"Volition as a Means to Clarity" by Leonard Peikoff

I have to start by saying, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. What I'm going to be offering in these two weeks is the remnants of a seminar which I gave in 1985. This is a seminar that was a three city operation. I had a group in my office in California. I had a larger group on the telephone, a speakerphone in New York and a small group in Boston. And we had a full fledged discussion group with these three cities. And everybody got to recognize everybody's voice. And it worked out to be very valuable because it took very bright students in all three cities. So I had like the cream of the crop. And a lot of good points came out of it. The best points and the ones that I was 100% certain of, I put into the book Objectivism, the Philosophy of Iran. What is left is what you're going to be getting in this course. I did announce this course with this content, essentially in 1985, right after the seminar was given. Unfortunately, I announced it in California and picked a day when Californians can't come, not knowing the customs, the local customs there. So it never did get to be given. This is the first time as an organized mini course. I call it the Art of Thinking. The subtitle, how to Apply Objectivist Epistemology to One's Own Mental Processes. I think I'll just start by reading a few paragraphs from the original brochure because that tells you as tersely as possible what I had in mind for this course. Epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is a practical subject. Its concern is to guide man's mind and thereby make his cognitive processes clear and efficient. Many people, however, regard the subject as floating abstractions. To direct their thinking, they rely on a mixture of common sense, unidentified childhood and college habits, and groping, trial and error. The present course aims to remedy this situation, to restore epistemology to its proper human function, and I add, parenthetically, within the limits possible in six seminars, because this could be six encyclopedias. The purpose of the course is to teach the student how to make the principles of objectivist epistemology the actual guide of his own daily thought processes. So it's a course in what to do with your mind during an act of thought, when and how. And in that sense, it's a practical course based on the resources of an overall rational philosophy. And I hope the result, even of the brief discussions that we're able to have will be to some extent, increased mental efficacy, firmer philosophic conviction, greater ease in solving intellectual problems, and a fuller development of Your intellectual potential. Now, the course is partly new, theory building, of course, on previous books and courses, and part exercises. Now, the three main prerequisites are my own book on Objectivism and the philosophy of Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology in at least the first edition, if not the second, and Atlas Shrugged. If you're unfamiliar thoroughly with one of those three, a lot of this is going to go over your head. But I assume paying these kind of prices and traveling these distances and having the interest that that must imply you couldn't have missed one of those three. I'm making a point, however, of omitting topics which are crucial to the theme, but which have been covered intensively elsewhere. So, for instance, I'm staying away from rationalism versus empiricism in this course because I've given a whole course basically on that in the Understanding Objectivism course. So I'm going to try to cover topics which, although they're not total revelations to you, will be developed in new ways to a new extent than you've heard before. Our focus will be positive, the proper thinking methods. But I'm going to give a lot of examples of improper thinking methods to clarify the correct methods, by contrast. And I'm going to try to take my examples not from other philosophers so much as from real life, and range across. I don't include them in real life, range across areas such as politics, art, science, and the movies. So it will have a real practical meaning to you. Now, as you've seen from the brochure, I've divided into six topics. The order here is not hierarchical. The order is. There is no order. I started from the beginning and I went until I ran out. This material is not at the point yet of the organized hierarchically. If it were, I could write a book on it. The first one, which I want to start with, which I want to do today, is volition. You can look at your programs volition as a means to clarity. Now, we know the conceptual level is volitional and that that is the key to thought. And I want to emphasize this at the outset of this series by telling you a new function of volition that I have not discussed in any previous lectures. Not just that you should focus or not and why that's indispensable, and so on, but in what way you can use volition in some cases as a solution to your intellectual problems. That's why we're going to start with. Because the first thing in learning to think clearly is to know what is and is not in your control, when you should be asking questions and when you should be simply engaging in an act of will. So that's where we're going to start. Now then, for the next time, just to give you the overall structure here, the question will become, well, now, what do you do positively with your will, now that you have it in your control and you know you're going to use it? And that takes us to the idea of thought as integration. That's a new idea in the sense that I will be presenting it. All aspects of thought are nothing but forms of integration. And then the discussion of hierarchy will be discussed as a form of integration. And then we'll have some exercises in practicing the grasp of hierarchy. But really, the idea of number two could just as well be called integration as hierarchy. It's the essence of what thought is. And then three and four are specifications of that three tells you how to integrate in one way by forming and thinking in terms of essentials, and four tells you how to integrate in another related way by thinking in terms of principles. And both of these are concerned respectively, with what is an essential, not just a definitional essential, like the definition of man, but the essential of a narrow concrete, like the essential of a movie or of a book or of a person. So it's a broader use of essential, although they're related to the definitional use. And similarly with principles, we're going to define what is a principle, how do you distinguish a principle from a generalization, and how does it work to promote integration and enable you to think? And having done this much, we're going to finally cash in with what final state you get as a reward. If you use your free will correctly and you work to integrate and use essentials, and you use principles, you can then say that you are certain. Now, everybody in this room I know is already convinced completely that you're certain. And you're right, of course. But certainty turns out, judging by my seminars, to be a very treacherous topic for many Objectivists. Obviously, I get bombarded by bright students by question after question, all of which have in common. They can't get the idea of contextual certainty. And one way or the other, they're trying to slip around that or digest it or disintegrate it into something else. So I put some of the typical questions that I get asked, and I'm going to cover these questions. You'll see when we go through it, that what's common to them all is the inability to grasp what contextual certainty that's why people think they have to say, atlas Shrugged is a great novel in the present context of knowledge. Now what's wrong with that? Obviously you don't have to go around saying, I'm giving a lecture now in the present context of knowledge somewhere, you don't have to say that. And yet all knowledge is contextual. There are eight or ten questions of that sort which people have. And that brings us really to the formal end. The last is in the nature of a. P.S. this is the sixth of the six lectures. I'm calling that thinking versus writing. Writing is one expression of thought or one tool of thought. It is not synonymous with thought. And of course, thinking went on for eons before writing was developed. Thinking requires words, but the passage through written words was a much later historical stage and many people do not make this distinction. And they think that the only way to understand something is by writing. And writing is a difficult skill. It would be analogous to saying the only way to understand something is by painting it or expressing it in architectural form. And that is an impossibility. So what you have to do is have a sharp distinction in your mind. What is it to think, to understand, to get clear in your own mind. And then as a completely separate question, now that I have this clarity, how do I get it down on paper objectively? How do I write it? Now, anybody interested in writing will find in writing anything, even a letter to the editor, let alone beyond, should get some value out of this. But this is more a how to lecture as I'll give a little theory. And then what I want from you more in that number six is what practical problems do you have when you try to express yourself in writing? Any tips or clues that you need or any snarls that you're into in learning to express ideas in writing? I would like you to tell me. And in that one case I will accept pre written questions before the lecture. You can hand them in anytime this week or next week. The others will just take the questions as they come up. But in this case I want to try to give you practically as much guidance as possible so that when you get confused in writing, you can tell right away, is this something that's just the technique of how I'm presenting the material, in which case you'll look for A, B and C as the solution. Or. Or am I really screwed up in my own mind? I don't know what I'm talking about. In which case give up writing and do something completely different till you understand it. So that's what I want. That would have saved me years on my first book, because I just blasted ahead knowing nothing. And I had to get the clarity of thinking by Ayn Rand editing my writing. And that was a nightmare because I never understood what I wrote till after it was written. So that is our program for this course. Now, a few other preliminaries that we can plunge in. I am going to, of course, give you an opportunity to ask questions with each of the six lectures. And then we have two special sessions, one hour, then two hours for freewheeling questions. I don't want you to raise your hands whenever something occurs to you because there's just too many people here. If we got down to 50, then we could do it that way as a continuous seminar. But if I have a dozen hands for every sentence, we'll never get anywhere. But I'm going to try to stop after I get a certain spot in the development and give you a chance to ask questions rather than go through the whole hour or whatever it is unbrokenly and then say questions. So we'll alternate questions and lecture. And the thing is, of course, I'll have to be completely arbitrary when I decide now you can. And then now it's too late because there's more material to cover. But that's how I'm going to try to handle it. We've given up trying to record your voice, although this course is being recorded. So I'm going to just try, because you have to run to Pennsylvania or somewhere to find the micing. So instead I'm just going to repeat your question for the benefit of the people at the back. Well, I have to say that I can see clearly only up to about the first eight or nine rows. So behind that you have to wave your hands. I can see the movement of your hand, but I can't see you. I want to say one last preliminary word. And that is, where would Ayn Rand stand in regard to this course if she heard it, which she didn't. Now, obviously, I believe she would agree with everything I'm saying. I do not in any sense intend this to be a departure from Objectivism or a contradiction of anything that she said. But this does not have the same status in my mind, and it shouldn't in yours, as my book on Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Now, even there, I had the disclaimer, she didn't read it, and she's not responsible. But I was, in every formulation in that book. I was 99.99% sure, if not more, on the basis of things that Ayn Rand directly said to me or directly approved in writing