 10 instances of it's confusing field and then see what you can do. I find personally these kind of broad integrations the single best part of philosophy. I would never have gone into philosophy if it didn't offer the possibility, once every decade of taking 20 things that have seemingly nothing in common and seeing them all as an instance of one thing. That is the supreme pleasure for me in philosophy. And that's why I feel a certain, in quotes kinship with Plato, who had this mystic vision where everything was united into one. Because if I were to go bad, I would go bad in that way rather than like an empiricist. Who just stares concretely at every percept as it goes by. There is a pleasure in integration for me, and I don't think for most people it's tremendously clarifying. And at the same time it feels like you're actually expanding your mind by you're getting smarter because you can see such esoteric things so clearly. And of course all you're doing is economizing the units by dropping out some and bringing all the others under one formulation. And I think I mentioned to you already that Ayn Rand was the world champion at this skill. I always felt that she was standing on a mountaintop and had the whole universe as the background. And whatever you would say, the radar would go out to connect it to everything that was similar and different. And you would right away come right back with what it means and where it comes from. It was completely different from what you would see from ordinary people. Now, I think I'll mention one negative example here or a few negative examples thinking in non essential, just a contrast with what we've done so far. And this is a true example also from my experience with Ms. Rand. And this I believe I've mentioned in some course, so you have to forgive me if I'm repeating it, but it's too good an example. Not to mention this was in the early 50s when I first moved to the United States. And President Truman, was He in the 50s, like 51, I think, had seized the steel mills where there was a strike on pretext of national welfare. And this at the time was, it was a major step because it had never been done. Private property was still. There was lip service to the idea that industry was sacrosanct and so on. And therefore it was a big turning point if he could get away with this seizure. And of course, Ayn Rand and her friends fought against it, conservatives in general fought against it as a monstrous president. But what we heard the other conservatives at the time saying was seared into my mind as an example of non essential faith. A lot of their commentary focused on the fact that steel is involved and steel is really crucial to the economy and must be left in private hands. And one of these people was actually convinced by an objectivist and then came back and said, well, I see that it applies to steel, but what about coal? And that was the level on which they functioned, that the essence of this event was they took over. Other people said what's wrong with this was that Truman's seizure involved the executive branch taking over the industry. And this is the proper prerogative of Congress. There was no law operating, and that's what they were fighting about. This is dictatorship by the presidency instead of by Congress. Most people are still talking about the imperial presidency, but when they walked as the imperial speaker and other ones, a lot of the Republicans were saying, the trouble is, it's the Democrats that are behind it. They are taking it away for selfish reasons and powerless. Whereas if we, the Republicans did it, it would only be in the name of the welfare of the country as a whole. And other people were saying, it's okay because he didn't steal their property, he merely temporarily took over control of it. So in other words, he behaved like Hitler rather than Stalin. Now, there was a torrent of writing and analysis, but all these people were helpless to analyze this event, to evaluate it, or to prevent its recurrence. The most they could say was, our gang will do it better, we'll do it for the public welfare. Now, if you were hearing all this and then you heard Ayn Rand's analysis by contest, you'd see what thinking in essentials is, because she saw all the details. She knew that it was Truman and the Executive and the Democrats and Steele and all the rest of it, but she swept them all aside. The first thing she did is discard all that as non distinctive and non essential. What were the essentials? What was left after she realized the exact same phenomena could take place with coal, or under the Congress, or, you know, under a new party, et cetera. So all that is just out, she discarded. And then what is the essential? Some men are producing, creating, which involves an act of independent thought. And others, the government officials involved, whoever, whatever their party or office, are directing them, not by virtue of creative skill, but by the power of a gun, the power of physical force, which is all that the government has to back up its edicts. The essence, therefore, of this instance of nationalization, she said, is the rule of force over mind. And that is the essence that would endure no matter what country you're talking about, what branch of government, what industry. And on that level, once she can integrate all these phenomena under that one principle, she can explain why the policy of force only works to paralyze and stop the minds involved, that a mind can't work under force, and that the only result therefore can be what happens in status countries, the atrophy of production, poverty, etc. And so she would reach from that one example, properly analyzed, the evil of government control, control of any industry for any purpose at any time, strictly. And that's how she Reached her whole philosophy. It's not that she had divine revelations, but she always went to the essence. And she would spend a long time, she could talk about something like the steel industry at that time for 12 hours at a time, for a week at a time, as long as she was still trying to get at what is distinctive about this and how does it relate to what the progressives did in the earlier years of this century and how does it relate to the New Deal and how does it at all was trying to strip away, discard, find what's left and then integrate it to a broader principle. And then where does that principle come from? As you know, ultimately she would tie the principle initiation of force back to something like identity disqualifies consciousness, which had come up in another discussion, you see. And that's how she finally ended up with the total philosophy. Because everything was integration through essentials and then integration of what you've already integrated. So this I think should give you good examples, some good examples of thinking in essentials. Now I've got a couple of examples here that I want to give you of thinking in non examination a non essential that are things that people really do and say and have you tell me why this is non essential. Well, one that used to be very prevalent until I guess about the, I think about the 60s when this one died out. The fundamental choice