Thus, to grasp an “existent” and its “identity” is to move from perception to perceptual judgment. But to link the identified existent to other similar or different existents is the crucial, primary epistemological step in the conceptual process. This view of an entity as existing in certain relationships with other entities is an awareness of the existent as a relational unit. Rand states: “The ability to regard entities as units is man’s distinctive method of cognition, which other living species are unable to follow” (6).
Rand defined a unit as “an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members.” To identify such units in reality, a person must engage in “a selective focus” (6–7). This selectivity is based on objective criteria of classification. For instance, things exist. Attributes exist. The thing is its attributes. But the attributes can be separated from the thing in an act of mental isolation. The abstracted unit cannot be reified into a separate thing, but it does enable a person to bring the elements of the real world within the range of consciousness. Rand explained: “Units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships.” The unit helps us to classify objective existents according to observed, real characteristics. Thus, in her concept of “unit,” Rand bridges metaphysics and epistemology, the existence of the thing and our knowledge of it as a relation (7).
For Rand, the formation of relational units is the essential foundation of concept formation. A “concept” integrates two or more perceptual concretes—or units—which are isolated by a process of abstraction according to specific characteristics and united by a specific definition.42 A concept means the existential referents it signifies, or the existents it identifies. This understanding of concept formation involves many distinct and interrelated epistemological aspects.
The first moment of the conceptual process is the ability to abstract. Rand would have agreed with the Marxist theoretician Bertell Ollman, who explains that the necessity of abstraction is
[a] simple recognition of the fact that all thinking about reality begins by breaking it down into manageable parts. Reality may be in one piece when lived, but to be thought about and communicated it must be parceled out. Our minds can no more swallow the world whole at one sitting than can our stomachs.… “Abstract” comes from the Latin, abstrahere, which means “to pull from.” In effect, a piece has been pulled from or taken out of the whole and is temporarily perceived as standing apart. (Ollman 1993, 24)
Likewise, for Rand, this process of abstraction is “a selective mental focus that takes out or separates a certain aspect of reality from all others” (Introduction, 10). Abstraction is a necessary moment of the conceptual process because the mind cannot deal at once with all of the complexities of the totality. People are not omniscient; they function neither as gods nor like Aquinas’s angels. Rand explained that in the Thomistic view, each of the angels embodies the form of a different species. Lacking corporeality and human consciousness, the angels are conceived as being capable of grasping all the instances of every universal Form in existence by a single act of contemplation. Rand warned that human beings cannot attempt to operate like Aquinas’s angels (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 8).
The human mode of awareness limits how much can be grasped in a single cognitive act. By abstracting units from the totality, people make the world knowable and manageable. These units form the basis of open-ended concepts, each of which incorporates a recognition of context and change. Our abstractions enable us to “chew” the pieces of a complex totality in an effort to make them cognitively digestible.
Thus, abstraction is necessary, according to Rand, because people cannot deal with the whole of reality, or the totality of their own knowledge in a single, simultaneous instant of cognition (“Appendix,” 172). Abstraction enables us to reduce the information at our disposal to manageable cognitive units. In this sense, a human being is no different from a crow; each has a limited ability to discriminate beyond a certain number of units. The difference between a human and a crow, however, is that humans are capable of conceptualizing relational units which internalize innumerable variations within a specified range. Thus, though human cognition is also limited by the “crow epistemology,” humans are able to transcend these limits by a conceptual process condensing the number of units with which they must grapple (Introduction, 63). As Kelley (1984a) explains, the unit economy inherent in concept formation “is a way of treating discriminable things as if they were identical. This has the advantage of filtering out a mass of information that is irrelevant to most cognitive tasks” (19).
Abstraction is a necessary first step in concept formation, but it is not the culmination of the process. Those who would abstract a unit without reintegrating it into a cognitive totality create a distorted, partial, or segmented view of reality. The totality cannot be ignored.43 Rand would have agreed with Lossky ([1906] 1919) that our ability to abstract “separates out from … reality some fresh aspect, of which we become aware precisely as an aspect of, or an element in, the part of reality under investigation” (230). For Rand, the part can never be reified as a separate whole. If we are to avoid such reification, the abstracted units must be blended or synthesized into a single, new mental entity. This new unit of thought is a concept, which is denoted by a word.44
The concept can be reduced to its component parts whenever analysis is required. Indeed, the integrated units of a concept can be expanded or contracted depending on the cognitive context. But our integration of the units into a concept is not an arithmetic sum. One does not merely add such units as “mind,” “arms,” “legs,” and “heart” and achieve a concept of human being. Rand preserved the integrity of the conceptual whole. She viewed concept formation as closer to an algebraic formula in which the concept itself stands for a limitless number of concretes of a specific kind (Introduction, 10). The consequent blending of the abstracted units “is not a mere sum, but an inseparable sum forming a new mental unit.” It is an integration.45
Thus the second moment of concept formation is integration. The process of abstraction necessitates the process of integration. These two are inseparable; neither aspect is possible without the other (“Appendix,” 138, 144). Breaking up and “chewing” the pieces of reality is an analytical process that must be followed by synthesis, so that the pieces are reconnected to the larger totality.46 A fully human method of thinking requires us to “dance back and forth” between concretes and abstractions. Physical concretes and conceptual units must never be disconnected. And abstractions must never be left floating in disregard of the existential reality that gives them meaning. By integrating concretes and abstractions, units and concepts, human beings unify the elements of body and mind, existence and consciousness (Rand 1958T, lecture 5).