that she would have to agree with this statement. It was just inconceivable. And anytime I found a statement where I thought there's even point two percent, I cut it out just on the ground. It better not be there than it be dubious. Now, what is left is what you're getting in this course, that is ideas that I got in the course of writing the book that I did not have that degree of discussion with her about. So I think they're implicit, I think they follow that they apply Objectivism. I'm morally sure she would agree, but I'm not logically sure. And I, given my lifetime experience with her, if she would materialize and say, how could you say that? At some point, I wouldn't be that surprised. So you have to listen to the. You always have to do this anyway, even if I was giving you orthodoxy officially stamped in the Bible. But this is particularly true here. This is my best understanding of carrying what I learned from her a step further. But you have to listen and decide, do you think it really follows or not? I do, but I'm stimulating warning you that I have nobody to say that I that it does except me. So you have to take that for what it's worth. All right, now let us plunge into the first of our topics, the role of free will or volition and achieving intellectual clarity. Now, I take for granted that you know the essence of the theory of free will that Objectivism advocates, the idea that your basic choice is to focus or not to use your conceptual faculty or not to think or not. But many people believe that that basically exhausts everything your mind's choice consists of. Now, in a way, it does if you take those formulations broadly enough. But one thing I want to stress, the thing I want to stress today is that you have to know a little more detail what that consists of. It is not just turning my consciousness on or turning it off. It's not as though someone says to you, two plus two equals four, and your choice is, I'm going to focus. Oh, yeah, see, I'm going to evade. Oh, I won't look. If that's all there was, it would be a lot easier. People think, in other words, that free will is just opening your eyes. And then understanding simply comes from what you look at once you open your eyes. And that in many cases is true, but unfortunately, in many cases is not true. So that my thesis this morning is going to be that there is a Volitional element, not only in getting yourself to think, but in actually achieving understanding of the content you're thinking about, that you deliberately have to enact a certain method of coming at things, or you have no choice of ever understanding, even if you're focusing from morning to night. Now you know in general that method is much more important than content, how you think, than the content of what you think. And the reason is, of course, that method is what dictates content. That's why epistemology is so crucial. This is especially true at your advanced stage. I assume you've had courses and books and been steeped to the hilt in egoism and atheism and every other bromide of our philosophy. But many people, having done that, still have the same questions over and over, year after year, seminar after seminar, decade after decade. And the questions are fruitless. They never get what they consider a satisfactory answer, even though to me answering is crystal clear. The part of the class just can't figure out why it's not clear. And I think it's because they don't understand the role of volition in changing the method of their thought. They think that all they have to do is concentrate using whatever method comes to them. And if I'm clear, they'll be clear. And that simply does not follow. I have received, as you can imagine, a great many questions in my life about objectivism. It would be actually countless. And I've often, not always, not even dominantly, but often been struck by what I would regard. This is what led me to this theory in the first place. It was a kind of willful, self indulgent, even defiant attitude in the questioner. Not in the sense that they're rude, but as though they are saying through the vehemence, the passion of the position they're taking and the fact that it's something that's been exposed as error time and again in lectures and writing. It's as though they're saying, I defy you to dislodge this perspective from my mind. Say something that'll blast it out. And that's when I grasped it the first time, that some people ride a certain method self indulgently. Now, I hasten to say, I'm not using self indulgent here as synonymous with immoral. I'm not saying at all that these people are immoral or dishonest. I don't think they know what they're doing or what to do differently, so it's strictly a matter of knowledge in those cases, but what they actually are Doing is coasting on certain familiar methods. That is just the way their minds work. That's their idea of how you get to be clear. And they are resisting the break with those methods that is necessary if they're to understand new material. It's like you, just like you learn to practice to type with two fingers and you become really expert. As I once was, you can do as fast with two fingers as other people can with 10. But then you have to go to the computer and it just doesn't work anymore and you have to deautomatize and you painfully learn this ten fingered method and you know the keys are in the wrong place and you hit alt instead of a space bar and so on. And there's a transitional state there where the two finger it seems clear, logical, makes perfect sense. It's natural. And the new one, you're all confused, you don't know what's coming next, your fingers won't do it. And it's a definite regression in terms of your inner sense of control and clarity. Well, that is exactly the same kind of process on a non mechanical basis that takes place when you have to change your mind about a deep and difficult question. You've got the two finger method automatized. And it is not enough simply to focus your mind fully on the person making statements of praise about the ten fingered method. Because as soon as you go back to your own life, you're back to the two fingered method, which is what's natural to you. More than that, you will hear all the discussion of the ten fingered method from the point of view of the two fingers. So your subconscious will be constantly translating. When he says right hand, he means the left index finger, see? And you'll hear the whole thing that way and not even know that you're doing that because your mind is geared to think in terms of the two. Now what I'm saying is that the. And when you do try to forge ahead with the correct approach, it's not easy confusing and there's a terrific pull to go back to the two figured method because you know where you are, you can see everything is luminous. What we need now is to see how this applies in thinking not just in terms of this analogy. Free will as the agency that can directly instant investigate a better approach. And I think this, the possibility of free will doing that follows from the very definition of objectivity, which as you know, is a method of corresponding to reality which is volitionally adopted. The essence of objectivity is it's a volitional commitment as against the perceptual level where you just open your eyes or not. So volition is built into objectivity. And since objectivity as we know it is what we're striving to gain in all of our thought processes, the proper use of volition in all of its functions is crucial. And as I said, I want to now develop the theme that free will has an actual role in achieving clarity, answering problems, resolving philosophic confusions, and that there are contexts in which this can sometimes be done simply by an act of will. In other words, in which you do not require any further questions, any further information, any further understanding. You actually already understand perfectly. Reason has done its part and it stands in your mind, although you don't realize it, as I'm going to commit to it or not, yes or no, I'm going to accept that. I accept it or not. Now, let me say in advance, and I'll keep repeating this because there's a certain percentage of people who will continuously misinterpret this point, and all I can do is just reiterate it and say that's the same misinterpretation when you tell it to me. I am not saying. I am not saying that you can get yourself to accept anything by an act of will. If I say two plus two equals five, I am not saying you have the power by will to say, okay, yes, I affirm it and that's it. You don't. In that sense, your will is a secondary phenomenon. You use your will to focus, but when you focus on the fact and add 2 and 2, you inexorably get 4, and will will have nothing to do with it. At that point, what is required is you have to understand, you have to see the logic, you have to see the evidence and the argument and the conclusion. But there are situations which are not like that, situations where you already have seen the logic. You could repeat it, you could give a lecture on it, you know every step in it, and it's not unclear to you. And nevertheless, you don't quote, understand, you feel you don't understand. And the reason for that is the failure of a certain act of will on your part. Now, you've got this in advance. That's the type of thing I'm talking about. The issue comes up when you have clashing contexts in your mind. Clashing context. Context in here means a set of ideas which condition your thinking on a subject. And a clashing context means you have two sets of ideas which condition your thinking, each one opposed to the other. So you can't hold them both in mind at the same time because they annihilate each other. Each context seems to you to be coherent and understandable, and yet the two are mutually exclusive. One or the other has to be dominant in your mind at any given time. Now, I'll be giving you many illustrations of this, but I just want to say the theory in advance, the point here is that when you know that one of these is right and you can prove it, and that the other is an automatized error, and that stage you must get to by intellectual analysis. But when you know that this one is objectively right, here's the proof. And this one is an automatized error, you must volitionally endorse the one you know is right and volitionally repudiate, suppress, if you like, banish from consciousness, say no to the other one. This is a necessity of getting rid of it. And there will be an interim period. If this wrong automatized context is deep in you and has been there for a long time, there will be a long period. I can't tell you how many weeks, months, or years where you will be deceived, satisfied. When you push it away. You will feel that, oh, there's so many important questions, doubts, problems that I want to know the answer to stemming from this wrong context, and that if I don't ask and answer those questions, I'll never understand the issue. But that is an illusion. That feeling is an illusion. It's a mere offshoot of the wrong context trying to sustain itself. The wrong every context feeds you a whole set of questions that you must answer to keep it happy so you can integrate the material to it. And so long as you don't ask those questions from the point of view of that context, the context feels frustrated. That part of your mind feels, I don't get it. I don't care. How would you say, answer this. How would you answer that? That is a context trying to assert itself. And if you have two opposite ones and you're trying to squelch one because it's built into your subconscious thinking at this point, it's not going to go away. When you give your allegiance to the correct context, it's still there and it's still going to be saying, but what about this and what about this and what about this? And that is what you have to resist. You have to go through an interim period after you know the proof of the right ideas, where you say, I'm not asking those questions. I am not void Those doubts, I'm turning off that whole context, even though I want to pursue it, even though I feel it is essential to my being clear about this issue. I am resisting this feeling. I look at it as neurotic or diseased or at minimum, erroneous. In any event, it's a part of my thought which is built in, but which I am in process of repudiated. Now, if you follow that process, ultimately you will automatize, stabilize, institutionalize the right context. And then when you return to the old questions, doubts and problems, you'll undoubtedly have the experience that I did, because I went through this many times, had