The Uncaused Life
I just posted my final chapter at The Prophet of Causation. The new chapter is “The Uncaused Life,” which is a play on the most famous saying from the guy pictured above.
The last chapter is on Ayn Rand’s esthetics, but—well, it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about how Ayn Rand’s esthetics is an entry point to her view of the whole “spiritual” element of life: not just art, but emotions, companionship, love, and the role of philosophy itself.
This also explains why I think we should devote more effort to exploring and understanding her esthetics, which I have long thought is the great undeveloped hinterland of Objectivist philosophy.
Here’s what I think is the most interesting point from the chapter. It’s about a dilemma that has been sort of hanging out there ever since the first chapter on ethics, where I describe how Ayn Rand’s ethics is grounded in the requirements of human survival. The question is: Is that enough? Do we need something more, in addition to survival, to account for the full richness of human life?
I did a little more thinking about this in response to a challenge from reader and philosophy professor Neera Badhwar (a version of the argument she and Roderick Long offer at this point in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ayn Rand).
Here is how I address it within the scope of this book.
Some philosophers have challenged Ayn Rand’s view of survival as the basis for ethics by arguing that it is too narrow to offer a complete guide for all of human life, particularly the “spiritual” aspects of life like art, emotion, and companionship.
If we interpret survival in a “thin” way, as bare subsistence or the provision of only the material goods that support life, then it is necessarily inadequate to explain those other aspects of life. Yet if we interpret survival in a “thick” way that includes this kind of spiritual flourishing, it is tempting to assume this must require something in addition to survival, some kind of “survival-plus,” some other consideration or goal added on top of survival.
But in Ayn Rand’s philosophy, survival as such, even in its most literal interpretation, is already “thick,” in this sense, because it already implies and requires a whole spiritual dimension to man’s life.
Suppose a man becomes severely ill and requires a complex and difficult medical procedure—say, quadruple bypass heart surgery—after which he lives for an additional 20 years. This is a matter of survival in its most obvious and literal sense, delivering decades of additional life. But to get to the point where such a complex medical intervention is possible requires the modern scientific method. The scientific method, in turn, is the product of centuries of philosophical exploration going all the way back to Socrates asking his fellow Athenians to define important concepts and debate the nature of truth and the best life.
To get an extra two decades of survival from a life-saving surgery requires a prior two and a half thousand years of intellectual and spiritual development—and much longer, back to the first stone tools and cave paintings, if we trace all the roots that made Socrates possible.
Our lives in a developed society are extended by thousands of such innovations that we take for granted, many of them simpler and more prosaic, like modern sanitation. The caveman, it is estimated, had a life-expectancy of 28 years. In the healthiest advanced societies, life-expectancy is currently above 80 years. Those additional years—an extra two lifetimes—were bought by thousands of years of innovation and the growth of knowledge.
To be the kind of species that can perform surgery on our own hearts, and all of the other tasks that extend modern life to a span of nearly a century, humans had to first become the kind of species that can enjoy art, find meaning in music, debate philosophical questions, and do all of the other things that are necessary for our advanced intellectual development.
Very many things about human life can be explained as requirements for the care and feeding of an intellectual faculty that makes our lives much longer and more secure. An observation I cut out, partly just for length and partly because it maybe seemed a bit too personal, is that this also explains the need for recreation and for play, particularly mental play. Many of us love puzzles and word games and murder mysteries (which are really just a form of logic puzzle) because they are ways of exercising and rewarding the mental faculty on which our existence depends.
(By the way, if you like that observation about murder mysteries being a form of logic puzzle, I highly recommend the recent British TV series “Ludwig,” which is based directly on that premise.)
This is a big insight I remember having about Ayn Rand’s philosophy very early on: Spiritual values are aspects of the requirements of human survival, and the spiritual dimension of human life has a genuine and substantial “survival value,” to use the terminology of evolutionary science, because the mind has survival value. It had better have survival value, because our big brains are extremely expensive to maintain, biologically speaking. The only scientific explanation for their evolution is that they have an even bigger biological payoff.
I’ll leave that as something of a teaser for the book. And since a few people have asked: Yes, this means the book is essentially finished, but it won’t actually be available for a while. I will be giving it a once-over for more corrections and proofreading, and one of the chapters on epistemology is a bit too long. Also, I will be seeking an established publisher, and that process can take quite some time. And I’m doing all this while running for Congress, so it will move even more slowly.
In the meantime, I have a whole bunch of fragments left over: interesting observations and explanations that I cut primarily for length, because this is supposed to be a relatively short overview of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. I set a target of ten chapters of about 5,000 words each, which ought to yield a book somewhere around 150 pages, maybe a bit more, depending on the layout. So there were a lot of interesting ideas that couldn’t make it into the final product. I’ve saved some of those and might dole them as I can get to them, since I think they’re worth sharing.
To read those as they come out, and also to read all the chapters as they now stand, you can subscribe to The Prophet of Causation. Or stayed tuned at this newsletter, because I will share occasional updates.