That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, the life-keeper of your body. Your body is a machine, your consciousness—your mind—is its driver; and that which you call your emotions is the union of the two, the product of the integrating mechanism by which your mind controls your body.

  Man has wrested existence from the mystic demons, but not consciousness—material reality, but not his mind. Men still look at consciousness as savages looked at material nature. Men have progressed in material production, but have not progressed in spirit—because the first was the province of reason, but the second is still the province of faith and emotions. There has been no moral progress, because the tool of all progress-the mind—was banished from morality.

  PART 5

  FINAL YEARS

  15

  NOTES: 1955—1977

  This chapter presents a miscellany of notes written from 1955 to 1977. AR’s notes for two books, also made during this period, are saved for the last chapter.

  The following material begins with notes on psychology written in the same year that AR completed Galt’s speech. These notes are unrelated to the speech; AR kept them in a separate folder. They contain the build-up to and her first discussion of “psycho-epistemology,” a concept she originated; she later defined it as “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious and the automatic functions of the subconscious” (see The Romantic Manifesto). She begins by referring to a man’s conscious premises and subconscious processes as the “super-structure” and the “sub-basement” of the mind, without giving explicit definitions of these terms. Later, she writes: “Super-structure is the realm of philosophy, of premises, ideas, convictions, etc.—that is, the content of a person’s mind; sub-basement is the realm of psychology—the method by which a mind acquires and handles its content.”

  Almost a third of AR’s notes on psychology are presented here—those in which AR is writing as a philosopher about the foundations of psychology. The rest of the material, which I have omitted, pertains to topics outside the realm of philosophy, such as particular neuroses. Her motive in writing the latter notes was to understand the people she knew, many of whom baffled her. However, she was not interested in psychology as a subject, and never made a systematic study of it. So the omitted notes are of less interest.

  The rest of the material in this chapter is from the post-Atlas Shrugged period, when AR was writing prolifically on philosophy. Considering the complexity of the issues she dealt with in this period, it may be surprising that she made so few notes. But she found non-fiction writing much easier than fiction. Typically, she wrote from brief outlines, which are omitted here because they merely list the main ideas in the published articles.

  May 13, 1955

  [In her 1955 notes on psychology, AR used the term “rationalist” to refer to “an exponent of reason. ” Since this term is associated with the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy in philosophy, which she rejected, I have eliminated it in favor of “rational man. ”]

  Psychological “Epistemology”

  The three metaphysical fundamentals with which a human consciousness has to deal are: existence, consciousness—and the consciousness of other people.

  The crucial decision that a man makes is: in which category does he place the consciousness of others—in external existence or in his own consciousness? The first is the proper process of a rational man. The second means that the consciousness of others becomes a factor in the mind’s process of judgment; it becomes, not an external fact, but an x factor by means of which facts are to be judged; not that which the mind perceives, but that by means of which it does the perceiving. This is the root of the “epistemological” corruption of a human consciousness.

  Example: A rational man thinks: “Two plus two equals four.” A second-hander thinks: “Two plus two plus x equals four—maybe, the x permitting.” The x stands for the unknown and unknowable decision of the consciousness of others.

  Question to investigate: These three fundamentals are probably the three premises which determine a man’s psychological “epistemology.” Is there a special method of thinking that a man will employ according to the premises he has formed about these three fundamentals? And, as sub-category: in relation to his own consciousness, is there a crucial premise formed by a man about his thinking and his emotions? Is this premise another determining factor in the thinking method that a man will employ? [...]

  Next assignment: Define more fully and specifically what we know so far about methods of thinking.

  What is the exact role of the conscious mind (of the “spark”) as driver and as spectator of the material provided by the subconscious?

  What is the exact nature of the subconscious as the repository of stored knowledge—and as the automatic creator of emotions?

  What is the exact role of emotions in a process of thinking? (Are they selectors, integrators, blockers—or all of these, according to one’s premises?)

  What is the exact nature of the process of integration?

  What is the nature of the state which a man takes as certainty? How does he know that he knows? (Or is certainty possible only to a rational man? If so, what takes its place in a corrupted consciousness?)

  Is the question of “certainty” related to the question of “values”? My lead here is the fact that when I attempt to calculate a chess game my mind gives up on a very violent feeling of “What’s the use?” [...] (Later question: Does [a man] become immoral (non-valuing) because he has formed the premise of a fluid reality—or does he form the premise of a fluid reality because he has rejected his value-setting power? I suspect that it is the first. I also suspect that one’s concepts of reality and of values are inseparable corollaries. This, I think, is the point at which the independent mind and the sovereign value-setter are united.)

  In relation to emotions: The two fundamentals are pleasure and pain. In psychological motives they become: love or fear (love for values, ambition for pleasure, i.e., happiness—or—fear of pain, escape from pain). (This leads to: activity or passivity, achievement of the positive or escape from the negative.) An important moral lead is the question: Is a man motivated by fear in any part of his psychology? He is immoral to the extent of his fear motivations—immoral in the primary sense of morality: fear leads to the refusal to think, to perceive reality. (Fear as an “epistemological” factor.)