all these burning questions, but I said, I'm going to get Objectivism, to hell with all those questions. I just won't ask them. And it was almost like, you know, they were banned in Boston. They couldn't come up. But then, of course, I was conscientious. I never forgot what they were. I just wouldn't think about them. But when I finally did get Objectivism solid in my mind, I returned to those old questions, you know, with a certain degree of trepidation, of, well, now I'm ready to take them on. And I found that the. The great majority seemed puerile to me, silly, pointless. I couldn't. Why was this such an issue? This is stupid on the face of it, but it's only stupid on the face of it because by that time I had killed the context that generated those questions and I had put in a solid Objectivist base. And looking at it from that point of view, this is just too silly or pointless to be worth discussing. So in other words, you have to not only get the new context out, integrated into your mind, you must also do a negative job. In a case like this, you must disintegrate the wrong context. Getting rid of a persistent error consists of disintegrating it, blasting it, and disintegrating means disconnecting it from all the vital lines of your thought. When you integrate a conte, a new idea into your conduct, you take all the essentials and you say, here's how it leads to this. Here's how it leads to this, this, this, this, this. So all your forms of thinking are tied into this. When you disintegrate, you do the reverse. You say, this has got nothing to do with my thinking, my clarity, my definition of understanding, of logic, etc. You break all those ties, you blow it up, and then when you finally get your new integrations straight and look back at those, there's nothing to sustain it anymore, and consequently, it just fades away. Now, I'll give you a personal example, because this is certainly I was the world champion on clashing context. And I think the best example is when I started graduate school. The professor and most of the department were staunch pragmatists. They didn't believe in absolutes, they didn't believe in reality, they didn't believe in anything. And I had to, of course, write exams and essays that they would pass, you know, that they would give me an acceptable gradient. I knew it was all wrong, but I had to grasp enough of how they looked at it in order to be able to write papers. So even though I kept telling myself, this is all wrong, you know, you're going to catch so many errors. So I would catch 80 errors, but there was 4020 in the sentence he just uttered, so I would, you know, 3,000. I swallowed without even realizing. Well, I was busy catching the 80. This was back in the 1950s. And then, of course, alternately, after having these classes at school all week, I would have a meeting with Ayn Rand, usually on Saturday, and ask her all kinds of questions about Objectivism. And she would make objectivism seem really clear. And I spent about, oh, I don't know, two or three years completely oscillating between pragmatism and objectivism. Not that I ever was tempted to believe pragmatism, but it was a real part of my thinking and I couldn't get rid of it. When I was in one world, I could see how the pragmatist thought. And in that world, objectivism seemed to be very confusing. And the next week or the next night, under the spell of Ms. Rand, creating the context, this seemed completely clear and I couldn't even recreate, she'd say to me, well, why do they say that? And I'd say, I can't remember. And yet, when I got back to there, they say to me, why does she say that? And I'd say, I can't remember. I just. Ultimately, I came to see that each of these approaches rested on certain fundamental premises and that they each carried a whole context with them. And I got to the point, like Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, that by shifting focus, I could enter one or the other at will. I knew how to activate one or how to activate the other by just focusing on certain premises and letting myself go with it. Objectivism, I got to. Because I would say to myself, existence exists. Consciousness is the faculty of perceiving it. And I get that as a basic mental set. And then when the Pragmatism started talking about, but worse right away my question will be what works? Where? How do you know what works? You know, all those existence oriented questions would come to me. Pragmatism I had to get into through the analytic synthetic distinction, which at that time, before I had written my article, I couldn't find very much wrong with and you know, every sentence, you could either string off its meaning because of the way we use words, or else it's just a hypothesis about observed data and everything is a matter of convenience and the wording that works is what you should use. In other words, a complete separation of concepts from reality. And as soon as I accepted that which they made very plausible in those days by putting two charts on the board of this sentences versus those sentences, and their sentences had about nine sets of differences, so they picked a tenth and didn't really have, but, but you thought that's what it was, and so you got sucked into it. And once that was there, then they could lead you all the way through and then you see reality. Well, what kind of sentence is that? Now you're completely lost. The point is that in either state, the other had no conviction to me. When I was within the pragmatist world, I could not understand Objectivism, even though I knew intellectually that I must be wrong. Pragmatism must be wrong, because I could prove it. I could give a step by step proof which is perfectly objective. But still, somehow pragmatism had this seductive power to me. It felt plausible and the objectivist argument felt convincing, even though I knew it was right, because I knew the axioms were incontestable, I knew that it followed the axioms and I knew that pragmatism violated them. I knew all that as clearly as I know that I'm here giving a class. But I still couldn't get rid of that nagging series of questions directed to Objectivism from pragmatism. But what would you say about this and this and this? And of course, as soon as I did that, the pragmatist contents were pumped up and that blew up my objectives, understanding, and I would be sunk again. It was impossible at this point convincingly to reflect pragmatism to myself by raising its questions and objections and then answering them from Objectivist framework, because the Objectivist framework at this point was not that firm in my mind. I understood it, I could recreate it on paper, but it was not yet a built in part of my thinking. It was not automatized. It took my whole mind and energy Just to keep real and concretized, existence exists in a few principles of that kind. And in the precarious state I was in, something that I was familiar with and had heard a lot about and could start, you know, jargonizing with, like, pragmatism was all that was necessary to just blow me up completely and leave me with not no understanding whatever. Because I could see that question. I could see that you can ask that question. I'm completely lost. In other words, put it another way, the act of raising these antagonistic questions, even provisionally, the act of looking at the world as the pragmatist would, blew up my understanding of the Objectivist principles, and I simply would get nowhere. Of course, Ayn Rand would get exasperated. We've had this discussion seven times. You know, what else is it that you don't understand? And, you know, I would blurt out something enough to get the eighth discussion. But. If I tried to, for instance, hang on to existence exists and then say, well, pragmatism would say, what kind of statement is that, analytic or synthetic? Well, as soon as I ask that question, I'm in the framework of that decision, you see, and then I would say, well, existence exists must be analytic. And if it's that, because the word is contained in this first word, the second with the predicate and the subject, well, if it's analytic, that means it doesn't depend on experience, it doesn't refer to the world. So it's just linguistic, but it's just linguistic, but it says there's a reality. How can that reality, you know, I just go round and round. You couldn't get anywhere. You was completely trapped in the pragmatist context. And one point, I'm right, said to me, you just have to get rid of the analytic synthetic distinction, kick it out. You know it's wrong. You know all the reasons why the fact that you're still asking questions on its basis just means it's automatized and you have to just knock it out of yourself. So I had no choice but to sweep pragmatism in its home whole context and questions and dichotomies and doubts and objections to sweep it all aside, not to try to answer them at that point, but simply say, no. It be like, you know, you have a temptation to some depravity, and you made up your mind, you know, you understand why this is wrong and all your childhood experiences, everything that led to it, but you still have the desire for this dough. You don't say to yourself that, but, well, I'VE got to do more studying. I'm going to take the dope. Until then, you say, no, that's it. And then you fight it in every way you can. But I had to make the decision to make a complete mental break. Utterly disowned pragmatism. I have to say, in effect, this is a tissue of falsehoods without a shred of plausibility, even though to me it appears to be very plausible. Now, that is a hard thing to do. You know what I mean? You have to say it against yourself as your own policy. I simply said to myself, I'm not going to indulge it anymore. I anathematize it. I will not think about it anymore. I won't think through it or in terms of the questions it poses. I won't even try to relate the two contexts to anymore because the bad one is too entrenched and the good one is still too shaky. So I'm simply going to reject the bad one. I'm not going to repress it in the sense of, you know, forgetting that I ever had doubts or questions. I know it exists, but I'm going to, what psychologists call suppress it. In other words, say, this is not my function now, push it to the side. I don't want it to be involved. As this time I'm going to say as an act of will. That's it. It's dead for me. It's no longer an issue of intellectual concern. Then you go into a very uncomfortable transition period, because it feels like I am full of legitimate, crucial, clarifying questions which would really make objectivism clear if only I could answer them, but I can't, because to ask those questions, I think back into the other context. So, you know, you just simply have to persevere. And you find that in time, through a definite mechanism, the bad context starts to fade because you're cutting it off from all of your thinking. It's not integrated anymore, and it loses its power of being a part of the whole. And the new one gets progressively more integrated, and it's like healthy tissue eating up a cancer. The. The cancer gradually atrophies and you finally reach the stage where your context is so clear, the objective is context, that you can say, okay, I'll put that to the side now, and I'll look at the world the way pragmatists do, and instead of being plunged into pragmatism, you say, oh, isn't that absurd? Because right away, every point from objectivism that you've now integrated just smashes down this all alternative context and you find that you can't figure out how was this ever plausible to me, all the doubts that were so burning at one stage of development simply seemed foolish and wrong headed and because of mystery that they were ever so prominent in your thinking. And the reason is because the context that gave them their power has died. And there is no way to achieve this state than by will. That is how you solidify a new integration and remove an old automatized one. Now, I repeat again over and over this point, I am not saying go into a new subject of which you know nothing, grab onto a viewpoint and say that's mine by will. You cannot do that. This, this is repeating again. This whole advice applies only when you have devoted substantial time to grasping the logic of a case and you, time after time find yourself slipping into an antagonistic context which you know is illogical, but you can't stop yourself from asking those questions in that context. Only that volition as a means of clarity becomes essential. No amount of discussion at that point will do it. You have to just wrench your mind onto the truth