To abstract and to conceptualize, human beings must expend cognitive effort. As a dialectical thinker, Rand would have agreed with Ollman (1993), who argues that “most people are lazy abstractors, simply and uncritically accepting the mental units with which they think as part of their cultural inheritance” (26). Rand implored us to stop thinking in a preconceived square, to name our primaries, to identify our starting points, to recognize the hierarchical structure of our arguments and knowledge.47 For Rand, this necessity to check our premises is the hallmark not only of a fully human epistemology but of radical thinking as well. Radicals go to the root; they refuse to be locked into the ideological boundaries set by others. Indeed, they question their own assumptions and strive to articulate their basis in reality as well. As in her distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made, Rand rejected the reification of the status quo as transhistorical and natural. Every issue, event, thought, desire, and action must be understood through a process of articulation.
Once the mind has achieved the tasks of abstraction and integration, the formation of a concept is complete. Rand saw each concept as an open file. A concept becomes an instrument for knowing reality. Our initial concepts allow us to grasp new elem
ents of knowledge. With each epistemological expansion, we can return to our original concepts and enrich their meaning. Such integration of old and new knowledge enables us, over time, to subtly change our vantage point on the totality.48 As Rasmussen (1983a) explains, a concept is “not a closed, a-contextual, repository of omniscience which provides a non-empirical path to knowledge.… The ‘rich’ character of a concept’s cognitive content results from the fact that its significance … is not limited by what the knower explicitly considers when using a concept” (525–26). Thus, our understanding of each concept grows extensively and intensively with each advance in knowledge.
Rand explains that concept formation is an essentially mathematical process.49 Since every existent is part of the same reality, each is measurable. The standards of measurement may vary.50 For Rand, everything is measurable, either cardinally or ordinally. Our concept formation process incorporates this reality in the very act of abstraction. In abstracting two or more units from the totality, we differentiate within a specific context according to those characteristics which are commensurable. Our conceptual classifications omit specific measurements and intensities, while retaining the commensurable characteristic(s) that unites the identified cognitive units.51
In forming the concept “dog,” for instance, we need not be aware of every dog on earth. We omit the variations within the species, forming a classification that comprises all of the diversities within a specific range. As our knowledge deepens from observation and scientific investigation, we are able to sharpen our definition of the dog’s essential characteristics, without changing our concept of the existent, “dog.”
The wide range of the concept “dog” incorporates every dog that has ever lived and will live, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes. But it does not include any cats. The concept “dog” omits the measurements (the various kinds of dogs), but retains those characteristics shared by all dogs. Abstracted characteristics enable us to distinguish “dogs” from “cats,” and “dogs” and “cats” from “tables.” As our context changes, however, so can our cognitive classifications (Introduction, 13–14). Ultimately, everything that exists can be integrated by the axiomatic concept “existence,” since all things belong to the same reality. But for the purposes of concept formation, indeed, for the purposes of human knowledge, we engage in a primary inductive process in which characteristics are isolated according to perceptual similarities. As our knowledge grows, we begin to classify newly discovered instances of established concepts. This interaction of inductive and deductive moments makes possible the movement toward more specific differentiation and wider integration (19, 28).
Rand’s theory of measurement omission leads to an interesting paradox. Though the process is crucial to conceptualization, it is not wholly directed by the faculty of volition. Rand argued that most people do not realize that they are engaging in any kind of measurement or measurement omission when they are forming concepts. But from the very first moments of abstraction, our ability to differentiate is an ability to distinguish between larger and smaller entities, hotter and colder states, brighter and darker colors, weaker and more intense emotions. Each of these differentiations involves implicit measurement. One does not have to measure the exact wavelengths of light that distinguish the color red from the color blue. We perceive differences even though we are not aware of measuring these differences at the time of concept formation. Science and mathematics can help us to articulate the actual measurements that are involved in this process, but explicit quantification is not typical or necessary.
