Understanding Our World. Based on the resources of the University of Michigan. [Music] I have held the same philosophy I now hold
for as far back as I can remember. I have learned a great deal through the years and
expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications, and
I intend to continue expanding it, but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness
as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason
as his only absolute. University of Michigan television presents
an interview with a challenging critic of intellectual life and leadership in America
today, an interview with Ayn Rand, noted American novelist, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas
Shrugged, and philosopher-spokesman for America’s new intellectual. To interview Miss Rand,
Prof. James McConnell of the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Miss Rand, a moment ago we heard you mention
the fundamentals of your philosophy of life. I suppose it’s true that, at least in one
sense, every novelist is a philosopher. But I think very few novelists have devoted the
time and the energy that you have to the development of a consistent philosophical system, so let
me begin by asking you: Do you consider yourself primarily a novelist or primarily a philosopher? I would say I am primarily both, equally,
and for the same reasons. You see my main interest and purpose, both in literature and
in philosophy, is to define and present the image of an ideal man, the specific concrete
image of what man can be and ought to be, and when I started writing, when I approached
the task of literature and began to study philosophy, I discovered that I was in profound
disagreement with all the existing philosophies, particularly their codes of morality. Therefore,
I had to do my own thinking. I had to define my own full philosophical system in order
to discover and present the kind of ideas and premises that make an ideal man possible,
in order to define what kind of convictions would result in the character of an ideal
man. I think your novels show very clearly that
you have achieved that sort of fusion of philosophy and fiction that I think you aimed for. Thank you. You know, in several of your novels you’ve
made the point that leadership in any culture, not only in art, but in literature, morality,
politics and economics, that this sort of leadership must be provided by what you call
the professional intellectuals. That’s right. I wonder if you could tell me just what you
mean by the term professional intellectuals. Who are they for example? The professional intellectuals are, in effect,
the field agents of the army whose head or commander in chief is the philosopher. The
philosopher, the man who defines the basic, fundamental ideas of a culture, is the man
who determines history. And professional intellectuals are all those whose professions deal with
the humanities, the studies of man as against the physical sciences. The professional intellectuals,
in all their various professions, carry to the rest of the culture, the rest of society,
the philosophical premises, the ideas which have been defined by the philosopher. Therefore
they are the transmission belts. They are the ones who determine the goals, the values,
and the direction of a culture. Is this true in any culture? Would it be true
no matter where you found them? It is true in a civilized culture, but historically
you must remember this: The new intellectual, rather the intellectual is a very recent phenomenon.
There were no such phenomenon as a professional intellectual prior to the Industrial Revolution
and the birth of capitalism. Prior to that, men could not make a living, could not make
a profession of intellectual work. The mind, the intellect, reason, had no value in those
earlier cultures. It is only since the birth of capitalism and of a free society that men,
for the first time in history, acquired the chance to make a living by means of dealing
with ideas. Reason became a practical issue for the first time, and the height of it was
the 19th century. Today, this is the value which we are losing, and it is the intellectuals
who are betraying it. You think, then, that American intellectual
leadership has collapsed? Yes, collapsed and abdicated. How have the intellectuals failed to do the
things that they ought to do? How have they not lived up to their responsibility? By betraying the very premise that makes their
existence possible: by denying the intellect. For decades now, the intellectuals have been
progressively preaching and advocating the idea that the intellect is impotent, that
man can know nothing for certain, that reason is unreliable, and in effect man has no
power to know the facts of reality. This amounts to men who, proclaiming themselves intellectual,
spend their time denying the validity of the intellect. That is a form of committing suicide.
And today, when you see the rise of such openly mystical, anti-intellectual philosophies as
Zen Buddhism or existentialism, doctrines which cannot really properly be called philosophies,
this is the admission of intellectual bankruptcy on the part of those who accept it. If in
a group of men, such a theory as Zen Buddhism, which is a doctrine originating about the
fifth century BC, if that becomes the latest word of the mind, it isn’t I who am condemning
them – they have condemned themselves by their own actions. They have given up. They
have declared their intellectual bankruptcy and have gone back to the mysticism of the
Dark Ages. Why do you think they’ve done this? Because, since philosophers are the ones who
really set the basic premises of the whole intellectual profession, the philosophies
of the Western world have been going progressively more and more towards mysticism ever since
the Renaissance. The Renaissance was achieved, was the intellectual result, of the Aristotelian
influence, the influence of Aristotle’s philosophy, which in effect destroyed in the
Middle Ages and broke the way for the Renaissance. But ever since then, while men, while the
culture in general, were achieving incredible progress culminating in the 19th century,
on the basis of that Aristotelian influence, the intellectuals, ever since Immanuel Kant,
were going progressively more and more against reason. The trend started of course before
Kant, but I consider Kant the crucial destroyer and the crucial turning point. He was the
philosopher who undercut the validity of reason. He did not really succeed, but his is the
most skillful system of pushing reason off the philosophical scene altogether, and to
the extent to which other philosophers and intellectuals accepted his basic premises,
to that extent they have been moving towards a noumenal, mystical world ever since. You mentioned Kant. You mentioned Aristotle
and his influence on the Renaissance. Under whose influence was the world before the Renaissance?