and away from the other. And it's uncomfortable and unhappy. It could be for weeks, months, and in my case, years in many issues, because. Because I went through that process time and again and there was always that terrific moment when I finally saw it, you know, however many weeks or months of preliminary sessions. Now I get it. I remember, I think it was in 1960, I was lecturing on Descartes and trying to explain what was wrong with him. And I said to the class at one point, the whole thing comes down to existence exists. And as I said it, I thought to myself, that's really true. I see that, you know, that was. I still remember the illumination, you know that for 10 years I'd been saying it, but it wasn't all the way in, you see, And I still remember that as the paradigm of what is clarity. Suddenly it lit up everything and Descartes seemed ridiculous, you know, whereas before that I know existence exists, but how would I refute his argument that we can't perceive the external world? It was like you know it, but you brush it to the side. But finally it dominates your thinking and when it does, the rest of it disappears and you have to do it by will. Now I'll give you one more example of a very different kind. Not from me, but from somebody else who is a prominent. Oh, I guess I shouldn't say that, who is an Objectivist. But there's many people who are prominent Objectives anyway. But this person asked me once, why do you say that religion is anti reason? He said, I know a lot of good religious people who are honest, well motivated, you know, friendly, and so on. And they always give me reasons and arguments for their viewpoint. Now, I understand from objectivism that they're mistaken, but I don't see in any way how they are anti reason. They're the embodiment of reason, argument, persuasion, you know, no violence, etc. So how can you say that religion is inherently anti reason? And this person happened to have been brought up religiously and surrounded by these types as he described them. Now, how would you apply what I'm saying so far to this case? First of all, what context is this individual absorbed and as being the framework for his conclusion? Raise your hand if you have an idea. Yes, Okay. First of all, his context was formed out of repeated experience with religious individuals. He wasn't going to what is the nature of religion as such? He was simply taking religion equals what a group of people that I know are religious do. And as long as they stood in his mind for this is religion, then you could give any abstract argument you want. The essence of religion in opposition to science is the rejection of reason and why God that you could prove, you know, would not be God. If you give any philosophical argument, you say, yeah, yeah, I see, that's anti logic. But. But it isn't, because look at these people. These people are perfectly logical, you see, and he would try those arguments on them and they would come back with some kind of, you know, mistaken answer, but nevertheless was some answer. So here this person had a context with an emotional pull, images, memories, concrete, filed a certain way. And then he heard the objective as you pointed. It just clashed altogether with that and said to finally work out the solution. I had to fight with him. And it was an issue of will, because every time I would make a point, yeah, I know that point, but. And the whole point was I had to fight with him to yank his mind away from the people he had known to the essence of religion as a doctrine, as a metaphysics, as a philosophy. Forget the people, just first think about what this philosophy of religion says. I had to, in other words, completely separate philosophy from personalities and point out to him that the method by which someone proselytizes does not have anything to do with whether he stands for reason or not. Every bad viewpoint, I say, without exception, every bad viewpoint, however depraved, if you're advocating murder or the molestation of babies, has its, quote, arguments from its Supporters and books showing that there's 15 proofs of why this is so, and do you know why? They can't escape that since man is a conceptual being, there is no way to gain converts except by some kind of conceptual, logical argument. And that's why dictatorships have to instill propaganda, even though no one's allowed to speak. They have to constantly give the argument as to why Hitler is the greatest and the state is going to wither away, we're going to surpass the United States, etc. They have to constantly argue because that's the only form of human communication. So if you take the line, these people don't beat me, they don't kick me, they give me arguments that no more shows that they or their viewpoint are rational than it does for anybody. The question is what kind of arguments of what kind of premises, and are they open to counter arguments? If the argument are just a rationalization for their faith, that's meaningless. And when the person thought it over and he saw the nature of the issues involved one by one, he had to say, this particular priest, he wasn't really being rational. He thought he was. This one was mistaken. But he wasn't open to any discussion. One after the other, he had to uproot these. At a certain point he got enough of the Objectivist context. The other one lost plausibility to him. When he was with me or Objectivist, he could look with a certain negative attitude toward the religious people that he had been brought up with, but it didn't last. When he would go back to visit them, their whole thing would pull him in again. They seemed so sincere and pleasant and so on. And he said, oh, this is a complete overstatement by Objectivism that religion is an assault on the mind. And so it just can't be. Look how clear this man is trying to be, you see? And he had to. He had to fight those years of automatization again by will. He finally got to the point where he would say, this is a religious person, but he's honest. He'd immediately say, what do I mean by religious and what do I mean by honest? And once he got those two in his mind, he'd say, I'm not. This guy may be ignorant, that's not the point. I can't use that combination together in a knowledgeable person such as this one is supposed to be. And when he was able to automatize that, the old context gradually faded and. And it stood in his mind only in the same way that we all now remember Kindergarten teachers who were very sweet, and by retrospect we realized they were very malicious, but we didn't know it at the time. The old context, in other words, continuously reasserted itself and made the new one unreal. And he had to continuously say no when all those smiling faces came up from his subconscious. I understand that this is the pull of my former context. I won't indulge it, I won't keep worrying about it. I'm not going to keep on trying to gather data to show that, you know, religion is not anti reason. He was collecting people who were reasonable but religious, you see, I'm going to stop that now. People often say to me that Objectivism is clearer to them when I lecture for the space of the lecture, under the influence of my lecture, and the reason is because of the emphasis of my voice insinuates the Objectivist context for the space of the day. You know, I make connections, I bring it to life, everything hangs together and so on, and automatically it becomes the dominant context, listening to me. So everything becomes clear. But that, as these same people point out, doesn't last, because when they go back home, the old context comes back up, the lecture context fades, and they wonder, oh, I must have had a drink too much or something, because it really. He didn't have that good a point. And the thing is, it can't last without that continuous act of will. You have to know what within you is clashing with it, and you have to make the decision no, even if you're dying to, because until you get the Objectivist clearly enough, you can't even refute your preceding context. And you go back to oscillating. Now a couple clarifications and then I think we'll go to some questions before I give you other examples. You may think I'm saying that the technique of devil's advocate. Wrong. You have the devil's advocate technique, which is a very helpful technique, consists of asking questions from your enemy's context, consists of saying, what would someone who held the opposite view, what could he object? But what I'm saying has nothing to do with the use of the devil's advocate, the devil, if you use the devil's advocate properly, the devil advocate is an earlier stage prior to the one we're talking about today. That is, before I said, before you reach the issue of will, you must intellectually understand the true context. And one essential, very often, one very helpful method is the devil's advocate. Because in the sheer act of grasping it, you would want to say well, how would I. What would it say to this? What would it say to this? What would it say to wanted to say to this? That's part of you getting it. So I'm saying you could ask any questions from any context at the point where you're still trying to grasp. But there does come a point, and I think many of you can attest to this, where you feel you do get it, except you lose it when you're immersed in the other contest. That's the point at which the devil's advocate is the bad thing to be, because then you're deliberately instilling the other contest. So devil's advocate, I would say use at the beginning till you get your first clarity, then throw it out and then when you're really clear, you can bring it back in. And now the devil will be seen to be impotent. So just to summarize, first you have to grasp and reason that one context is right and the other wrong. But the point is that even grasping that will not make the questions and doubts and inherent in a bad context go away. And so long as those doubts are considered while the new context is still not automatized, you will never be able to answer. And then the doubts themselves, instead of being refuted by the new context, will blow the new context up. So at that point you need will, then later you return as necessary and answer the doubts now firmly from the right context. So we can put the theory here another way. It is not true that the only way to grasp the truth is step by step to uproot the bad or the confusing in your mind. That is the actual reverse of the proper procedure. Now see, people have this idea that to get clear about something, you find everything in your mind which is unclear about that subject and then ask one at a time. I don't get this. I don't get get this. I don't get this. I don't get this. But all those unclarities are like weeds coming from a root. And you know it'll sprout more unclarities just the way ecologists sprout more things anti science or socialists sprout more things anti capitalist. It's like a multi headed hydra. However many you cut off, they just keep growing because the root is there. So it's not true that the way to grasp the truth is to eliminate one at a time your unclarities and regard to it. You have to grasp the truth in direct relation to reality. First you must make this your functioning, automatized, implemented Context, just your mind and reality. And then by reference to that, you can uproot all the unclarities, and you'll be surprised that there's not that many when you establish the positive first. But so long as you say, I don't really understand this point of objectivism, and I won't be able to get it until I see what's wrong with that point of pragmatism, you'll never do it. Even if I were to give you the answer to that point of pragmatism. You say, but yeah, but that isn't really convincing, because what if a pragmatist says so and so, and then you're completely off, You've lost the proper context and approach. I don't want to repeat this too many times. Here's a good formulation, I think, worth repeating. It's not a new point. When you have a clash of contexts, first grasp intellectually which one refers to reality. And at that point you should write this down. One of my contexts is thereby proved, even though neither is convincing. Convincing in the sense that it brings with it, you know, that conviction of total clarity. You could integrate it to anything. You see the world through it. You first have to just get objectively, like a mathematical proof, is this true or not? And at that point your other context is still very real to you. So you say, this one is true, but neither is really convincing, because I could go from one to the other. Then