Objectivism and the Five Loves

Objectivism and the Five Loves
by Luke Setzer

Week
8
"Causality versus Duty"
in
Philosophy: Who Needs It

Sunday                        Outline and Questions

This week's reading examines the anti-concept of duty. Ayn Rand tears into this poisonous notion the way a mongoose tears into a cobra, ripping it to shreds by the end of the essay. To live well on earth, you need to master the distinction between causality and duty that this essay makes.

Interpretive Questions

1.      Define and contrast the key terms causality and duty as used in this essay.
2.      Why does Ayn Rand advocate causality while denigrating duty?

Evaluative Questions

1.      Do you agree with Ayn Rand that you should act from causality rather than duty?
2.      How did this essay influence your values?

Monday                      The Human Need for Bonding

Ayn Rand observed that while rational animal most essentially describes man, social animal also characterizes him. Infants depend on adults for their survival and cultivation into fully functioning humans. So for the beginning years of their lives, human beings cannot possibly live in solitude. They rely on others to satisfy their needs. Hence, they have a powerful survival motive to form bonds with others.

When you first exited your mother's womb, the world appeared to you as a flurrying buzz of incomprehensible activity. Your only awareness came to you in the form of your external sensations of such activity and internal sensations of hunger, discomfort, etc. As you grew more aware over time, your brain automatically began to form raw sensations of the outer world into concrete percepts of entities that existed independently of you. Your brain automatically began to distinguish your mother and father as people separate from yourself.

As your brain's development progressed, you learned to focus your attention for brief spans of time. With exposure to talking from your caretakers and others, you began the long process of language acquisition. You learned to abstract the relationships between concrete percepts and abstract concepts in the form of word associations. Your young, fresh nervous system by its nature arrived wired and ready for such active learning.

As you matured, your power to focus your attention grew to longer periods as your vocabulary increased with each passing day. You soon learned to speak in complete sentences and to form generalizations about how the world worked. If you touched a hot stove once, you learned, "Touching a hot stove is bad for me." If you combed your hair like your mother asked and she praised you for it, you learned, "Combing my hair is good for me."

Eventually, you began learning higher level skills like reading, writing and arithmetic. This may have started in your home or in a classroom. If your parents read to you while you followed along in the book before you started kindergarten, you may have entered the classroom the first day already knowing how to read. If not, then your teachers had additional work to do with you to get you started.

If you received an adequate education, you grew in your abilities to reason at higher and still higher levels as time passed. As you learned specific intellectual skills, you also received specific moral feedback about notions of good and evil. This feedback may have corresponded or conflicted with your overall needs as a human being.

Suppose, for instance, you earned a much higher score on a given test than anyone else. If your classmates chastised you for it, you may have interpreted that as a sign of your own moral failure to "fit into the crowd." Conversely, if your teacher praised you for it, you may have interpreted that as a sign of your moral success at "being your best." Your interpretations of these events, including the weight you assigned to them, influenced your evaluations of them to guide you in your future behavior.

During all these stages of growth, one fact became increasingly clear: You had a need to bond with others. As an infant, you had a need to bond with your parents and caretakers because your very survival depended upon them. As a toddler and a youth, you depended upon those bonds with adults and others to feed you valuable knowledge to preserve and to advance your own life. The bundle of emotions tied to this bonding commonly has the umbrella term love. Moreover, the love between a parent and a child serves as a role model by which the child learns exactly what this term means.

Why do people have a need for bonding? For much of your childhood, you relied on people older than yourself for your existence and well being. You relied on adult caretakers to satisfy your physical need for food, clothing and shelter. You relied on teachers of all ages, even peers, to assist you with your spiritual need for meaning and your mental need for knowing. Your interpretation and evaluation of these events and how well or poorly they served your needs drove the formation of your bonds with others.