Let’s go back and look at some of the – Before the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the
Dark Ages were ruled by mysticism, that is, by religion and philosophy. And in those periods,
philosophy was considered a handmaiden of theology. The predominant philosophical influence
was Plato — Plato’s through Plotinus and Augustine, who were philosophically Platonists.
Aristotle’s triumph in effect began with Thomas Aquinas, who brought back the philosophy
of Aristotle, most particularly its most important part, epistemology, logic, reason. Well, what in particular about Kant’s system
of philosophy do you think was responsible for the trend that you see today in philosophy? Very cumbersome, very complex and very false
and phony system of dividing man’s intellect, man’s mind, from reality, of declaring that what we perceive is only an illusion created by some special kind of categories
and forms of perception in our own mind. By declaring and allegedly proving, allegedly,
that we can never perceive things as they are, which simply means that any object which
is perceived is thereby false. If an object is perceived, it means our perception is incorrect.
It was in effect an attack on the whole concept of consciousness, not only human consciousness
but any consciousness. It was the denial of the reality or the validity of our perceptions. Well, if this is the situation that we’re
in right now, this brings another point. You’ve talked about the trend into mysticism, but
in your latest book I know you talk not only of mysticism, but this is only one part of
a trend that you have traced, and you called the mystics the Witch Doctors, as I remember
– That’s right. – and you also talk about the rule of force
and the men of force, the Attilas of the world, so how do they fit into your framework? Well, you see, in fact reason is man’s only
faculty for perceiving reality. Reason is the only means by which man can achieve knowledge
of reality. And by reason, of course, I mean the faculty which perceives, identifies and
integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Therefore reason is man’s faculty
for perceiving reality. But reason does not work automatically. Men have to decide, will,
to think and to perceive. Men can receive sensory data or integrate sensations into
perceptions automatically, but they cannot form conceptions, they cannot form abstractions,
automatically. That has to be a volitional function of man’s consciousness. Since most
men, guided by their philosophers, do not wish to think, and they consider thought and reason
is a dangerous or impotent or too much of an effort. Most human cultures with very rare
exceptions have been ruled by what I call Witch Doctors, and a Witch Doctor is any man
who takes his emotions, not his thinking but his emotions, as his tool of cognition and
his guide to reality. He functions by means of faith. He acts on the basis of blind beliefs,
which in fact are nothing more than his wishes. He is guided by his wishes, by his whims,
which he takes as a guide to reality. No matter on what level of culture you observe him,
that type of man is a Witch Doctor in the sense of his psycho-epistemology, of the way
he uses his mind. And since he has to deal with other men, since on the ground of emotions
no one can deal with reality nor with people, the natural ally of the Witch Doctor will
always be the type I call Attila, that is, the primitive, savage tribal chief, the man
who acts only on the range of the moment, on his immediate sensory perceptions, who
is contemptuous of and refuses to consider ideas, principles, or abstractions, and whose
way of dealing with reality and with other men is by means of brute force. Attila is
either the gangster or the dictator or the military conqueror or any man who believes
that force is practical — any man who refuses to think and wishes to loot, enslave, or force
others. All through history, all major cultures with very few exceptions were ruled by an
alliance of the man of faith, that is the Witch Doctor, with the man of force, which
is the Attila. The Witch Doctor provided the goal and the values and the moral sanction
for Attila to enforce in the world. And in today’s world, you see the same phenomenon
in allegedly civilized terms, but the essence remains the same: a dictator, which is the
Attila, a man like Khrushchev, and his political theorists, the modern leftist, liberal, socialist
intellectuals, who are philosophically Attila-ists. They in effect provide an allegedly non-mystical
moral justification, a philosophical justification, for Attila and for the rule of brute force.
I call them the neo-mystics, because they are as much against the validity of reason
as were the original jungle witch doctors. I can see the relationship of what the mystic
or the neo-mystic can give to the Attilas, but what, why do the mystics need the Attilas?
What is the relationship the other way? What does –? Why do the mystics –? Yes. Because a mystic’s first and motivating
force is dread of physical reality. Ah. Since he is a man who holds his emotions above
reality, who in any conflict between his feelings and the facts of reality, will select his
feelings and will abandon reality or deny it, he cannot deal with reality at all, and
his mysticism is a form of escape from the necessity to deal with reality or with facts.