you suppress the other by will, and you work for a time with the correct, reintegrating your mental life around it, suppressing any assertion of the wrong context. And then when the good is institutionalized, you can think easily in terms of it, and you can return if you wish, and polish off the old error. So it's not enough to integrate new knowledge, you have to disintegrate error, you have to learn to disintegrate error. And just the grasping and principle of the error in the abstract will not disintegrate, will not remove the sense of its power over you. One new principle, however clearly stated or understood, cannot de automatize a whole entrenched context. Only a long period of automatizing the good will enable you to deautomatize, break up, tear away from the essence of your thinking the bad. And you're going to have this, I say, this intermediate situation where Satan is tempting you and your life or death in this is whether you can say whatever you say to me. I do not give you cognitive standing. It's basically like Dagny to Francisco, I still want to sleep with you, but I won't. And it's that same attitude applied to intellectual errors. If you can make the point for point substitution in parallel, you have to be able to say, okay, I want to ask this, I need to ask it, but it's a disease and I'm not going to. Not just a pee goff out of myself or of anybody. You see, if you have a divided context, your mind has to heal itself while itself being divided. Your mind is the doctor and the patient. You have to do your own brain surgery. So you've got to know at the outset which part is the doctor and which is the patient, which possesses the truth and which is the error you're trying to excise. If you slip back and forth from one to the other, the doctor does some surgery and then the patient wakes up and sticks a knife on the doctor, you're going to get nowhere. And when you have two clashing contexts, let me stress this point. There is no neutral ground on which to stand when they clash. There's a contradiction, and it's either or. So you can't find some earlier spot in which you say, I might even commit myself whether there's a reality or not, whether there are concepts or not. I'm going to start here and come to pragmatism, objectivism, straight from zero. Because from zero you can't go anywhere. You have to start somewhere. And two contradictory contexts, you can't. There's no neutrality from which to judge them. Each annihilates the other by the nature of a contradiction. And you can't even think without accepting one or the other, not about the issues involved. So you have to take a stand. And the only way you could take a stand is by what your mind, what Ayman called your superstructure, logically tells you and then banish the other. Now, there's a helpful parallel, I think here. If someone near to you dies, you know that your life has been completely bound up with. You know that that person is dead. Intellectually, you're clear on that fact. But you have still integrated your whole life around this person. You have hundreds of expectations on a daily basis which continue to come up. You read I still to this day I read something in the newspaper but have a flash of, oh, I have to show this to. Before I get to the word I. And then, you know, I stop. And of course I've deodentized a lot in 10 years. But what you can think yourself, if anyone you knew a movie, say, oh, wouldn't they love to see this Movie or I gotta call so and so. And those questions don't go away just because you know the person is dead because they're so built in if they're a serious value to you, to all of your value circuits that your subconscious object automatically feeds to you the question that presupposes their living. And you know that if you've gone through mourning, one of the cognitive tasks of mourning is to disintegrate those connections, to go through all the categories of your life, your job and your sex and your movies and your everything that, your travel, everything that this person was tied to and try to say, now what am I going to do with that person? Is gone. And this is not a process that happens by itself and it's extremely painful. And that's what really compromising the death consists of. It consists of grasping that your life is going to be impoverished across the board. And you can't take that in at first, you know, which is why the post funeral period is usually more miserable than the immediate death where you're shocked. There's a parallel here of course, to intellectual understanding, which I think is obvious. If you don't follow the right procedure, the one I'm recommending, you will be a perpetual frustrated clarity seeker. You'll say, oh yes, I'd really love to get clear. I just can't. Now I know what that feeling feels like because I, I stretched Ms. Rand to the last of her patients because we didn't know any of this at that time and she couldn't figure out why. I'm asking the same question time after time after time. And I didn't know so clearly that there's two contexts, et cetera and so on. And I got dangerously close to being perpetual. The only thing that saved me is that finally after 40 years I figured it out, but I stopped seeking it because I had it. But hopefully you can learn from my and other people's experience and not go through this agonizing quest. Now some of it you're going to have to because you were brought up, you were brought up by somebody other than yourself. So theoretically some errors are entrenched all the way down. I don't know of what kind. It's much worse if you've gone to graduate school and still worse if you've gone to graduate school in philosophy. But also you can benefit from the experience of people who did it before you. Here's a formulation I wrote down which I think might be helpful. We always think of free will as the choice to think or not or to focus or not. And that's correct. And I'm not in any way denying that. But I'm pointing out a specific aspect of that which I think is new today, and that is free will as the ability to cling to known truth in the face of your own doubts. Free will has the ability to cling to known truth in the face of your own doubts. And of course, I repeat again, that presupposes that you did in fact see the logic of the argument. Now, when I first presented this, several people in the class said, you're destroying Objectivism. They didn't come at me that baldly, but that's what it amounted to, because they said, you're really asking for faith. You say, I don't really understand it, but I accept it. And by an act of will I reject the other. And isn't that faith? And isn't that the opposite of objectivism? Now, I'd like to hear what you would say if someone asked you that, assuming you understand where we are so far loud from the back. Faith is taking something without bothering to know the lie. Logical connections at all and the premises behind the connections you're making are grounded in the true axioms exist, whereas the free will is. I know existence exists. It's true. I'm being tempted not to take that as the base, but I'm going to do it anyway. Even though I got now. Okay, that's exactly right. It sometimes feels. I won't try to summarize that because I'll say it what he said in essence, which was the correct answer. But it says it often feels like faith in the transition period. It feels like it even though it isn't. The reason that it feels like faith is because something in your mind is giving you questions, problems, etc. Along with the feeling that is really earth urgent to understand this if I'm to really grasp it, and you are saying to hell with that. I'm refusing to answer. But the reason that it isn't faith is because of what this gentleman at the back said. You are doing it in conscious fidelity to a context that you have seen proved, you have seen the steps all the way back to the axioms. You know intellectually that this is true. The will involved comes that we're talking about only after this preliminary analysis, when you already know the truth. But the problem is that the false thing keeps plaguing you. You know that there's something wrong and you can't get rid of it. That's what I'm saying. The chances are at that point that you have got an entrenched false context, and it won't go away unless you actively be disintegrated, which means refuse to let your thinking be connected to it, which means just push it aside and say, die or shrivel of your own self. My mind is committed here, and it's also not faith, because at the end, once you institutionalize the correct conduct, you come back and formally refute the old one so that even the doubts seem weird to you. I would say that the act of will that I recommend here is truly objective in the philosophic sense, as against being both subjective or intrinsic. You know that trichotomy, hopefully. If not, you're not going to learn it from me today. But the intrinsicist is the demander of faith. He says, take it from me, I have the revelation from God or Ayn Rand or whichever. You simply obey without understanding or any process. You just passively accept that's the exponent of faith. And certainly I haven't said anything remotely to suggest that the subjectivist is the one who would say in this issue, I have questions, I have doubts. Maybe they're not based on reality, they emanate from my private era, but I feel them, I want them, I want to pursue them. Now, that would be true subjectivism being run by the content of consciousness apart from reality. So the people who pose as the opponents of faith on this issue are really the advocates of subjectivism. Their idea is, if a question occurs to me, and I feel I'm never going to be clear on this subject without asking it, even though I know that it comes from an unreal context, I want to ask it. It's a form of wind worshiping. Whereas the true objective method is when I grasp the that fact facts of reality, I willfully adhere to them and suppress mental processes at variance with them, even when those processes are seductive. You want me to repeat that? That's the gist of why it's objective. When I grasp the facts of reality, I willfully adhere to them and suppress mental processes at variance with them, comma, even when those processes are seductive. And by seductive here, in other words, they're so confusing that they seem essential for your own clarity and understanding of the issue. Now, I have a couple of examples that I want to give that are a little more real and common than pragmatism versus objectivism, which is the autobiographical example. But I want to stop here and give you a chance to ask questions just about the theory. And I will then come back and give some More examples. As a matter of fact, we are allowed, what, four and a half minute break. Four and a half. So it's now, according to my watch, 11:42 and a half. So that would be 11:47. So you're free till 11:47. Let's see, it's starting to go now. All right, I'm going to take questions for a little while now on anything other than examples, which I'm going to be giving you, but anything about the theory or application that yes, will say we always come at things with preconceived conclusions and predilections and all that based on what you've seen and said about these two contexts and their work required to shift from one to the other. Would you give any credence or legitimacy at all to that kind of throwaway line? No, I would not. The question is, this is not your exact question, but this is really what your question amounts to. Subjectivists like Kant, etc. Say, we come at every question with a subjectivist built in framework, in our own private predilections, etc. And therefore we never can get to know the real truth. Isn't there some credence to that in the light of what you're saying? That you have these things built in and you have to push them aside? There's no similarity whatever epistemologically be. Because I say you're born tabula rasa, Objectivism says, and that every step of your content, including your methods, you had to acquire by an act of choice. And it remains forever within your power to get rid of and to improve or correct. Whereas the subjectivist endowment is either you have no faculty of choice and or it can't touch the basic categories which your mind has been endowed with and which distort everything that you perceive. So the subjectivist says any mental content is distorting because the content wasn't derived from reality. And I say when you have a conflict, that means you have absorbed two different contents from your assessment of reality, one valid and one not. And it takes time to undo