is communism versus fascism. When I first came to this country, everyone who was not a communist was automatically labeled, including me, a fascist. That was just considered a factual description. I think actually it was the Goldwater election that put an end to that because he was, whatever his deficiencies, he was obviously not a fascist. So they got the idea there must be something else besides fascism and communism. But before that time there was only those two choices. Now why is this thinking in non essential to say that? Well, you have to say, if you're thinking in the field of politics, what is the fundamental question? Because the fundamental will be that which underlies and governs all the other questions. And therefore that will be the basis on which to make essential distinctions. Now, what is the fundamental question in politics? Will it be accepted? No, not will it be accepted? A lot of bad, horrible politics, politics can be accepted. That is not the fundamental. First of all, philosophy is concerned with how government should be organized, how society should be run, not will people do it. If they don't do it, then you have to either fight them or psychoanalyze them. Is it bad? Freedom versus slavery. All right, you say freedom versus slavery is the essential, but put it another way, what is the function of the government? What is its basic role or purpose? And you have only two answers. In principle, either it's to protect individual rights or not. If it's anything other than protect individual rights, it has to be directly or indirectly infringing individual rights. And that means the alternative has to be freedom or slavery of some kind. Now then, if you want to say what is a fundamental or essential distinction in politics, you would say a system which favors rights versus one which denies rights. Capitalism versus communism are essentially different because on that one fundamental issue, the issue which defines the essence of the field, they have opposite views. But suppose you take communism and fascism and say, are they essentially different? Well, if the essence, if the fundamental question is their attitude toward individual liberty, then obviously fascism and communism are interchangeable. They are two mildly different variants of the same idea. One is against private property explicitly and the other claims to be for it, but decides that it will have all the prerogative of ownership. So it's the same thing in two different ways. One is materialist and communist, one is religious, the fascist one is internationalist, one is nationalist. But all of that, there's dozens of differences, but none of it affects what is the function of the government. Those two are just variations on the theme. And so here you have this bromide which was the worst assault I'm thinking in terms of essentials dominating political discourse particular decades today. They just are too ashamed to say it because they've decided that communism has failed too. So they don't say, you don't hear this anymore. But it really was true that your parents generation, or maybe your grandparents thought that this was self evident and there was nothing else to be but a communist or a fascism. Let me give you one more example before we take our break of a really bad thinking in essential which is not as widely known and typically comes from a staunch political conservative. His name, if you care, is M. Stanton Evans. He's associated with various periodicals. I'm not sure he's still alive, but he was at one time called me still. At one time he said the following. He was arguing, I believe it was in an article that religion is the only possible source of freedom. You know, the standard conservative idea that this country was founded on God and his God given right. But he had it worked out a little more professionally than just, you know, the people who chant on the street. This was his explanation. He gave three explanations. Three aspects of religion that separate them together make it the real source of political liberty. The first one, he says religion limits the secular authorities. And he said, for example, under the pagan civilization, for instance, in ancient Athens, they could put Socrates to death if the majority didn't like him. They considered the human mass all powerful and not subject to any higher power. Whereas he said a Christian would never permit such a thing as the death of Socrates or a religious person, because he realizes that man has an allegiance to something higher than his own desires, namely to God, and that therefore the state must also be limited and subject to those higher authorities. So that's number one. Religion limits the secular authorities. Then he went on, religion introduced the stress on the individual soul. And that's true, Christianity did do that. The idea that each individual is precious, he's made in the image of God as against. The pagans, you know, tended to be very collectivist and they would write off whole populations as ba ba, which is the way the Persians spoke. And they called them barbarians and they took slaves en masse from these countries when they went to war on the ground that these were, these were sub human creatures or they were, they were, you know, the idea that each one is an individual destruct them as simply bizarre. But the Christians introduced the idea that each individual, whether he's a slave, a master, a citizen or a foreigner, has an individual soul which is precious. And Evans argued this is a crucial legacy of religion, without which you could never have had the individualism that we have in a free country. And finally, he said religion was essential to the, what we would call a separation of powers in the government, or what he called the equipoise or diffusion of power in the government. And he said, for example, we saw in the funeral period that each class had its own definite right, not each class, but each caste had its own definite rights and responsibilities and couldn't, couldn't infringe on the rights of the next. Even the king, when he was pushed against the wall by the nobles in 1215, had to say, yes, there's certain things I can't do. I don't have all power. None of us have all power. The powers are separated down here because concentration of power is only above us, as against the totalitarian approach, you see, which is all power than the government. This is really a variant on the limit on secular authorities, but it's from the point of view of power being diffused and not in any one agency's hands. And he ascribes that to religion. Now, you see, if you leave that with enough citations and quotations, so just enough to overload your mind so you can't Retain the essence, you come away. Or many people would come away with a sort of uncomfortable feeling. Well, yeah, I guess there's a lot of things here. And religion did contribute to freedom. There's something to be said for that. And then they'll hear a lecture from an objectivist why religion is the enemy of freedom in America. Yes, something to be said to that too. And who can know? It's all a matter of pain now. What you have to do when it occasions. Think in terms of essentials and ask