Therefore he needs Attila as a protector. He needs Attila to save him from the necessity
of dealing with facts to provide his material livelihood, and to enforce his edicts on the
victims. Well, earlier you said that each culture should
have its philosopher, and then the intellectuals should be the people who more or less put
the philosophy into action. That’s right. It seems to me that there is another side,
another issue of this too. What about science? Well, science is a very recent phenomenon.
Science is of course the product of the 19th century, of the industrial revolution, of
capitalism, of a free society. Now I must mention the third type of man who has been
very seldom the ruler of history or of any society; he has been the forgotten and exploited
man of history. That is the man who leads by means of reason. That is the man who, in
his psycho-epistemology, is not guided by his immediate perceptions nor by his emotions
but by logic, by his concepts, by reason. That is the man whom I call the producer.
He is the man who creates not only the material values of mankind but also and above all the
intellectual, the philosophical values. The first producer in history in this higher sense
of the word would be Aristotle, who was the first rational philosopher. Scientists certainly
should be producers. They are the men who are supposed to be and by the nature of their
profession have to deal with the study of reality by means of using reason. Unfortunately,
today, most of them outside of their own narrow profession, outside of their laboratory in
effect, are turning more mystical than any other group of men. The fault is partly theirs
but predominantly the fault of philosophers. Since there is no philosophical guidance at
all, many scientists today are turning to a Witch Doctor type of mysticism of their
own. You mentioned producers. Aside from those
people who give us intellectual products, what about the businessman? You’ve talked
about capitalism. I’d like to know his role in this. Well, the businessman also is as recent a
product as the intellectual. Before the birth of capitalism, there were no professional
businessmen, and there were no professional intellectuals. Both the mind and material
production and trade were enslaved and ruled by the various combinations of Attilas and
Witch Doctors, which means by a powerful government, by an absolutist type of government, whether
it was the feudal absolutism or the absolute monarchies of Europe of the post-Renaissance
period, in any case the producers of material goods, the traders, and the producers of ideas,
the teachers, philosophers, the early scientists, were men without official status, without
a profession, and at the total mercy of the political rulers, which means at the mercy
of rule by force. It is only since the Industrial Revolution and the birth of a free society,
the society of capitalism, that there was a new class of men which is the free producers
of material goods, the businessmen, the industrialists. They of course are the producers in the strictest
sense of the word, or should be, but they are the greatest victims of today’s society.
They are the ones who have been betrayed by modern intellectuals, and in this sense both
businessmen and intellectuals will commit suicide by destroying each other, and the
fault belongs to the intellectual. The businessman is the man who has to use his mind to deal
with reality, to study facts, to produce material goods. He is the man who serves as the transmission
belt of the discoveries of science and carries the products of science to all levels of society.
He is the one who takes the invention of theoretical scientists or of an inventor, transforms them
into useful products, and putting them into mass production, makes them available to all
levels of society. The businessman is the man who has achieved the enormous, historically
miraculous rise in the standard of living of mankind during the 19th century. He
is the one who has lived up to the role of a producer and to the role of a rational creative
man, but the intellectuals have never given him credit for it, have regarded him as if
he were an Attila, and being afraid of freedom themselves, have been looking from the start
of the Industrial Revolution for some form of an Attila to protect them, the intellectuals,
against the free market of ideas. Well, you know, you’ve been talking about
the bankruptcy of our modern intellectuals, and I know that in your most recent book,
this is really a manifesto to a group that you call the New Intellectuals. Would you
mind telling me just who they are in your own words, and how they differ from the old-style
intellectuals? Since the old-style, presently existing intellectuals
have declared their own bankruptcy by abandoning the intellect, what we need today, what I
call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think – meaning,
any man or woman who knows that man’s life must be guided by reason, by the intellect,
not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystical revelations. Any man or woman who values his
life and who does not want to give in to today’s cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence,
and does not intend to give up the world to the Dark Ages and to the rule of the collectivist
brutes. The New Intellectual then you would imagine
to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Have there been any of this type in the past that you
can remember that you would like to point out? What type I would hold as the New Intellectual? Right. Well, only to name a few historical examples
in the most general way, Aristotle is the man I would take as the first intellectual
in history, in the best sense of the word. The Founding Fathers were America’s first
intellectuals because they were thinkers who were also men of action. They were the men
who knew that reason is man’s guide to reality, that man can achieve an ideal way of life
on earth by means of his reason, and that man requires freedom in order to be guided
by his judgment and his mind, that men should deal with one another by trade, by persuasion,
but not by force and compulsion. It’s the Founding Fathers who established in the United
States of America the first and only free society in history, and the economic system
which was the corollary of the American political system was capitalism, the system of total,
unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism. This was the basic principle of the American way
of life, or the American political system. However, in practice, it has never yet been
practiced. A total separation of government and economics had not been established from
the first. It was implied in principle, but certain loopholes or contradictions were still
allowed into the American setup and into the American constitution, which permitted collectivist
influences to undermine the American way of life, and today it is practically collapsing.