that. And at a certain point the only thing to do is to suppress one by will. But that is completely different because we start from reality and our goal is to choose the one that conforms to reality and shrivel the other. The subjectivist would say, if I have that context, that's me and that's the way it is. And it's true for me, you see. So you can't make that computer comparison to subjectivism. Yes, a good way of disintegrating a bad idea, Actually, I would say no, you say the good way to reduce. Refute an idea or get disintegrated is to reduce it to absurdity. No, that is a good technique in argumentation as the part of the process of thinking and grasping what's true. You say, well, this proposition, if it was so, then it would lead to this and this and this, and that's absurd. That is helpful in the intellectual clarification, but that will not disintegrate a context. You can point out that pragmatism leads to the most insane absurdities, and therefore you know absolutely well that it's false, but it still keeps coming back. So the fact that you have grassed that something is absurd any more than if you know someone has died, you know that it's absurd to wonder whether they want to go to the movies with you, and yet the thought comes to you. So we're talking about a different thing than this is. That's precisely why it's an issue of will. If you could get rid of a context, if I knew a magic formula that would be like this. Whenever you have one of these stubborn false contexts, just recite Gall's speech and then practice two syllogisms and it'll go away. You wouldn't need an act of will. There, you see? But the whole point here is that you can't get around it. You must engage in this act of will, and it's a very discomforting experience. Yes. Harry, in distinguishing this from faith, would it be relevant that in order to dismiss a doubt or a question, you first have to, I would assume, identify. All this comes from that pragmatist or whatever wrong context, rather than there might be other questions that occur to you. It's not. Oh, absolutely. That's very important. Professor Binswanger is saying that before you dismiss a context, you have to have reason to believe a question. Rather, you have to have reason to believe that it relates to false context. And this is very easy in practice to do. You can't even begin to do this while you're at the stage of understanding, because questions will pour at you, some of them from false context, some of them from perfectly valid context, some from special ignorance that nobody would have guessed that you were that ignorant on that particular point. But nevertheless, that's relevant too. And you have to just, if you get somebody who knows it, ask and ask and ask, and finally you will see a pattern across time. You will be able to tell that this is a learned skill. Such and such a question is a reality based question. Such and such comes from this gestalt that I got at school. And you'll be able to shift from one to the other. Only way you can do that is it appropriate to start using free will. But if, for instance, you hear this, this is a perfect example. If you hear this lecture today, you don't get it yet intellectually, I mean, I'm not casting aspersions on your intelligence, but you haven't integrated this as to part of your thinking, which would take you a while. So if you have now eight or 10 questions and say, well, no, he's proven his point and this is my subjective. You don't even know whether those questions are subjective or not. For all you know, you found a mistake in what I'm saying, or you found a perfectly legitimate aspect that I didn't cover, or you wanted to integrate it to something which is really correct and important. So you can't dismiss all that only when you've had enough experience and enough repetition of this. I don't get it. I don't get it. No matter how much I ask, I don't get it. That's when you should start to hypothesize what is it that's stopping me when I see so clearly what the truth is and I can't shake these questions. And then you try to find, usually it's something from childhood or from college, like religion or pragmatism or whichever, that you just can't get rid of. And it's when you identify that that you have the means to then start using will. But if you just indiscriminately start, first of all, you couldn't do it because if you just said to me out of the blue, in order to speed things up, forget every question you had, let's just keep on taking answers. But you couldn't do it. So I'm assuming a definite kind of experience. But I know that that experience exists not only for myself, but for many others who shall remain nameless. And I would say for any major philosophic point, one year is a good time. Now, if it takes you a year of thinking, maybe 100 pages of writing questions and maybe five hours of asking some expert, and then you get a pretty good idea by that time what the point is and you're still very recalcitrated. And the same questions keep coming up again and again. Then you have time to sit down and think, maybe you know, I've got something really wrong that I have to get rid of by will or Disintegrate by will. Okay, yes. No, but right behind you. Then I'll take you. Yeah. Isn't there man that held his book up in the air? Oh, that's you. I saw the book, and I didn't see it. I was wondering if there was a parallel between what you've been saying and psychotherapy. When you have an irrational or mistaken emotion and you explain why it's wrong, why it's based on false premises, it doesn't go away. Somebody says, well, you. I understand it, but it doesn't go away. What's the matter with you? You're a lousy therapist. You have to act against this based on your knowledge, and it'll eventually go away if you do that. I think that's an excellent point from Dr. Locke. It's not even a parallel. It's the same issue applied to intellectual matters as applies in psychotherapy. If you go to a therapist and he shows you that you hold certain wrong ideas, and you can see intellectually that they're wrong and they're leading to these emotions, and that's why you hate your mother and so on, and he could be as clear in the world. You go out, you're still a hater. And that is not a reflection of him or on you. It's that you can't de. Automatize something that is part of the whole fabric of your thinking in a short time or painlessly. So you have to go through a period where you say to yourself, if this is the actual situation, my mother is a saint. You know, I didn't like her because I was jealous. I see now. That was stupid. And every time you feel it, just keep reiterating what you're doing, saying, don't succumb to that. And theoretically, if the psychiatrist is right and the mother holds up, you end up. It's not a very plausible example, but you come out. It's the same thing. You have to use will to integrate on whatever level, psychological or philosophical or putting it negatively. You have to use will to disintegrate. No amount of conversation will get past that need. Yes. I was just on that same point. I had the same thoughts about how therapy. A lot of what we teach is how to deautomatize, and a lot of what you do is testing reality. You get the person to go out and to keep challenging their ideas. And there are many different ways to do that. Yeah, I agree a lot of therapy is deautomatizing, but I'm trying to give you a lead as to how to deautomatize so it's not, I don't say what I'm saying is synonymous with deautomatizing. Deautomatizing a wrong context is the goal. But the method of deautomatizing is not to connect your thinking to this particular area, not to ask questions from it, to keep it cut off, separate. And that means disintegrated, not, not integrated. And then it will shrivel of itself. And then, because the essence of thought is integration, that's the next lecture. Then when you build the positive in and you just turn the light on, the thing will go. So deautomatization is the goal, disintegration is the means, and disintegration is done in the context we're talking about by willful suppression. I just won't ask questions from that framework. Because every time you ask a question from that framework, you make another hook between your idea of clarity and that false context. That's another thing you have to break. You see? So the more you try to get clear, the more you perpetuate your mistakes. Okay, I'm trying to get different people. Yes. Have you had one today? No. Okay. When you're beating down, in the process of beating down of that context, say, what is the approach for dealing with questions asked by others that emanate from that context? Do you avoid discussion on that issue? Did you ask me that at the break? No. Oh, because somebody asked me the equivalent and I said to ask it during the. How do you talk to other people when you're in process of beating down one of these alien contexts, which. But it happens that other people hold that same context and they are asking questions of you from that context and it's plausible to you, and yet, you know, you're beating it down. You have to make a decision right there as to what your priorities are. Now, if it's, you know, a professor of philosophy and he's quizzing you on pragmatism and you tell him your position is unintelligible, you mean, you know, you're never obliged to do that. But if you're talking about a non pressure or non coercive situation and the guy wants to just chat about philosophy in a bar, and he starts off by saying, you know, nothing exists, right? You, you cannot, you cannot say, well, I see from what point of view you know, you're speaking, but why do you say that? He says, well, because nothing is what we call the hole in the donut, and it obviously isn't there, otherwise the donut would be full. Now, if he strings you along one after the other, and you start looking at the whole world from the point of view of the doughnut. He will convert you without a doubt. On the other hand, and you'll be blown up. You can undo your thinking completely. On the other hand, if you just come out and say to him, wrong, existence exists. If you don't see it, goodbye. He'll say, what a dogmatist, you know. So there are certain people that you can't talk to, or rather all you can do. You can talk to them in the first and the last stages, like a Hegelian synthesis. In the first stage where you're ignorant, they could just pepper you with objections and you don't know whether they're pointing out things. You've got to really learn which are valid, valid or falsehoods that you have to get rid of. Then you have to get to this stage of like priestly isolation and get thee behind me, Satan. At that point you cannot argue with other people. The most you could do is assert. You could say, I don't agree with that. I'm not going to argue it right now. My point is such and such, but I'm not prepared to argue it at this time. That's it. Because as soon as you start an argument you're wiped out. Because. Because your grounds of arguing aren't clear to you and the act is going to pull you into the other context. Then hopefully you get to the highest synthesis where you can now take on anybody say, sure, I'll argue with you, because you could do double entry bookkeeping. In other words, you can keep your context tremendously clear and keep his running and knock it off one at a time and without affecting yours. That's at the end. But certainly I would not go on tv. You'd be better on TV in the first state than the second. If you went on cold, you'd give your honest answers to say, I don't know. But if you go on and you think you've got a case, only you're mixed up with a contrary context and that's what the interviewer has, then you're completely destroyed. You come across as evasive, unclear and so on. And these TV and radio interviews pick that up like shocks feeding frenzy. So you have other people are good at the beginning and the end, but not in the middle. That doesn't mean that you can't talk to them. But you try to either find some, you know, relatively safe subject like the weather in Virginia or whatever, or else you just assert and you say openly, I'm not arguing at this stage, we disagree. But you know, I think I'll tell you one more of these general questions and then I want to give some examples. Somebody have something that hasn't been covered that they wanted to. Okay, you. Yes. Would you say that the ability to maintain your context in the face of an opposing context is really what is meant by the idea of the strength of character? Well, when I say that the ability to hold your own context in the face of, of an