whether any one or all of these three criteria are essentials of freedom. In other words, do they distinguish freedom from slavery? Are they distinctive to freedom? Here's the first one. Limit on secular authorities because man is subject to higher authority. Well, suppose you have a society in which the secular authorities are really limited. Does that entail freedom? Does that distinguish a free country from the slave country? Absolutely not. It leaves open the exchange of one kind of slavery for another, namely slavery to the secular government, replaced by slavery to the church officials, to the theocratic power. So it is certainly not an essential of freedom. Now a limit on the secular authority would be really great if the reason for it was the supremacy of individual rights which man's life on earth requires and therefore government can't infringe in. The secular power is limited. But once you say the secular power is limited because we have an all powerful supernatural master, you've wiped out freedom just as bad or worse. You see, you've taken a non essential, you see something that does not distinguish freedom, but that happens to be true of freedom. Ignore what makes it essential in the context and then go on. The same analysis is applicable to, to the emphasis on the importance of the individual soul, what you call the individualist element. Now certainly it's true that in some form this is essential to freedom. They had this emphasis on the individual soul through century after century after century of statism, feudalism, theocracy. So what is the part that, why is this non essential as stated to freedom? If you say the soul is crucial and that's all you say, that in itself is not distinctive to freedom, it won't sustain freedom, and in fact it's compatible with total slavery. Yes, you're not saying individual human being. What about the body? Yes, what about the body? You say the individual human being, the soul part, you know, you could say fine, do whatever you like with your precious soul, but here on this corrupt earth, it's encased in a vicious body and therefore we need a strong dictator to curb, you know, your animal Impulses and your ugly desires for physical wealth, et cetera and so on. Now, if you call emphasis on the soul by itself individualism, then individualism has nothing to do with freedom. It's like a psychological respect for an internal principle that has no relevance to this life. Now, when would stress on the individual be essential to freedom? When the individual means not the disembodied soul, the soul body dichotomy, but the human being, the integration of soul and body, the opposite of the mind body dichotomy. In other words, when it was part of a this worldly secular philosophy and not an otherworldly two reality clashing philosophy. As to the diffusion of power argument, this is the idea that if you have 10 masters, each with one tenth of the power over you, then you're really free because none of them has 100%. Obviously that 10 masters does not change the situation. And what is the real life example of this? The conservatives to this day are. I have met conservatives whose attitude is they hope that the Supreme Court invalidates abortion because that is properly a matter to be regulated by by the state. And they're upholding liberty because liberty means the diffusion of power and therefore we should give it to the states to decide that is that exact same mentality that is utterly thinking in non essential everything good about the things he quotes. The emphasis on the individual and diffusion of power, etc. Is good only in a context when it's an aspect or an expression of one fundamental, namely respect for man's rights, which in turn rests on a philosophy of reason, which in turn is the opposite of religion. So he's taking non essentials to bring him in a seemingly plausible way to the exact opposite of the truth and coming to the conclusion that religion is the mainstay of freedom. Now, if you see this, you can see why it's important that you know how to think in essentials and spot it when somebody is not doing it. Because otherwise there can be terrific plausibility, especially if you read rapidly, just get the gist of it, to the conclusion these people come to. Now, we're going to take a break, but I want to give you a slight assignment for this. Five minutes. Tell me what is essential to the philosophy of objectivism? What is the essence of objectivism? Okay, you have five minutes to figure that out. So we've actually taken a seven minute break. Seven and a half. So theoretically I should finish at 12:30. Two and a half. Now I've got the fan here, but I have to keep everything down. I gave you the question as an exercise, what is the essence of objectives? And I think I'll start to spare you this first early stages by giving you some answers that I have heard explicitly or implicitly from people across the years. Answers which I think I can say without tipping off my hand too much, are inadequate. Objectivism involves an intense passion for architecture in New York City. What's wrong with that? I mean, one word that is not the essence of Objectivism, but rather what a derivative. It's not even a derivative. It's nonessential that it follows from non essential. Well, anything that is nonessential is nonessential. But I want to know what this is positive. And so it's an example of one character created from the point of view of an Objectivist philosophy. It's a concrete, and there would be thousands of possible applications which would not involve New York before New York was ever even discovered or invented before even architecture was discovered. So to take one person and say, that's Objectivism. A lot of people did that with Ms. Rand. Whatever she liked is Objectivism. Whatever she didn't is not. And she objected to that as much as anybody else, because then that is truly what you would call a cult. Whereas a philosophy has certain ideas, not certain individuals that are the essence. Certain individuals can be magnificent representatives, eloquent, you know, beautiful, inspiring. But the essence has to be of a philosophy, has to be its idea. All right, how about this is another one I had suggested. Objectivism is a consistent philosophy based on reality. Well, it's abstract. You say, yes, it's abstract, but any philosophy, whatever you say is going to be abstract. There's something a little more wrong with this than just that it's abstract. Suppose a man comes into the room and says to you, I got a great philosophy. And you say, why is it, he says, completely true reality, no contradictions anywhere. You say, okay, wait, what is it? He says, that's it. That's the essence of my philosophy. Now, technically speaking, the description I gave you is a compliment, not an essence. That doesn't tell you anything about the philosophy. It's just your response assessment that it's a nice philosophy. Now here's a third one. Is this essential to Objectivism? Is aradic. You have to watch your word here. Not, is this essential to. Is this the essence of Objectivism? It starts with existence exists, and consciousness is the faculty of perceiving. Is that the essence? What