Today there is nothing left except an undefined tradition. The active intellectual direction
of our society at present is anti-American and anti-intellectual. It is going back to
the primordial mysticism of dictatorships and the rule by force. Therefore the New Intellectuals
now should be those men who will stand up for two fundamental values: the value of their
own life, of their inalienable rights, of their self-esteem, their independence — and
the value of a non-coercive free society in which men do not use force against one another. You mention in your book, the latest one on
the philosophy for the New Intellectual, that in our Founding Fathers, talked about the
right of the pursuit of happiness. Do you think this is really important? I don’t know what else could be any more
important if you attach exact meaning to concepts. The pursuit of happiness means a man’s right
to set his own goals, to choose his values and to achieve them. Happiness means that
state of consciousness which comes from the achievement of your values. Now what can be
more important than happiness? But happiness does not mean simply momentary pleasures or
any kind of mindless self-indulgence. Happiness means a profound, guiltless, rational feeling
of self-esteem and of pride in one’s own achievement. It means the enjoyment of life,
which is possible only to a rational man on a rational code of morality. What that code
is I couldn’t possibly tell you in a brief interview, but those who are interested will find it in my books, particularly in Atlas Shrugged. Do you think it’s important then that we
be guiltless in our feelings about this? I wouldn’t even know how to answer such
a thing as, is it important to be guiltless? To put it in my terms, I would say it is important
to be moral. I would stress the positive, not the negative. The New Intellectuals then that you’ve talked
about should assume the responsibility of formulating what we might call the solutions
for the crisis of civilization. This brings to mind immediately then the question, if someone wants to be a New Intellectual, how does he begin? Where do the New Intellectuals
start, and how do they work? Well, they would need above all an integrated,
consistent, comprehensive philosophy of life. Now to accept or define or even agree with
a new philosophy is a very long process which requires very careful thinking, because an
intellectual will not accept it on faith nor on arbitrary say-so. To acquire a new philosophy
is a long process, and if any man takes this issue seriously and wants to become a New Intellectual, he would have to begin by accepting two premises which I call the basic minimum
of civilization. They are not axioms, but a man would have to prove them to himself,
he would have to convince himself. Then his mind would be free to consider the rest or
the other questions of philosophy. But the first two, which a man would have to define
to himself before he can proceed, is the relationship of reason to emotions and the evil of force
among men. The first premise, the relationship of reason to emotion, means a man if he wants
to be an intellectual has to learn how to differentiate his thinking, his reasoned judgment,
from his emotions, wishes, hopes, fears or whims. He must learn that feelings, emotions,
are not tools of cognition, that emotions are the product of his premises, they are
not a guide to reality, they are not a form of knowledge and perception. Therefore the
first thing that a man who wants to be an intellectual would have to accept is a full
understanding of the fact that man must be guided by reason and that it is only on the
basis of reason that he can approach other men and discuss, cooperate, or act with them
or deal with them. On the basis of emotion, he would have to resort to blind force, because
emotions are irrational or unprovable. If two men act on the basis of their emotions,
they have no means of communication. When emotions are put in their proper place, which
means as the consequence of reason, not as the leader of reason, then men have a common
vocabulary, they have a common means of understanding, and a common frame of reference and arbiter,
which is reality. What about force and the use of force? Now, that is a basic social-moral principle
which an intellectual should accept, that no man has the right to initiate physical
force to compel another man. No individual man has that right – [fade-cutoff] You have been listening to a discussion of
the intellectual crisis in modern American society. Special guest on today’s program
has been Miss Ayn Rand, noted American novelist-philosopher, whose analysis of the current plight of the
responsible American intellectual holds this hope for the future: Those who will accept the basic minimum
of civilization will have made the first step toward the building of a new culture in the
wide-open spaces of today’s intellectual vacuum. There is an ancient slogan that applies
to our present position: The King is dead, Long live the King. We can say, with the same
dedication to the future: The intellectuals are dead, long live the intellectuals, and
then proceed to fulfill the responsibility which that honorable title had once implied. This program was recorded in the University
of Michigan television studios in Ann Arbor. This is University of Michigan television.
The original program cut her short at the end, I've wondered if the entire interview is floating around out there somewhere