opposing context as what's meant by strength of character, I think it's related, it's a form of intellectual strength. I don't think it's synonymous with strength of character because I can easily imagine the type of person who's thoroughly trained in philosophy and they're thoroughly familiar with all the antagonistic context and they can maintain their own no matter what. And honestly or dishonestly, it doesn't make any difference, but they can do it because they're familiar with. They can shunt back and forth from one falsehood to the other. But their character is the pits. I mean, they are, you know, they can be dishonest, they can be parasites, they can be dependents. So all I would say is if your context is logical, if it's rational and you hold it because it's rational, not just by the accident of someone having taught you the right thing, and you hold it knowing that what you're fighting is a temptation to the opposite, then you are putting the intellectual basis down for strength of character. If you then go on to make all your choices in action with that same approach, we're here talking only about thoughts, you see, then you will develop a very strong character. So this is certainly an essential. But practice just as an intellectual exercise, it's a precondition, but not the substance yet of a moral character. That's a good question. Now let me give a couple of real life examples which I'm sure you must have experienced. I must have had these questions. I couldn't count. I started asking them and then I finally got some impatient with people asking me then that I can barely even talk about them anymore. But this is a good example of something going from being obvious to being obviously senseless. Where did the universe come from? Who caused it? Who produced it? Who created it? And you can tell people you can't ask that question. That would presuppose something outside of the universe that acted as the causal generator. And the universe, by definition everything there is. So there can't be anything outside it. Or you can tell People look, you're going to say X is outside of it. The causes. Where did X come from? You have infinite series and you can get a person say, I see, okay, you can't really ask that question. But they say, I'm really bothered by that. And they come back six months later. Well, if you, you can't say, who created the universe, how do you explain the universe? They say, well, what do you take as an explanation? And after long discussion, it means God would be an explanation. Then show them that isn't an explanation. Explanation is relating one thing within the universe to another thing within the universe. Say, okay, it takes them quite a while. And it takes not only argument, at a certain point, they have to go home and say, okay, this question, where does it come from? I'm not asking that. It just was, it just is, period. I don't like that fact. I wish it wasn't that way, but that's the way it is. And I'm never going to get an answer to this question because it's an invalid question. And every time your mind goes to it, you say, no existence exists. This is where you start. You can't get underneath existence. And this feeling comes up, wouldn't it be really great though, if you could just find one thing? And after a while, if you keep saying no, it gives up. I mean, you know, your mind just won't go on forever without any reward or motivation. If you keep saying, to hell with you, that's it. That is like a temptation, you know. And finally you've redefined, you know, all the words cause and explain and universe and existence, et cetera, so that none of them can be used, since they've all been brought into the right context, none of them can be used even to voice this question. And you say, well, one day you get to the point of saying, where did it come from? Well, that's absurd. Where is a place? And place means a certain type of relationship, Relationship means a certain type of entity. And that's all social. Much part of your thinking that you can't even ask that question. And then you look back and say, isn't that ridiculous? But you had to have that. And there are people who are objectivists to this day who understand it well, but who haven't gone through that. And they tell me, you know, I understand everything in objectivism and I don't want to believe in God, but I just don't get where did the universe come from? And they have missed that intermediate step. Now, I didn't have it. So Bad on that one. But on this one, I used to argue with Ayn Rand ferociously on her view that the universe is finite, there's only so much of it. And I always asked her, well, what's outside it? And she would say, there is no outside. And I would say, well, what about if you went in a straight line, straight and straight and straight forever and ever and ever and ever, what would happen when you bumped your head at the edge? And she said, you can't go in a straight line that far. You can only travel in circles. I said, well, I just can't visualize this at all, because when I visualize you universe, I always liked the Greek idea that it was a round ball, not the Earth, but the whole universe, because they had this cute argument that it has to be round, because there's no reason for more of it to be over here than over here. So it has to be a perfectly. Anyway, I would visualize this round ball, and I could easily imagine something boring its way from the inside up to the edge and then poking its head outside. And she said, you can't visualize the universe, so what do you mean you can't form a picture? The universe is everything. You can't form a picture that isn't delimited by at least the potentiality of a contrast. So the only way you can grasp the universe is conceptually, it means everything that is. If you know what finitude means, you know that everything that is is what it is and is no more. And therefore there's no question about the universe being infinite. And of course I got to understand that. But I had terrible trouble breaking this model of going in a straight line and coming to the end. It became a joke finally, in the circles of which I moved at that time. And at a certain point I just started to laugh too. And then it started to seem silly to me and feel. Finally somebody asked me that question, and I remember reacting with authentic indignation. How could you ask such a thing? I think I have a couple more examples here where it comes up all the time in regard to free will. You know, you give the whole Objectivist position. There's higher level choices and then there's the primary choices. The primary choice is to focus or not. This primary choice cannot be derived from any antecedent events, including even your previous conclusions and value judgments and so on. It's a primary. So of course primaries, everybody hates. They like secondaries, tertiaries, quaternary, but not primaries, because everything has to come from something else. And this Is a primary, upsets everybody, just the way the universe is a primary. So they ask continuously, but how do you explain why these two men who had the same background and the same values and the same thinking and the same everything, this guy, at a crucial point in his life, chose to think and this one didn't? Why? Now you say, well, all you can say is he chose and he didn't. But why? This couldn't be causeless. No, it's not a cause. Causeless. The cause is the nature of human consciousness. The effect is it has the capacity on its own hook to go one way or the other. That's it. The cause is the choice. But why did he choose the choice? Now, you see, you can ask that to infinity. Well, that's the choice he chose. Then why did he choose to choose? Choose that choice? You just can't go on. And this is again, one of those things which you can see it intellectually, I mean, unless you're a determinist. But that's a different thing. But if you're not, you can see intellectually. But you finally have to get to the point where the very word causality or explanation or whichever is integrated into the proper context. So you can't use them to say why. The word why in other words, has to be taken over by the correct context. So when you say why improperly, it becomes silly. You say, what do you mean, why? The fact that you can utter why doesn't mean you're using the word why correctly. And this is a perfect example. The only way to do that is to suppress those whys when they come up and say, this is the wrong use of why. I don't feel it, but it is, so to hell with it. I'm not asking it. And then when you finally, you know, do it, you find that it's much easier. Or here's one more example that is very common philosophically. I've been giving you so far basically metaphysical examples about existence and consciousness. But here's an example. One of the major things, the major thing that perpetuates skepticism is one of these false contexts that are clung to as an absolute. Namely, it's always possible for us to be wrong and not know it. How do you know you're not? And then you say, well, here's my argument. It's possible. We think an argument is valid and you committed an undetectable fallacy. How do you know you didn't. Now, if you get into that how do you know you didn't type of question, there's no way out because that automatically wipes out anything you answer. No matter how brilliant your proof, how do you know it's not wrong? How overwhelming your facts, how do you know they're not distorted? You know how clear your definitions, how do you know there shouldn't be another one which is transformed? You know there's no way out. You're trapped in skepticism forever. And a skeptic is just by definition someone who clings to that as his defining context. He will never let go of that how you know you're not. And consequently, no matter what you say to him existence exists. You can't get under him. That's his equivalent of existence exists. Now, the trouble is the skeptic never gets anywhere from that except to go around like a nihilist and say, nobody can know anything. But what happens to objectivists is they hear existence exists, consciousness, a isa and rationality, and everything is great. And then they meet a skeptic, usually in college, who insinuates this premise and gives them five or six plausible examples, or people thought the earth was flat and they were wrong, and et cetera, et cetera, and then generalizes, how do you know you didn't make a mistake? Isn't it possible? Of course they don't know anything about the word possible. Everything's possible, you know, and they get that deeply entrenched. And then they come to Objectivism and they go through exactly what I did on pragmatism versus Objectivism. If the force of the speaker can beat that out of their head for the moment, they say, yeah, sure, you can know things. That's ridiculous to question. Absolutely certain. But as soon as they get back to their professor or their subculture or whatever, the question comes up again. How do you know you didn't make a mistake? That question sucks them in. They say that I don't know. I can't prove it. Now you know there's a whole mass of things you have to be able to prove, to deny that question, or massive things. You have to integrate the onus of proof, principle, and what's wrong with the arbitrary. And that means what method should be used to connect concepts? And that means what are concepts? So there's a vast positive constellation that you have to integrate before that question. How do you know you're not wrong? Wrong will will die. And during that period, you will never learn all that you have to know and integrate it. If you're continuously oscillating back to, maybe this isn't true. How do I know anything? It's like you're ripping the connection out as you're putting it in. So you just spend your entire life saying, somehow Objectivism is good, but they're dogmatic. They don't allow the possibility of error. But by the very fact of the saying that he can't retain Objectivism anymore because the things that he needs to raise that question are at odds of the Objectivist context. So although he thinks he's in effect, a soft Objectivist, you know he's going to go with Objectivism, but just with his own reservations. The reservations pull out all the wrong implications and gradually Objectivism becomes less and less clear to him. And this is the. You have simply. God, once you understand intellectually that this question is wrong, you have to just simply suppress by will. And for instance, the thought occurred to you right? Now, maybe Pikov just made a mistake. It's possible he even started by saying, ayn Rand