are those axioms? Those are the axioms, but they don't yet tell you the essence. Now, presumably, those axioms that are properly developed will lead to something that distinguishes this philosophy from everything else and that integrates all of its elements, which will be the essence. But the statement of the axioms itself does not make apparent what that essence is. Now, a lot of people say, I believe that something existed that I'm conscious of it. What's that got to do with capitalism or all the rest of it? Well, then let's try this. If the essence is not a concrete, it's not a complement, it's not the axioms. What about if I did the following? Objectivism is the philosophy which advocates reality. Reason is man's only means of knowledge, rational self interest, capitalism and romantic art, and believes that man has the ability to integrate all of these through the power of free will. And also the criminal should be punished. Independence is an important virtue, but it's the derivative of rationality. And the census are valid. And that's it. That's the essence. That's a summary, that's a list. That is not the essence. Now, in you know in what way the child's definition of math can be very primitive because in his context of differentiates. So you could say a thing that moves and makes noises, and that's okay for a child. In the same way, if I appear on a TV show and they ask me, what's the essence of objectivism? I'll say it stands for reason and selfishness, or reason selfishness and capitalism. Because to them in that context, they never heard of that combination. And it immediately differentiate the for everything else they know. Whereas if I told them the real essence, it would be a complete blank. And in the 12 seconds that a TV interview gives you, you'd have no time to explain. So I give. In effect, we often give in writing this childlike definition, which is really not the essential. The essence is just an essentialized description. But we want the essence. Seriously, as philosophy students, if we're going to get to the essence, the first thing we have to do is discard as not relevant. Well, of course we discard that. You have to have orange hair. We love architecture in New York. What about being against a woman president? I'm rambling strongly against a woman president. Is that a part of the essay Objectivism? Absolutely not. You discard that. A lot of people are against that or who are not objectivists. And she could have never written on that question, and objectivism would have been unaffected. And so the fact that you feel strongly that you disagree with her doesn't mean you disagree with Objectivism unless the reason that you disagree is because you feel that that's the perfect expression of asa, which you really hate, and take it on its face value, we discard that. So we restrict ourselves by this means two seemingly distinctive tenets. Capitalism, egoism, reason, reality. Well, to some extent that's a step, because we're taking each field of philosophy and condensing it down to its essential at the start. But the problem is none of these terms are the essence as we have stated it. It doesn't. It's not distinctive as stated. For instance, if I say we advocate reality, well, that will distinguish Objectivism, say, from pragmatism, but it certainly won't distinguish objectivism from Plato and Aristotle and the whole classic tradition, who were very strong, everybody before Kant was for reality. Or if you say you're for reason, or what exactly is that? Plato as a rationalist, Hegel is a rationalist, etc. So we have not yet, by using these general terms, indicated what is distinction. Nor have we united this list. The point we already made via a fundamental. Again, it's back to a list and not an essence. Well, then we have to decide what element within a philosophy is the most fundamental that explains the rest. Now, if you have any knowledge, you know it's not ethics and politics or aesthetics. So your choice comes down to metaphysics are epistemology and according to objectivism, which is the more fundamental of the two, insofar as you can separate epistemology. Epistemology, because that governs the method by which you think and therefore determines your conclusions in all fields, even including metaphysics. Now, we indicated in our preliminary approach here that reason is the key objective of this concept, epistemology, and we distinguish that therefore from mystics and skeptics. But what is really distinctive about the objectivist view of reason? Is it that we utilize the senses as the basis of our conclusion? No, that is stated by many people, certainly by Aristotle and others. Is it that we think it's very important to form concepts the way Princess, Socrates and Plato, who were the discoverers of concepts, they thought it was crucial to form concepts? No, that's not distinctive to Objectivism. What is distinctive to the objectivist view of reason that would set it apart from everything else and at the same time explain all the rest of the philosophy? One thing only the back. Well, what's the name for that? An objective theory of concept. Objective theory of concept. That is what is distinctive, as I argued in my book, what distinguishes Objectivism even from Aristotle? The objective versus the intrinsic and the subjective. And as I Also argued in my book that of what underlies everything else, that Objectivism, doctrines in art, in objective values and politics, and objective rights, and even in metaphysics, we're counting on an objective method to validate things like causality and so on. So the essence, if I were asked to speak without having to popularize, but you couldn't say this on a TV show because the host wouldn't even know the word concept, let alone a jacket. The essence, I would say, though, in a technical context, is the objectivist theory of the objective, rather theory of concept formation. That's what sets it all apart, and that's what leads to the rest. And that's why, in my view, the most important of Mr. Ann's books from the point of view of philosophy is Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. If she had not left that book, but had left Atlas, it would be like leaving all the consequences brilliantly delineated and the root from which they grew unstated. And I don't think it would have had a chance unless someone came along with the genius to see it. But luckily, I don't think luckily, because she wouldn't have seen the consequences if you have implicitly in these, knowing the bait, she didn't do the whole thing. All right, that gives you an idea of how you analyze the essence of a philosophy. And if you can actually see how this theory of concept underlies all the rest of it, which is exactly the mission I gave in my book. The mission I gave to myself was not just present Objectivism, but present it all from the angle of the theory of concepts as the root. And therefore my book is deliberately what I would call an essentialized presentation of Objectivism. I left out everything that was not necessary to establish the objective theory of concepts and its role everywhere else. That's all I wrote about. So that's a good book from that point of view. Now, I