Philosophy: Who Needs It

1982

Overview

In Philosophy: Who Needs It, a collection of essays written by Rand in the years following Atlas Shrugged, she argues that philosophy is not a pastime for brooding teenagers or ivory tower intellectuals. It’s a subject that deals with some of the most important issues in human life. What kind of world do we live in? How do we separate knowledge from error? What is good and what is evil?

In Rand’s view, we cannot avoid having — and acting on — some answer to these questions.

“Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt.”

Themes

The root of a philosophy and whether it is life-affirming or life-negating, Rand maintains in Philosophy: Who Needs It, is its position on the primacy of existence vs. the primacy of consciousness.

“The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists — and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness — the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).”

Extras

IN RAND’S WORDS

Censorship: Local and Express

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