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Second thoughts As it turns out, I grew up under socialism and found it horrible back when I was only 13. The communists in Hungary terrorized opposition-party candidates and voters in 1948, when the country went into the Soviet fold. It wasn't a matter of having no heart but of being totally blind to evil not to recognize the horror. By the time I was of college age, I had escaped Hungary for the United Stares and was in the U.S. Air Force, when I started to think seriously about politics. It was the Kennedy vs. Nixon debates that woke me up. As it turned out, I quickly became convinced - under the influence of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek and some others - that a totally free society is the best basic framework for human community life. In other words, a capitalist economy, with the strictly limited constitutional government that is its host, is just and should not be compromised. Even more briefly, never give up the principle of individual liberty. Having made such a decision early in my life, I became convinced that I needed to subject myself to a rigorous regime of challenges. Otherwise I would never be sure that I didn't simply react to socialism by blindly embracing its opposite. So I majored in philosophy and eventually became an academic philosopher. However, when I was getting my training, the field was dominated by what is called Anglo-American linguistic philosophy, an approach to the discipline by means of the study of language - how it is used, what the rules are of using different words and sentences, what the meaning of "about" or "like" is and so forth. This was a far cry from the tradition of grand systematic thinking one finds in the great philosophers of the past, so I decided to pursue my own education apart from what my professors demanded of me. Before college, I had already discovered Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke. In graduate school, I returned to reading them and those who continued to study these seminal thinkers. What I learned, at least at the level of methodology, is that to get anywhere with the big issues one must never become complacent. Ayn Rand had stressed, in her own philosophical essays, that a genuine thinker never stops checking his premises. In other words, one must be fully committed to the repeated examination of the bases of one's ideas, be they in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, psychology or any other area of concern. Everyone who aspires to gaining a clear understanding of things needs to ask and examine, over and over again, the variety of answers given to such questions as, "What is it to be anything?"; "What is knowledge?"; "What are the basic standards of right conduct?" and "What kind of community is just?" as well as the more special questions, such as, "How does the human mind work?"; "What system of economics produces prosperity?" and "How should children be raised and taught?" Just how demanding this regime is can be appreciated by considering that in our own age the very idea of a "basic premise" is under serious challenge. Today's major philosophers, in Europe and in America, tend to be what are called "anti-foundationalists." They dispute the idea that any basic principles or facts exist against which the rest of one's understanding needs to be checked to make sure it is well-grounded. Deconstructionists, postmodernists, radical pragmatists and all sorts of skeptics are basically saying to us all that there is no way to make sure one is right about anything, there is no basis on which to rest any beliefs; it is all made up. Some even dispute that the law of noncontradiction is fundamental, claiming that it is a Western, "Eurocentric" bias. We hear this around us all the time. The message may come from television, newspapers, teachers, friends - "We're all the same" or "Don't judge" or "One idea or belief is no better than another" or "You are intolerant if you don't accept how others think and live." It's important to understand the age in which you live - what are the major social trends that are present to influence thinking, and do you agree with them or do you not? I believe there's an important distinction - and a lot of life and thinking lies in being able to make such important distinctions - between treating individuals with respect for their basic rights and failing to judge their beliefs, actions and the institutions they support. Of course, these skeptics have their own problems with logic - after all, why take their suggestions seriously if no one can be right - but as a matter of personal discipline, their cautions can come in handy. They keep sending us back to the drawing board all the time, and so when we re-emerge, having sweated it out good and hard with innumerable questions and doubts, we should be the better for it all. My own approach, which leads me to become a very active academic philosopher, has been to expose myself, as much as I could afford it, to the challenges of people who disagree with me. Some do so completely, some just find this or that wrong with what I believe, and others - the nihilists among us - believe in nothing. I do it in a very systematic way. Presenting one's ideas in the relevant forums, going to conferences where one makes presentations before very mixed groups of colleagues, writing books that get scathing reviews, giving talks to people who vehemently oppose what one says - all these and many similar ways exist to honor the professional oath that I have always believed a student of philosophy - and indeed, ideally, of any other academic discipline - takes. Namely, never to fall asleep at the wheel, always to check and check and check, to make sure one isn't fooling oneself, one isn't self-deluded, self-deceived, or rationalizing one's prejudices and biases and thereby escaping the need to think things through, to research one's case thoroughly. Of course, not all persons are in the position to embark on such a rigorous regime of self-criticism, but some in each generation better be, and others can then feed off their work. Such introspection and challenge should be part of everyone's personal journey as well. People make many crucial decisions in their lives. Upon reflection, they might very well have made different ones. The difference is sometimes momentous, so attention must always be paid to the principles that are guiding the decision - that they are seen and understood by the individual in the clearest possible light. It all begins with knowing yourself and establishing your worldview and, as Ayn Rand said so succinctly, checking your premises.
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