want to take a different kind of exercise. Now, some of these exercises are fairly time consuming, so I suppose I should give you a choice to ask questions. But I think some of them are pretty helpful. So I think I'm going to preempt part of the question period today with that is you're going to have a whole hour tomorrow, so maybe we'll get through these a little faster. But some of these I know classes have found helpful, so I like to give them to you. Let's take the essence of a person. Does that interest you? As a topic that has to be of interest because you deal with people all the time and you Deal with yourself all the time. And having a correct view of yourself or of others is one of the crucial problems in life. And that means knowing what's essential and what isn't. And again, it's the same process that we've been using to reach definitions, the essence of a book, the essence of a philosophy. Now I'm going to do it on a fictional character from the Foundry, because the great thing about fiction as an example is all the relevant facts are given and known. Now if I take a real life person like Ross Perot and you ask me what is the essence? I say I haven't a clue because I don't even know the facts yet. I know a few contradictory things and a few generalities and a couple of good points and a couple of terrible points and charges that I don't know whether he can refute or not. And it's all without any context or idea at all. Therefore I haven't a clue even as a description of him, let alone what is essential. But once you read the fact that you know everything there is to know about these characters, if the characterization is properly given as it is by a romantic novelist. So I want to pick a non obvious character, not Aurora. I want to pick Dominique and ask what is the essence of Dominique? Now, of course, you are asking them what distinguishes her? Well, the first question is, distinguishes her from whom? Well, let's start with the easiest. What distinguishes her from Roy, which I think is the easiest to start with. You could start anywhere, but you get to contrast an error with somebody who's correct is easier. And then you can contrast the error with other types of error. Anyway, I'll start by asking how would I distinguish Dominique from Rohr? Well, of course there's a lot of things that are occurring. She's female, he's male, but that's not relevant here. Those have to be discarded because we're concerned with her character. Now if I was a Marxist, I would have to say, well, he's poor and she's rich, so that makes the difference with her character. But. But I discard that as non essential because they don't hold that type of view. Or he's an architect and she's a journalist. All that is out. All those are the superficial type of things that you get rid of at the very beginning. We're interested in their character, their thoughts, their ideas, their life attitudes. Well, at this point I just made a list, as it would occur to me, within the context of their attitudes, the differences, because I'm trying to differentiate Dominique from Rourke. So this is the list exactly as it came. Rourke works. Dominique has no real career. That's certainly relevant. It's not yet a statement of the essential, but it's a fact that is going to be relevant. Roark builds. Dominique tears down. Well, she tears down order. She tries to defeat him. She's afraid of what's going to happen to the things he built. Rorke doesn't notice people. Dominique, I remember immediately can't bear the idea that he's in the elevator with somebody else. Somebody else's eyes are looking at it. She feels something about people is bad and she can't stand. But there are big issues. Rourke creates objects of beauty. I'm saying the same thing from different angles. You see, Dominique sees this beautiful statue and throws it down the airship. Rorke loves her. She loves him and marries his enemies. Now, I try to abstract now, keeping all that data. There's a lot more if you want to go into detail in mind. What is the common denominator of one side versus the other? The fundamental that unites them all? It obviously has something to do with their attitude to values. They have two opposite attitudes to values. Your I can get what I want. It's worth struggling. People can't affect it. The Universe is, in Mr. Ann's terms, bad, evil. And Dominic's attitude is it's impossible to achieve the good. All you'll do is desecrate it. If you try, people hold some terrible power to stop you. The universe is malevolent. Okay, now we've reached that mark. What can we say then? The essence of Dominique is that she is a malevolent universer. Yes or no? The level of universe does not capture Dominique yet. It's part of what's essential to her. But it's not the whole answer. Because we can think of characters that are radically different from Dominique, but who share the same broad abstraction that they are malevolent universe. Who else in the novel represents or illustrates the malevolent universe? Decide to dominate? Certainly. And Winan and even Keating. They are all malevolent. Now, who should we try to distinguish Dominique from in order to get at the key to her? Now, before you tell me, let me give you this general rule of guidance. When you want to distinguish classified man, you don't call him the rational solid, right? You want to put him in the category that's closest to him and then differentiate within that. So you keep all of your knowledge about him going and you don't get thrown off into, well, he's a solid Therefore, his essence is that he's not full of hot air. So when you want to differentiate, you differentiate from the character that's the closest, not from the one that's the farthest. Now, we did that with Rorke in one way, because they both have this passionate attitude toward values, and that was the common denominator. But Now I'm Keating 2 in Wynin, which is the closest to Dominique Wynin. So we have to differentiate now Dominique from Wynin. And when we do that, we will come up with the essence of the character. Now, here again, I just made myself a list of obvious points. Winan is after power. Dominique wants independence, but through solitude, aloofness. Wyman has a driving purpose, a career which is a passion to him. Dominique does not. Wynan tries to break men of genius, great individuals. Dominique thinks it's awful, but she tries to defeat Rorke in her own way. Wyatt ends up defeated and broken. Dominique ends up converted and saved. Now, what is the difference then? They're both malevolent universes. They both believe that values, the good, has no chance in an evil world. But they come to two different conclusions on that basis. She comes to the conclusion, well, then you can't succeed. You may as well not try, withdraw, flee from others, despise them, and just be paralyzed. And he comes to the conclusion, yes, you can succeed, succeed in this kind of world. If what? If you conquer those who have the evil power, if you can rule them, then the universe is free again for you to achieve your value. And therefore he tries to conquer others to do which, of course, he has to accept their terms, put out newspapers and please them. He has