  May 25, 1955

  The first two metaphysical fundamentals which a human consciousness has to grasp and deal with are: existence and consciousness. Within each of these two, there are two fundamentals which a man grasps with his earliest concepts: existence is divided into facts (reality) and people (other people’s views of reality)—consciousness is divided into mind and emotions (thinking and feeling).

  If a man is unable to integrate these four concepts (reality, people, thinking, feeling) in a proper, rational manner, if he finds himself torn by conflicts among these four—then what he sacrifices and what he chooses to preserve determines his basic character, his metaphysics and his epistemology. [...]

  The proper pattern of a rational man in regard to the four fundamentals is as follows: Mind above emotions (but not in the sense of emotional suppression, only in the sense of knowing that the mind is the source of emotions)—and reality [above people] (a single, indivisible reality to be perceived and judged by one’s own mind). The specific distinction of a rational man is the fact that the consciousness of others as an epistemological factor does not exist for him, that he holds no such concept, that a conflict such as his view of reality versus the view of others has never occurred to him epistemologically and has never been an issue within his own processes of thought. A rational man regards others and their views as [external] facts of existence, to be judged by his mind—and not as an inner fact, to be part of his judgment. A man of unbreached consciousness is one who has never allowed the opinions of others to become an epistemological issue, that is, to shake his confidence in the validity of his own perceptions and of his own rational judgment.

  May 27, 1955

  Assignment: The next and most urgent step in this inquiry should be a full, exact and objective definition of:1. What these four fundamentals are, what realm they cover, in what form they exist within a consciousness, by what objective signs one can detect them.

  2. The exact influence of the sub-basement on the super-structure.

  3. The manner in which sub-basement premises are formed (since they are not formed as a conscious, philosophical conviction).

  May 28, 1955

  The Four Fundamentals and the Issue of Values

  The crucial error of the man who chooses “emotions above mind” in the sub-basement consists of acquiring an “epistemology” that makes emotions part of his thinking process in the specific role of a judge of values and, later, almost the judge of truth and facts (or the meaning of facts) and, therefore, the judge of certainty in any given thought process. While to a rational man the answer to a problem is a factual identification or explanation of reality—to a sub-basement emotionalist the answer to a problem is the achievement of a happy or positive emotion.

  The formula for this crucial difference is as follows:

  An emotionalist’s identification of values is: “The good is that which will make me happy. ”

  A rational man’s identification of values is: “I will be made happy by that which is good. ”

  Thereafter, the rational man will be incapable of emotional response without knowing the nature of that to which he is responding. In complex situations, he might need time to identify all the elements of his particular emotional response (since an emotional sum is calculated by the subconscious much faster than a conscious process of thought could do it), but the identification will always be available to him, open to his conscious mind, and his emotions will always correspond to his conscious standard of values. He might be mistaken in any given situation about his conscious identification of the facts involved—but he will never be off his standard of values, there will never be a contradiction between his emotional response and his conscious, rational, stated standard of values. He will never be in love with a person whom he consciously despises, nor be resentful of a person whom he consciously admires.

  The emotionalist will be open to all the above kind of conflicts. Only the strength of his rational super-structure will guarantee whether he responds to the right values or not, according to his conscious standard or not. He will experience an emotion ahead of his full rational knowledge of that to which he is responding. He will do so by means of a “package deal”: since emotions are sums, he will respond to his first, vague, generalized perception of an object or to some particular “highlight” of an object. He will respond to the total of an object, person or event—without breaking it up into its parts or attributes. In his “emotional epistemology,” he will be in a position similar to that of a child who perceives entities, but has not yet learned to identify them by means of their attributes.

  When his emotional response clashes with his later, rational identification of a given object, the emotionalist is left in an insoluble conflict: (1) He does not know how to untangle the emotional from the rational in his own mental processes; (2) He feels a tremendous reluctance against analyzing his emotions or their object, against breaking up the “package deal”; such an analysis is contrary to his basic metaphysics and his basic concept of himself; he feels as if he were doing violence to himself and his universe; (3) Even if he succeeds, by a painful, forced process of “old-fashioned will power,” in analyzing the object of his emotions, the conclusion made by his mind lacks full conviction to him, lacks the fire and certainty of conviction—because the emotion, not the facts, is his final judge of the value of reality, which does mean: his final judge of reality.

  The emotionalist is the man who says that “the cold hand of reason destroys emotions.” To a rational man, such a statement is incomprehensible.

  Sub-basement premises remain in an adult consciousness in the form of “psychological epistemology ”—in the method of thinking (“front seat” or “back seat,” directed or contemplative), in the place which emotions occupy in a process of thought (reason as the active director, emotions as the passive result—or—emotions as the active judge, reason as the passive result) and in the nature of the emotional response (specifically particularized—or—vague and generalized).

