All the time, I’m approached by individuals who ask me, “Why did you major in philosophy?” When I answer, “Because I needed to discover the right way to live,” they often follow up innocently with, “But I thought that philosophy had neither right nor wrong answers? Also, isn’t philosophy supposed to stay above the lowly concerns of real-life applications?” That detached view that modern academics have fully earned for themselves is what is wrong with our culture at large. While I personally invest myself in all of my writing, this piece is going to be more autobiographical than usual, but I take that tone only insofar as is necessary to help shed some firsthand light on principles which you can and, I think, should apply to your own life. Patrick has expressed the same concerns and experiences, so this is also meant to be something like an unofficial manifesto of why exactly Patrick and I do what we do on DEFENESTRATION and just why exactly you should even care.
So much for the appetizer; now for the meat and potatoes.
While walking through downtown Athens, Ga., this past week, I saw two peculiar sights and decided to document them:
The top photo is of a car window decal which displays a stylized “SS”. This is actually the runic insignia of Hitler’s infamous SS, the cadre of elite Nazi servicemen entrusted with the most critical tasks, including the actual execution of concentration camp prisoners. The bottom photo is of a sign outside of the local Ben & Jerry’s shop advertising their belief in “Fair Trade”, as espoused by the organized Fair Trade social movement. There was a line of what I would guess to be a hundred people and counting to take part in the fundraiser to promote that policy.
Those instances are not at all exhaustive of just when philosophy has bearing on everyday life. When does philosophy matter? The answer: Every waking moment of your life, from cradle to grave. As Ayn Rand puts it:
You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions – or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew.*
Now, what does all of that mean? It means that every single action you take is necessarily guided by principles, i.e. by your philosophy. Whether it’s deciding to make yourself a meal when hungry, what you want to pursue as a career, or whom you want to date or marry – philosophy is your all-purpose manual. When I say must be guided by principles, I don’t mean it simply in the normative sense that you just should be guided by principles, though that meaning is included. I mean that you must be guided by principles, as in, so long as you are conscious, you are living by some set of principles. Right now, as you are reading this, you are living by principles that you may or may not have chosen, such as: I should increase my knowledge; this is a better use of my time than checking Facebook (I’m flattered if you think that); I have a right to freedom of speech and to choose what speech to hear. All of those are just tiny samplings of all of the principles that you are living by right now. The only way to remove the rule of principles is by literal suicide. We don’t live by instincts like other animals; we live by the use of the mind, our rational faculty.
The analogy that helps bring it home for me is that of driving a car. You are the driver, your life is the car, and reality is the road. You can choose either to be aware of what you are doing by choosing to be ruthlessly sober, or you can drift and risk your life by choosing to be drunk. So long as you are behind the wheel – i.e. alive – you must either be sober or drunk; there is no third alternative. To live by a philosophy which you never question nor choose is to be drunk. To live by a philosophy which you choose based on the requirements of life is to be sober.
Contrary to popular belief, there are absolutes in philosophy. Just as a sober driver has to use his sobriety to conform to the lay of the road if he is to avoid disaster, so too must you choose your philosophy in accord with the nature of life, the dictates of reality. You can choose to defy reality in any given concrete instance, but you have absolutely no choice regarding what the consequences of that defiance will be. You can choose to drive headlong into a brick wall; you cannot change the fact that great pain or death will follow. Principles in and of themselves are not enough to achieve happiness; you must live by the right principles.
To repeat, so long as you are alive, you are behind the wheel. That means that no matter what you do, ultimately only you can control what you believe. You have free will, but free will – as with everything else – has a particular identity. It’s not whatever you want it to be when it’s convenient. Free will does not allow you to absolve yourself of its awesome responsibility or its correspondingly awesome power. You can’t hand your free will over to someone else and say, “Here, you make my decisions for me for a while.”
That means that you have to think for yourself. Again, here we have a double entendre. You have to think for yourself in the obvious sense that no one else can think for you. But, you also have to think for yourself in the sense that you have to think for your own sake. There is a rampant misconception that it is possible to think on your own while living for the sake of everyone and everything other than yourself. To ask someone to develop his own convictions while ordering him to follow everyone else’s is hypocrisy and, ultimately, is impossible. The ethics that says that you must think for yourself in order to live for your own sake is rational egoism, the ethics developed by Ayn Rand (and since rationality is necessary for egoism, I will henceforth dispense with the adjective “rational” and just say “egoism”).
Egoism is a moral or ethical concept, and it is in the field of ethics where rubber meets road. Ethics is the central focus of philosophy: there is no point to philosophy without ethics. If there is nothing else that you take away from this piece, at least get rid of the notion that there is anything noble about a morality that tells you that you must choose between being moral and being happy; the one leads to the other. You cannot dispense with morality for the sake of “convenience” any more than it is “convenient” for the drunk driver to decide that just this one time he should be fine behind the wheel. In principle, it is the same situation. No matter how tempting it may seem to abandon your principles for the sake of an immediate whim, the sober, safe driver keeps his eyes on the road because he will let nothing stop him from reaching his destination safe and sound. The drunk driver lets up “just this once” – and that is the last decision he makes. The sober driver also does not let himself be distracted from focusing on his path – not distracted by God, not by society, not by the state, not by Mother Earth, not by Nirvana – none of that. On the road of life, your destination is your own happiness. If you focus on anything but your route, you’ll crash. Don’t let your life pass you by because others have convinced you that you’ll get a do-over in some mythical hereafter or that your life doesn’t matter anyway because you are just an irrelevant member of Society.
For all of my own and Patrick’s talk of philosophy, you might be interested to know that neither of us digs into this stuff as our primary pursuit. My overriding passion is the study of and an eventual professorship in military history; Patrick’s love is the printed word. You might also be a bit surprised to know that we are both Objectivists (for those who are unaware, Objectivism is the philosophy founded and developed by Ayn Rand). If you are confused as to why two semi-starved college grads would spend so much time on something that they don’t intend to pursue as a profession, or why you may have never heard either of us mention Objectivism or Ayn Rand – don’t be confused. We are cases in point that living by principles means living by principles. We don’t need to tell everyone we meet that we are Objectivists if it doesn’t come up in conversation. If you know us face-to-face, then I dare say that neither of us gives a first impression of “philosophical” or even “academic” (I once almost got in trouble because a superior at my job thought I was going to lose it when in an early encounter he told me that he didn’t like Arrested Development – true story). Talking about philosophy doesn’t mean a damn thing if you aren’t going to put your money where your mouth is, and that “cash-value” – to borrow the pragmatists’ term (in a very different sense) – is exactly what we’re in it for. Really, that’s the only thing which gives philosophy any value, and I encourage you to cash in.
This happens to be a time when mentioning Objectivism is entirely relevant and proper, and it is here where I recommend that, if your appetite for applying philosophy to life is whetted, then you should read Ayn Rand’s many works, the most encompassing and most famous of which is her novel Atlas Shrugged, though I recommend that you begin with The Fountainhead. Whether you are an Objectivist or not, whether you ever decide to become an Objectivist or not – that is not the primary goal of this piece, though I most certainly do hope that DEFENESTRATION will help set you on the course to becoming an Objectivist. The point is that philosophy by its nature is what provides the sober hand needed for you to reach your waypoints and ultimate destination in life. Just keep your eyes on the road, your hand on the wheel, and don’t let anything slow you down.
* Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It, ed. Ayn Rand (New York: Signet, 1984), 5.
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