to try to beat them at their own game. And anytime he sees an authentic individualist who is not after power, he has to prove that that person is a fake. There can't be such a person, because then his own metaphysics is wrong, that you could succeed by that mean. So they each have the malevolent universe. But you could put it this way. They represent two opposite sides of the mind, body, dichotomy. Within the malevolent universe, wine is the body, or the practical side. He knows what he's doing is not right, not good, not noble. But his attitude is nobility is a myth. There is no such thing in this world. You have to be realistic. So he's like the practical side, and Dominic is the soul or mind side, or the moral side of the dichotomy. And her life is actually total renunciation, just like the medieval saints. She says she's going to do what's right. And what's right is to protect the good. And to protect the good, you don't create it or try to get rid of it when it's created because it's going to be murderously destroyed even worse later. So she carries out morality as she sees it to the extreme and he carries her back to Cali, both of those based on the malevolent universe definition. And that's why Wynan takes actions in reality which are evil. And therefore in the logic of his life course, he's going to have to be defeated and lose. Whereas Dominic's flaws are only in default what she has not yet done or achieved with her life. And that's why there's still a chance for her in reality to be saved when she gets another to put the case together. So I would say on this basis, the essence of Dominique is she is an idealistic malevolent universe. And that contrasted with Rourke and with Wynan. And of course by this point you know obviously that she's not Keating, because Keating has no ideal, he's just a secondhand cipher. And he certainly contrasted with Touhy, who not only has no idea his ideal is to destroy ideals, he's an anti idealist, which is much worse than anybody else in the book. Now, I don't know if you find this self evident or helpful or what, but I thought when I first worked it out that it's helpful because it gives you a simplified pattern in a case where you know all of the concrete, the method by which depend on what is the essence of a character. And that method is continuous differentiation and then abstraction of the fundamental and then further differentiation and abstraction until you feel all the data in front of you or all the data that's relevant is explained and intelligent. And at that point you have the essence of a character. Now it's much harder to do on a real person because a proper author gives you only significant detail, but a person gives you everything. He's just, you know, what he likes for breakfast is thrown on the table along with everything else. So you have to do an infinite amount of discarding on a real person relative to a character before you get to the essential because you're drowned with so many details. So you have to constantly be on the lookout for does this count or not? And usually you have three categories. I dismissed this. This is obviously significant. Like if he picks up the butcher knife, such and such. I don't know, I'll put that on hold. I don't Know what it means that he keeps scratching his ear and sticking his tongue up or whatever. Now, if you don't mind a one minute autobiographical comment, I'll tell you what I would do on myself in relation to my history, at least in relation to Dominique. And it's interesting because when I read the novel as a teenager, I was most personally identified with Dominique. She was a character that I sympathized with and most felt closest to and most wanted to know what happened to her. So did I have the same essence as her? Well, yes and no. I certainly was an idealist and I certainly was a malevolent universer as a teenager. So in that two respects, I was exactly like Dominique. But I had one difference that I didn't like about her or not I didn't like because I understood, but that I couldn't swear with what I wanted. I thought productiveness was an enormous value, extremely important. And I couldn't imagine the idea of just standing by saying everything is awful. And of course, I couldn't sympathize with Wyan's idea of power. So I figured my own way out of this dilemma, which was find a productive field that is immune to the evil of the world where you can be fully productive and they can't get you or destroy you. And that, to me was the world of philosophy. That's true. That's the tragic truth. That's what attracted me to philosophy. Of course I was interested in the questions and I was intelligent. But this is what set the seal, was this was a world where you could pursue truth apart from the reality which is ruled by evil. Now, of course, that very motivation being mixed, broad mixed consequences. I learned a lot of good things, but I fell completely into the trap of rationalism. I was completely right for that. Because philosophy to me was this world that you thought about detached from the real world. So that's when I started thinking by deduction from one idea to the other to the other. And then, of course, it came as a revelation to me that this was all wrong. But you see, the motive from which you choose a field right away starts corrupting knowledge of the field. But then the happy ending is because I chose the field of philosophy with emphasis on epistemology and had Ayn Rand as a teacher. The field finally became self correcting for me. It corrected its own error by teaching me the right epistemology, after which I could get rid of rationalism and then come back to reality and start over from scratch. But that's part of the reason why it took me, 40 years. I shouldn't, shouldn't take you that long. But I'm simply saying from the point of view of defining in terms of essentials, that little precis that I gave of my life, I think captures my development in essentials. And it does so by again the same method, differentiating me from Dominique and Wynne and then trying to see what is the combination. And I really had a direct contradiction as the combination ideals and work and malevolence. And so I was forced into a certain path as a result of it. Now, I'm not boasting about that, obviously, but I'm not ashamed of it either because I did the best I could and I've proven that by the rest of my life. So you can take that for what it's worth. Now, there's a couple other topics that I want to cover here. That one is on the brochure and that is how to translate from English to essentials. Now, there is an ordinary language to essentials. Now, I don't mean that you should always, every time you hear a sentence, rewrite it as it would be if you had your essentialized spectacles on. You were looking just for the square sometimes, many times. There's no point in that, you know, if you say I like orange juice, you don't have to say nutrition is essential to survival, you know, but sometimes it's helpful to take a point when you're thinking about it and ask yourself what is the essential statement of this idea? And I've just jotted down a few here out of an endless number just to give you the indication of