doesn't know the point he's going to make, so maybe he distorted I don't know what, but maybe he did. Now, nothing is going to stop you. I could argue with you until doomsday. And any answer I gave you, maybe that's the mistake. Nothing will take that out of your mind because you've said, I am including as a means of understanding a question which demands the assertion of the arbitrary. Well, once you're doing that, no one can stop you. So the only thing you can do is say, I won't do it. No, but you know, your subconscious is not directly within your volitional control. It'll just come back and say, tough on you. I want to know, how do you know he didn't do it? So you just have to say to this voice of the devil, and, you know, I don't want to know that. That is not part of my thinking. To hell with it. And then finally you get to the point where you can look back and you know, write a book on what's wrong with that question. Now, those are some of the most obvious cases of people who have difficulty, I venture to say, decade after decade. Everybody's got his own bet noir here. And some of them, like me, had six or eight going at one time, but they just can't get it. They're the perennial Objectivists trying to understand. And they come to all the conferences and they just get older and older and more and more disappointed. Now, I wanted to clarify just a couple of last quick points that we have some questions. In the original seminar, somebody asked me, isn't what you're really Getting at simply that you have to reiterate the right context over and over. And that is not what I'm really getting at. So since intelligent people ask that, I want to clarify that. Repetition or reiteration is certainly essential to automatization. You have to use it and use it and use it before it becomes part of you. But what I am saying is if you merely reiterate, you hear it in lectures, you read it in books, you say it over to yourself, that is not enough. You need to apply the new context to become your active intellectual framework and base around which you relate all new incoming data. So you not only need to keep it going and reiterate it, you need suppression, willful suppression of the old. If you have an old context that's in conflict, you get that point. I wish there was a magic formula where you could just kill off an old context. It would be great. On the other hand, it could then fall in the hands of. Of people who would kill off the right context and become a government method. So it's just as good, I guess, that it doesn't happen. I think I had one concluding observation here. Oh, yes. The last note I want to make is, this is another example. The whole lecture, in my opinion, is another example of what it means to grow up. So I'm giving it to you from an ethical point of view. One of the essentials of becoming an adult after being a child is what? One of the essential differences. Now, there's a hundred, but I'm looking for one, so don't tell me that one is taller than the other. What is one of the essential differences in the functioning of a child? And an animal on the one case and a man on the other, or a woman. What? Independence. But that's not what I'm talking about here. Not accepting the content of his consciousness. No. I'm thinking of something more specific than that. Something that an ordinary psychologist would understand. It's not an Objectivist point. Yes, well, that it's implied that we can assess. But I have something even simpler than that. That. Yes. More than taking responsibility, it's an ability to wait. Which is called what? Delayed gratification. One of the characteristic marks of children is they have to have instant gratification. If my daughter gets a new dress and I tell her, save it for the 4th of July, it's out of the question. She has to were today. That's it. Or other kids in this conference. The banquet was starting and they saw the pool. That was it. They were going to go in the Pool didn't make any difference. They had to come in wet bathing suits afterwards. Afterwards has no reality. The imperative of the moment is so powerful and the future is so far off and tenuous that the idea of delayed gratification would strike them as Kangianism. In other words, self torture is an end in itself. And yet what we're talking about here is really an instance of that. Most people, when they grow up, do achieve the ability, you know, not to eat as soon as they see the food on the table, not to just throw it down their throat and to save the dress for next week and to put money aside for a whole year for vacation, etc. Well, this is the same process here. If you want intellectual gratification, you cannot have it now. Just because a question comes to you, you can't say, I must have satisfaction. Now, I got to see it today because when it's really complicated and you have a set of contradictions, you can't do it today. So that's where you have to say, I'll put as much into this as I will into paying for my vacation or delaying till I can buy a decent car instead of an American one, or whatever it happens to be. If you pursue the right path, you will get there and you will really see it clearly. But you have to pay the price. And judging by my own experience, the price is sometimes very miserable and disheartening. But if you keep going, it finally all comes clear, and you have the advantage of my struggles and other people's to point out to you what you can do. Okay, I think we have a couple minutes for questions. I've completed number one. Now, you don't want to ask questions because you think it's going to come from the wrong context. That's very bad. Yeah, if it's germane. You made a reference to Ayn Rand's use of the word superstructure. I didn't follow that. Oh, I'm sorry. Ayn Rand sometimes, I guess not in writing, used the word superstructure to stand for the content of your conscious mind, which was accessible to your own knowledge. And she sometimes, instead of talking about subconscious ideas or deeply buried idea, she called it the sub basement. So she would want to know about someone was in his superstructure, was in his sub basement. And she thought, morality is acting according to your superstructure, but mental health is having no conflict between that and your sub basement. But those were terms that she used in early years, and I never. I don't regard them as technical objectivist usages. And in any event, they would Be psychological, not philosophical. We have a couple minutes more. Yes, Gary? Could this phenomenon of clashing context lead people to yearn for or advocate tolerance? Which tolerance is there a connection between? Well, the question is, could the phenomenon of clashing context be tied in with people yearning for or advocating tolerance? Only if they're completely malevolent. In other words, if a person has clashing context and on top of that thinks everything is hopeless, then he may as well say you should, you know, everybody should tolerate everything because we're caught in the unintelligible. But I was a real anti tolerant from day one. I hated the idea of tolerance and I still had clashing context. It never predisposed me to want to be tolerant. On the contrary, in one context I thought the other was awful and vice versa. So I had a strong view, but I just couldn't stay somewhere. But I think that tolerance or agnosticism comes from a different type of psychology, which is someone who doesn't want to know the answers. And a person like that is not bothered by contradictions. They may use it the way Kant used the antinomies, you know, just as a sort of afterthought to show how hopeless the mind is. And we can never know anyway. But their real motive is not an intellectual problem. Their real motive is either nihilism or terror. And therefore for either reason, the desire to break down ideas have no absolute. I think we can still do a couple more if you move it around. And somebody who hasn't asked yet. Yes, I was struck by you bringing up skepticism and was wondering if that relates to people who really believe somehow implicitly in primacy of consciousness. So you get the example you brought up before. The war between intrinsicism and objectivism are just two faces of the same underlying premise, which is accepting consciousness as primary instead of existence. I'm sorry, I didn't hear one half of you. The war between. If you have a war between intrinsicism. Oh, intrinsicism. They're both faces of a primacy of consciousness approach. Yeah, but what is the connection? Is the skeptic really have some kind of that area? Oh yeah. The skeptic is certainly an expression of subjectivism, just the way the mystic is the expression of intrinsicism that I cover in the book. So it just in the same way that intrinsicism and subjectivism in the theory of concepts have the same idea that detachment of concepts from percepts, in that same way mysticism and skepticism, which are their corollaries in epistemology, have the same common idea, namely the inability of reason to grasp truth. And then one says, well, when we can't grasp truth and the other says when we've got a super rational faculty. So if you're trying to point out that the clashing context is virtually always in philosophy, one form or another of the detachment of concepts from persons, that is true. The problem is the only thing that makes me hesitant is that will not always be the best way for a given individual to come at it, because that's already so abstract. Abstractor formulation that would have a tendency to be a floating abstraction. You should address the bad context and the terms that you can see. And very often in the early years of philosophy, the idea of thinking in terms of concepts versus percepts is already so abstract that is just too much for you at that stage. If you're at the stage already where you think easily in those terms and you can subsume intrinsicism and substitute objectivism under that one broad category, you're not going to have very much trouble with conflicting context because on that level you're pairing up everything wrong unless it's a floating abstraction. So usually your context is much more narrowly defined, like it's where's, what's outside the universe, you know, or who made you choose, etc. You're giving basically the answer rather than the problem the way it's to trying. Thanks, Bill. I think I have time for a 15 second question. Yes. With respect to your starting point, when you know that you're sure enough that you can banish the other point of view. With respect to the religion question, when you know that you're sure enough, well, that's your formulation is wrong right there. So let me answered that and I think our 15 seconds is up. You can ask the other half next time we get to it. It is not a matter of degree. If you take all cognitive states and arrange them on a continuum without any critical jump to certainty and you say, oh, I'm pretty sure, reasonably sure, well, I'm sure enough now, I'll suppress that. That won't work. That is not what I'm about. Talking, talking about sure is a colloquialism for certain and certain means the thing has been proved. That's the cutoff at the end of probability. It's not just a little more probable than probable. That means this is it, you've reached, you know, kingdom come and you have to have a real proof for that that you can objectively defend, put on paper if necessary, take it back to perceptual data. And it's only when you have that. That you can say, even though I have this, all these questions from that other context are still coming. No, but it's not as though you go along listening to one context and then the other and the other and the other and say, well, I feel pretty good about this one now, so to hell with the other. It is not an issue of sure enough. You're either sure or you're not. If you're not, then you have to go by the probabilities. You have to say if it. First of all, if you're not sure in philosophy, you don't understand the issue. Because philosophy, you don't say probably. You know, that's for scientific theories. You don't. You don't say probably any more than you do in mathematics. You don't say, I'm sure enough of existence to walk out of this room, but not enough, you know, to go to dinner tonight either. Either it exists or it doesn't, you see? So you have to have a critical point, like water get. Gets warmer, warmer, and then it boils and it turns to steam. Only when it turns to steam, in this case, do you throw away the other pot. Until that point, you try to concentrate on the best you can to get the proof. Okay, on that note, we will have to stop. Thank you.