Leonard PeikoffIn February, the Ayn Rand Institute Press will publish The Art of Thinking, a new book based on Leonard Peikoff’s classic lecture series, edited by Michael Berliner. In anticipation of this event, New Ideal is happy to publish an excerpt from the book’s introduction, which outlines the book’s purpose of applying Objectivist epistemology to everyday thinking, and the range of epistemological principles that can be so applied.
The subtitle of this course is “How to Apply Objectivist Epistemology to One’s Own Mental Processes.” I’ll start by reading from the original brochure for the 1985 seminar, because that tells you as tersely as possible what I have 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 help remedy this situation, to restore epistemology to its proper human function. 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.
The course is partly new theory, but it builds on previous books and courses. The three main prerequisites are my own book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR), Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE), in at least the first edition, if not the second, and Atlas Shrugged. I’m making a point, however, of omitting topics that are crucial to the theme but 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 on that in Understanding Objectivism. I’m going to try to cover topics that, although they’re not total revelations to you, will be developed in new ways and to new extents that you’ve not 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. The examples will range across such areas as politics, art, science, and the movies, so it will have a real, practical meaning for you.
Plan of the Course
The order of my topics (as shown in the table of contents) is not strictly hierarchical, but there are, as you’ll see, connections between the topics. The title of my first topic is “Volition as a Means to Clarity.” We know that the conceptual level is volitional and that it is the key to thought, but I want to emphasize a function of volition that I have not discussed in any previous lectures: in what way you can use volition as a solution to an intellectual problem. That’s where we’re going to start 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.
Let me give you an idea of where we’ll be going in the next lectures. The next topic will be: 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? That takes us to the idea of “thought as integration.” And in the sense that I will be presenting it, all aspects of thought are nothing but forms of integration. And then we’ll discuss hierarchy as a form of integration, after which we’ll have some exercises in grasping hierarchy. But Lecture Two could just as well be called “Integration as Hierarchy” — it’s the essence of what thought is. And then Lectures Three and Four are examples of that. Lecture Three tells you how to integrate one way by forming and thinking in terms of essentials. Lecture Four tells you how to integrate another way by thinking in terms of principles. Both of these lectures are concerned with what an essential is, 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 it’s related to the definitional use. And similarly with principles. In Lecture Five, we’re going to define what a principle is, how you distinguish a principle from a generalization, and how it works to promote integration and enables you to think. And having done this much, we’re going to finally cash in with: What final state do you get as a reward if you use your free will correctly, work to integrate, and use essentials and principles — and 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. I am bombarded by questions from students who can’t get the idea of contextual certainty.
Lecture Six, the last lecture, deals with the topic of thinking versus writing. Writing is not synonymous with thought but is an expression, or tool, of thought. Thinking went on for eons before writing was developed. Thinking requires words, but the passage to written words was a much later historical stage. Many people do not make this distinction. They think that the only way to understand something is by writing. And writing is a difficult skill. It would be analogous to say that the only way to understand something is by painting it or by expressing it in architectural form, and that is an impossibility. So, what you have to do is to understand, to get a thought clear in your own mind and then get it down on paper objectively. In that final lecture, I’ll emphasize practical problems you might encounter when you try to express yourself in writing. I want to try to give you as much guidance as possible so that when you get confused in writing, you can tell right away — “Is this something that’s just a technique of how I’m presenting the material or have I really screwed up my thinking and don’t know what I’m talking about?” In which case, give up writing and do something completely different until you understand it. That would have saved me years on my first book because I just blasted ahead knowing nothing, and I had to get clarity in my thinking by having Ayn Rand edit my writing.
* * *
That is our program for this course, but I want to make one other preliminary point, and that pertains to where Ayn Rand would stand in regard to this course if she had heard it, which she didn’t. 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. This course does not have the same status in my mind — and it shouldn’t in yours — as OPAR. And even there I had a disclaimer that Miss Rand didn’t read it and was not responsible for the content, but in every formulation of that book, I was at least 99.99 percent sure that she would have to agree with any particular formulation, because it was based on things that she directly said to me or directly approved in writing. If I was making a point that I considered to be only 2 percent dubious, I cut it out, on the grounds that it’s better to not be there than to be dubious. So how does that tie into this course? What you’re getting are ideas that I got while writing OPAR but about which I did not have as high a degree of discussion with her. 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 given my lifetime experience with her, if she were to materialize and say, “How could you say that?” at some point, I wouldn’t be that surprised. You always have to do this anyway, but particularly here. This is my best understanding of carrying what I learned from her a step further. But you have to listen and decide whether you think it really follows.
Ziemowit Gowin
Tara Smith