it. Here's a true statement in non essential form. Competition keeps prices down. That's the statement I'd be economically now, that's fine. But if that's all you know, or all the legislators know and they want to keep prices down and they want to increase competition, what does that like an invitation to let's have price controls, but more likely let's have antitrust legislation to make sure we have lots of competition. That's how the Republicans in 1890 thought. Basically they saw competition as good because it keeps prices down, so let's have more competition. Now, if they saw that same statement in essentialized terms, I want you to give me a three word statement sentence which will tell you what the essence of competition is in this conduct. Is it competition among powerlusters? Is it competition among what? Among what kind of person? Producers? Well, is producer, anybody who works anywhere in the world. It's competition among people who are left free to produce. Right. So then what the. The essence of that condition is competition. The essence there that keeps the price down is the freedom that underlies and makes possible the kind of production that makes possible the kind of competition that keeps prices down. And what is another name, a deeper name for keeping prices down, which also includes more goods are available, less effort is required to get them, et cetera? Prosperity. No, no, that's the system. But what is the stuff called that you buy at lower prices and get more of wealth? So competition keeps prices down. Essentialized translates into freedom, promotes wealth. Now, you don't have to do that all the time. There are times when it's important to focus on competition. But you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to see that prices is not just a mechanism for adjusting supply and demand. That's we're talking about wealth. And you have to see the competition is not just some, you know, economic interrelationship. It's an aspect of freedom. Now here I'm going to give you another one, and I want you to translate this. This happens to be a false statement, but I want you to translate it into what it's really saying. Religion makes life exciting. Oh, that's very common. You must have heard that. One form or another, we have this humdrum, prosaic world where everything is, you know, figured out in scientific and so on. Whereas religion gives us a whole, you know, a whole exciting new dimension of the unexpected, the unpredictable of poldergeist everything. Now, what would be an essentialized restatement of that? Now you can think. Obviously not there's anything wrong with that because Russian roulette makes life exciting as long as it laughs. What does a person mean by exciting? Exciting in this context, he obviously doesn't mean a cheap thrill. He means what it introduces, the arbitrary. No, no. What does this person mean? You're giving me your critique of it, but I want to know what would he mean by exciting when you press it down? He doesn't mean on a serious level, just the thrill of some momentary excitement. It's the idea that makes life important. It makes it meaningful. It makes it what? Motivation? By fear. No, you're giving me. You're answering my criticism. I'm not trying to criticize. I'm just trying to translate. I'm not trying to say what's wrong with this statement. I want to say, what is he trying to get at when he says religion makes life exciting? What is the deepest, most essential term for what he is putting in popular terminology as excitement? Or meaningful or significance or importance, fulfillment, purpose. Purpose. Or even more broadly valued. His idea is religion provides life with values in the significant sense. You know, not just crude material values, but real values. That's the meaning of exciting. And now, what is. What does he mean by religion? What is religion in its essence? In its essence. Not necessarily in his statement, but in its essence. No, religion is a type of philosophy. What type of philosophy? A philosophy that rejects reason, that's essentially based on faith. So religion makes life exciting. Translate that into its essence, and it would be reasonable. Is incompatible with values. Now, if you think of it in those terms, you have a much better context to know what to do with it. Now, I'll give you one more. Humility in ideological matters makes social existence safe and secure. You know, the idea that if everybody went around saying they have the real answers, everybody would be a dictator and try to force the answers down everybody else's throat. This is the standard liberal line. But if we're all humble, we realize we don't know the answers, nobody has the answers, then we can get along together perfectly well. We each have our own opinion, but nobody tries to force others. And so we have a tranquil, safe and secure life. Now, this is a con of bromide. They don't always use the word humility, but sometimes they do. Humility in ideological matters make social existence tranquil, safe, secure. Now, what does that translate into? Inessentialized humility in ideological matters really is what. Yes. Skepticism. Skepticism. The inability to know. Ignorance. Right. And what is a tranquil or social existence? What would be the alternative to it? Why we're, you know, enslaved and wrecked and destroyed. You can't go on. So what this is really saying is ignorance is an essential of survival. Or put another way, the choice in life is cognition or survival. Now, if anybody came out with that, he'd be laughed off the floor. And yet that's what it means. And there's thousands of editorials, but they get away with it by not putting it in a centralized terms. So what you should try to do, where it's appropriate, is try to find, look through the essence. That's why Ayra has such a terrific mind. One of the things she did is whenever was appropriate, she could translate. You would say X, and she would say, in other words, Y. And your reaction would be, oh, no, I don't mean. Well, maybe I did. And you find out that that's what you meant. You didn't have a clue that that's what you meant. But she could take that right away and translate into the essential. That is a skill that can be acquired. But it takes a lot of practice and takes a lot of, I would say, personal tutoring from somebody who can keep catching you decade after decade until finally you pick them up. Now, I've got only about 10 minutes and I had one other thing I wanted to do, but I think I'm going to give you a question period of time. What I was going to do, you can have me do this tomorrow in the question period, if you want, was tell you how if I were, as I am, in charge of signing a contract to do a movie of Atlas Shrugged, how I would determine what aspects of the production it is essential that I control and which not. And I actually have that worked out here as part of this course. But I think I'll save it so you get some questions and if anybody's interested in that, you can ask me tomorrow. So we'll take questions now. We have about eight or nine minutes. In your example on nihilism, is it sufficient just to go down to it as far as identifying that all these things are nihilistic? Don't