  Sub-basement premises are the methods of functioning of a consciousness —they are specifically the field of psychology (as distinguished from philosophy)—they are the workings of a soul’s mechanism, not the content of its ideas.

  Sub-basement premises are not premises in the sense in which we use the concept philosophically. A rational adult with an emotionalist premise in his sub-basement does not hold somewhere deep in his subconscious the conviction that “emotions are superior to reason.” What he holds is an epistemological method which, if translated into a philosophical premise, would amount to “emotions are superior to reason.” He did not choose it in terms of a conscious conviction; he chose it in terms of an-inner method of reacting which, by the time he is old enough to identify it, has become automatic, appears to be an irreducible primary and is extremely difficult for his own consciousness to identify.

  The same is true of the other crucial sub-basement fundamental: reality versus people. There may be other fundamentals pertaining to the sub-basement, which will need to be identified. At present, I am tracing only the influence of the two metaphysical fundamentals with which I started these notes: existence and consciousness. It remains to be seen (to be examined separately) whether these two cover the whole sub-basement or not. What I am certain of at present is:1. I have found the key to the pattern of how metaphysical fundamentals are translated into psychological fundamentals.

  2. What we called “sub-basement premises” are methods of functioning or what we called “psychological epistemology.”

  3. What we called “super-structure” is the realm of philosophy, of premises, ideas, convictions, etc.—that is, the content of a person’s mind; “sub-basement” is the realm of psychology—the method by which a mind acquires and handles its content. But since the method was determined by implied (if not conscious) philosophical ideas formed by a person’s mind—it is philosophical ideas that can correct the method, provided the psychologist is able to identify them for the patient.

  4. The role of psychology is “the science of epistemological retraining.” A patient needs, not just a correct philosophy, but a new method of thinking and feeling. A psychologist must first communicate the essentials of a correct philosophy, then start the patient on a course of “epistemological retraining”—as soon as the psychologist has grasped the specific nature of the patient’s errors (from the patient’s conscious and subconscious premises). This eliminates the need of constant analyzing of particular, concrete troubles, confusions and relapses. (This answers my own particular bewilderment at the fact that our best and most intelligent converts were not always able to derive from our philosophical abstractions the concrete applications which, to me, seemed self-evident.)

  (Note to Nathan [Nathaniel Branden, psychologist and associate of AR’s until 1968]: I know that the above is very vague and generalized, but my stomach (and brain) is screaming that this is the right track. The “epistemological” methods that we have discovered so far (such as “back-seat driving,” etc.) are not the whole story—but I am sure that the role of psychology is to discover, identify and then be able to cure all the essential “epistemological” errors possible to a human consciousness. We will know that we have discovered them all when we are able to explain every basic aberration of a human consciousness. In the past, we have been identifying and detecting specific, individual bad premises in a patient’s mind, some of them fundamental, others fairly superficial, with no general plan of procedure, no systematic view of a cure. What I am glimpsing now is at least the first key to establishing the mileposts of a systematic road to analysis and cure; the mileposts themselves are still to be identified; this is only the first of them.)

  1955

  [In the following note, AR is discussing those who refuse to judge right and wrong because of their fear of opposing others.]

  Isn’t this the “Rose Wohl issue”? [An unknown reference.] She said she did not want to think that others were so wrong. I thought she meant that she would find it horrifying to live among evil creatures and, therefore, prefers not to know that they are evil; I took her motive to be: (a) a kind of good will, which makes her resist the necessity of hating and loathing others, a mistaken form of desire for a benevolent universe, which she thinks she can achieve by evasion; (b) a practical sort of cowardice, which makes her resist the idea that she might be living among monsters and in constant danger, and makes her prefer not to know it, on some grounds such as “what you don’t know won’t hurt you”—again on the principle of plain (“wholesome”?!) evasion, such as the evasion of a man who refuses to see a doctor in order not to find out whether he has a deadly disease.

  What I see now is that she meant she does not dare think that others are wrong, she does not dare oppose them even in her own mind; they would punish her for holding such an opinion; it is dangerous not only to act against them, but even to think against them. (!!!) This amounts to a voluntary brain-washing as a basic policy of life. (Good God!)

  This issue is the reason why of any depravity, the one I’ve always loathed most is the slogan “If you can’t beat them, join them.” But again, I thought of it in semi-rational terms, i.e., I thought it meant the advice to fake the terms of others in action and beat them at their own game. But here I think I had a “stomach-sense” of the truth, because this slogan made me much more indignant and horrified than any rational interpretation warranted; I sensed something much more evil in it. Now I see that it means the surrender of one’s consciousness, in the sense of: “If you can’t beat them, don’t think”—it is meant to apply, not to action, but to thought, not to the realm of existence, but to the realm of consciousness, not in the sense of accepting values you do not really believe for the sake of some “practical” advantage, but in a sense unspeakably worse: in the sense of discarding your capacity to agree and replacing it by uncritical obedience—thus making obedience take metaphysical and epistemological primacy over acceptance or rejection, truth or falsehood, which means: over one’s judgment.