Thus Rand saw an interaction in the conceptualization process between conscious volitional actions, such as focusing, logical reasoning, and abstraction, and nonconscious, tacit, habitual operations of perception, perceptual judgment, and measurement omission. As Peikoff explains, this ability to omit measurements is a natural cognitive function. That people may be unaware of the actual mechanism does not invalidate the theory. Rand sought to grasp how people form concepts—that is, the process by which the mind creates relational, objective conceptual classifications. Rand sought to identify these methods, not to direct the process, but to analyze a largely inarticulate epistemological mechanism. In articulating its tacit aspect, Rand aimed to validate the reality-based means of human cognition. She wished to preserve the integrity of objective conceptualization, in contradistinction to those intrinsicists and subjectivists who saw concept formation as a product of metaphysical revelation or arbitrary social convention.52
INTERNAL RELATIONS REVISITED
In her theory of concepts, Rand navigated between the polarities of atomistic individuation and organicist integration. As I explained in Chapter 2, these extremes are integral to externalist and internalist perspectives. The doctrine of external relations faces a problem of integration. Since every thing has an identity strictly external to its relations, the externalist endorses an atomistic conception of reality. The externalist argues that the choice of a single attribute as an essential characteristic is a linguistic exercise largely dependent on social conventions. Since we can never fully know an entity’s nature, our definitions of its essence are purely arbitrary. In fact, countless definitions of an entity are all equally valid.
Thus externalism cannot distinguish essential characteristics from nonessential ones. It arbitrarily multiples the number of legitimate classifications that can refer to the same entity. Without the ability to integrate such classifications objectively, the externalist achieves cognitive anarchy and epistemological disintegration.
By contrast, the doctrine of internal relations faces a problem of individuation and abstraction. In strict internalism, the nature of an entity is often dissolved into the relationships that constitute it. And yet, paradoxically, in the attempt to define a concept, the internalist, like the externalist, fails to provide any distinction between essential and nonessential characteristics. The internalist reasons thus: since the definition of an entity must reflect the ontological status of its constituent relations, and since every relationship is essential to the thing’s identity, it follows that no essential distinctions can be made. In a fully coherent system, where every element is an extension of every other element, abstraction and definition are agents of distortion. It is no coincidence that the ultimate internalist sees everything as One. Metaphysical plurality gives way to mystical Totality. Individualism gives way to Totalitarian Collectivism.
For Rand, internalism and externalism are both to be rejected. The internalist sees all characteristics as intrinsically essential, whereas the externalist argues that the identification of essentiality is entirely subjective or socially arbitrary. Ultimately, internalists view everything as essential, whereas externalists argue that nothing is essential. Thus the internalist is typically an intrinsicist, and the externalist is often a subjectivist. Neither can select an essential characteristic that would make possible an objective definition. Whereas the externalist multiplies concepts “beyond necessity,” the internalist integrates concepts in “disregard of necessity” (Introduction, 72). Rand argues that definitions are neither subjective conventions nor “a repository of closed, out-of-context omniscience” (67). In Rand’s view, “A definition is a statement that identifies the nature of the units subsumed under a concept.… The purpose of a definition is to distinguish a concept from all other concepts and thus to keep its units differentiated from all other existents” (40).
The definition implies all of the concepts’ differentiated units. But a definition is only an identification that satisfies the cognitive need for “unit-economy”; it is not a description. Since people cannot grasp every characteristic of every existent in a single act of consciousness, they must utilize definitions that focus on essence within a specific context or level of generality. Rand attempted to avoid the pitfalls of internalist intrinsicism and externalist subjectivism by switching the focus of the debate from the realm of ontology to the realm of epistemology.53
Like the internalists,
Rand accepted as given the proposition that since everything belongs to one reality, everything is related. But she added the proviso that everything is related in some sense. She refused to speculate on the ontological character of these relationships. This does not mean that it is impossible to conceptualize existential relationships. It merely underscores the fact that human beings are not omniscient. They cannot establish “the relationship of a given group of existents to everything else in the universe, including the undiscovered and unknown.” They cannot adopt such a synoptic vantage point.
But human beings must show a scrupulous regard for cognitive clarity and precision in their definitions. How can they achieve such exactness, when at any given moment they do not know all the constituent relationships in which an entity may be involved? How can they pick an “essential” characteristic on which to base a definition, when they would have to know everything about the existent in order to know anything about its “essence”?
Rand rejected the view that everything must be known before anything can be classified or analyzed. The internalists and the externalists accept the same nonhuman standards by which to judge cognition, and then indict people for not living up to them. The internalists argue that since everything is intrinsically essential, no definition is fully valid because it is partial. The externalists argue that since nothing can be classified as objectively essential, no definition is fully valid because it is arbitrary. In both cases, the internalist and the externalist focus on essence as a metaphysical category divorced from the contextuality of knowledge.
For Rand, definitions must be “contextually absolute” since they must “specify the known relationships among existents (in terms of the known essential characteristics)” (Introduction, 47). The emphasis here is on what is essential within the context of knowledge. Definitions may change with the growth of knowledge. Hence, the distinction between essential and nonessential characteristics is neither intrinsic nor subjective. A definition identifies an existing characteristic of an entity as essential within a specified context of knowledge. This essential characteristic not only distinguishes the entity from other entities, but also explains the greatest number of other characteristics (45). The identification of an “essential” characteristic serves as a cognitive device enabling people to classify, condense, and integrate the elements of their knowledge (52).
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical Page 23