you need to go down and find the cause of nihilism? The question is, is it sufficient to just abstract that what's common to all these examples is nihilism in the Weimar culture case? Don't you have to also go to what underlies what is this basic philosophic cause? My answer to that is it's all contextual. It entirely depends on what you know. Suppose you are just, you know, you're not starting out with a knowledge of Kant, a knowledge of Objectivism. You're just plugged, you know, into this culture and you see that it has differences from the things that you saw when you were a child. If you could get to the point of saying nihilism, you would, even if you had no idea why, you would have some tremendous advantages. First of all, you would have made sense within your own context what is going on. And then you would have made precise what exactly you want to know. Where could nihilism come from? What could lead to it on this broader scale? And then you'd have to investigate and say what kind of subject could affect the whole philosophy. It can't just be music or science or math or whichever. And then you would encounter the subject of philosophy. There must be something in here that is able to be so all pervasive. What could possibly lead to that? Well, when did it start? You see, it started in the late 19th century. Who was the dominant influence and what did he teach? Little by little, if you pursued it and you agree, and on top of it, you would get down to what type of basic philosophy leads to Hagenow values and therefore to nihilism across the culture. But you couldn't say, as you imply in your question, you must do this because you can't say must where it's impossible. You can only go as far as you can go. At any point, you say, this is the common denominator and the cause. I don't know at this point, but within my context, something has to produce this. And I'll keep looking, you see? So it's nice to be able to integrate it with all the rest, but if you can't, you keep it hanging there with the idea. I know this much and I'm very eager to integrate, but I don't know what to yet. So I'm looking around. That's just exactly like Rourke with the D, you know, at the beginning where he saw something's the matter with the D, he doesn't function the way I do it. He couldn't. Why? He couldn't put his finger on it. Well, he couldn't integrate it, but he didn't therefore throw it out or make up false explanation. He left it specifically as not yet understood, wait for more information, you know, and then he put it all together. So that's how I would answer that. Yes. Where in 1992 can we find the private tutoring 1/10? 1/10? 1/30 of what you had with Ayn Rand? I'm sorry, I don't know any answer to that question. Where in 1992 can you get the private tutoring 110 or 1 30th that I got from Ayn Rand? I wish I knew. Certainly not from me neither. Zenona. I wouldn't make comparisons of myself to her, but I don't do it anyway, so you have to. What I would suggest is that you contact Dr. Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute, who knows all the experts in objectivism. Several are in this room and they could certainly make a terrific start. And I don't want to cause any ill feeling by singing out any one person, but if you're interested, I think that is available, but on a commercial basis. Okay. Yes, Garam. When you were comparing some of the traits of Winan to Dominique, I would have taken his art gallery as an indication of strong stream of idealism. Now, what's. Obviously I'm making some mistake there. No, you're not making a mistake. That's A good question. Gary says if he was making lists, he would have put down wine. Is Arkel as an example of a strong streak of idealism in him, and isn't that a mistake on his part? No, certainly not. And I could counter that with Dominique. She was which. Did she just live in a. In a desert island and be lonely? The fate of the world. Despite her view, she was taking action all the time she was writing columns, she was denouncing these people. She was, you know, she was trying to protect Rourke in all the practical ways she could, at the same time trying to destroy him. So she certainly. The reason you're interested in her in a character is because she's such a decisive actor, and yet her philosophy is action is useless. And the reason you can sympathize with Wynan is because he is such an idealist, despite the fact that he disavows idealists. So what you have to say is these are both people who have a true mind body dichotomy. And to have that, you can't have it 100%. So the better part of it pushes them into the other side of it. You know, by necessity, if you were purely the power luster, you'd have to be like Tui or Hitler. It wouldn't be wine. And if you were purely, you know, the woman who sits back and observes the passing folly, that would be Ivy Starnes in Adelaide, it wouldn't be dominant. So you have to take into account the context that these are two people who are essentially honest. And being essentially honest, they cannot escape the other part of the dichotomies, that they're caught in a contradiction. But that still doesn't mean there isn't a difference in their emphasis on the path they try to follow. See, I took that for granted. But if I wrote it, I think you're making a correct amendment. I'd have to say, I'd have to put down, to begin with, I'm distinguishing the honest characters from the dishonest ones. And then I would have Rourke, Dominique and Wynan, who I believe was honest. You see. Do you understand? My answer, therefore has two parts that plus the issue that you cannot really specialize completely, so you have to contradict yourself. And if you have any virtue, that virtue will make you take the good elements of the other side to some extent somewhere. So would they right to say that this is one of the reasons you would. You would compare her to him in the first place versus her to Heidi Stark? Oh, absolutely. That's why I. He's the closest to her because they're both good characters. And she says in the book somewhere she has the strange feeling that committed the same treason. She says to Winan. So the author is obviously pointing out to you, you're supposed to draw a message or draw a moral here, but, you know, a lot of people don't. A lot of people think wine is dishonest, which is absolutely not Iran's intention. In fact, she told me once that the only time on the whole Fountainhead that she ever cried while she was writing was in Rourke's final farewell to Wyman. That she was crying as she was writing it because she had such great admiration for Wyman as a character and she thought his mistake was so tragic. So he was certainly in no sense intended to come across as an evil character. In fact, when the time came to do his worst, namely to break Rorke, he couldn't do it. He tried, and he simply was disarmed. He was unable to do it. And that showed, you see, that he had virtue to the point that even having lived the life he did, the respect for value took over. And that's what basically redeemed him. But it was too late. Well, with that, we are now exactly two and a half minutes over, so thank you very much, and I'll send it to.