Because the term love can have many different meanings, clear thinking demands the use of more specific language to describe various forms of this affection. In his book The Four Loves, Christian apologist C. S. Lewis employs four specific Greek words to describe each of these loves: storge, the affection between family members, especially between parents and children; philia, the affection between friends; eros, the affection between romantic lovers; agape, the most generalized and universal form of affection with such broad applications as love of a good meal. In all these instances, the emotions in question have their roots in a need for bonding which in turn have their roots in the fundamental need to live.

An early 2006 issue of National Geographic offered a cover story about the chemistry of love. Studies of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the brain show specific responses of subjects to photographs of loved ones that they do not demonstrate to photographs of strangers. Particular parts of the brain literally "light up" the MRI screen in correlation with their love responses. The book Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson corroborates these observations.

According to a scientist interviewed in the National Geographic article, the feelings of total security and total bonding we feel as infants create a lasting subconscious memory that we spend the rest of our lives seeking to recapture. In his audio program The Spiritual Atheist, Michael Earl echoes this view. He notes that many people seek a relationship with the mythical God in quest for a restoration of those feelings. In passage after passage in the Bible, he cites catch phrases cueing the relationship between believer and God that mirrors the relationship between infant and parent, e.g. "Father in Heaven," etc.

Romantic love offers one of the most luring areas in which people seek this false form of security. People can literally seek "salvation on earth" when they think, "Once I find the right one for me, I will finally feel those feelings of total security I seek." Hormones further aggravate this self-deception. Studies of the hormones associated with romantic infatuation show that they can literally scramble the brain's capacity to reason properly. The brain chemicals associated with such infatuations also associate themselves with certain recreational drugs. This lends real credibility to the phrase "punch-drunk love." It should give anyone committed to a life of reason a cause to pause.

With all these facts about the biological nature of bonding in mind, how can one best interpret and evaluate them? Getting totally clear on the proper relationships between oneself and one's emotions, reality, reason, and other people becomes paramount. Learning to program the emotions to serve one's long-term self-interest before engaging in long-term emotional commitments establishes tomorrow's theme.

Tuesday                      The Ruling Value of Self-Esteem

How does Objectivism differ from major world views like Christianity regarding love? For Christians, the forms of love learned over a lifetime simply serve as instructions for the individual to form an eternal bond with God through faith and the acceptance of His Son, Jesus Christ, as personal Lord and Savior. They internalize this salvation by inviting the Holy Spirit into their hearts to guide them. By stark contrast, Objectivists employ the forms of love learned over a lifetime as instructions to form a lifelong bond with reality through rationality and the acceptance of reason as their only absolute. They internalize this mindset by embracing self-esteem, i.e. the shaping of their own souls into their own worthy ideals, to guide them. Objectivists accept reality's laws of nature as immutable and life on earth as the ultimate value. Thus, they strive to make every action productive and an expression of their own sense of self-worth.

Rather than regard their highest form of affection a bond with a mythical God or with others, Objectivists seek to make a bond with self, i.e. self-esteem, their highest form of affection. A Christian claims that his unconditional love of others models God's unconditional love of him. By contrast, an Objectivist demonstrates that his conditional love of others models his conditional love of himself. While a Christian depends on mystical revelation to "feel" that God loves him, an Objectivist can point to facts about his own character to show that he is worthy of loving himself and of sharing that love with others.

The previous discussion from the C. S. Lewis book focused on the need for bonding and its expression in four forms of love. It conspicuously omitted the fifth and most important love of all: the love of self. While Aristotle did discuss this idea in his book The Nichomachean Ethics, it largely got lost amidst the rampant stream of altruistic volumes from Christianity and elsewhere. These competing books expounded the virtues of loving others even at the expense of oneself and thus obscured Aristotle's idea of philautos or love of oneself.

Among her many achievements, Ayn Rand made a breakthrough discovery in the nature of psychology with her identification of self-esteem as a cardinal value. She fleshed this concept into the characters of her novels, showing how a high sense of earned self-esteem manifested itself in heroism while a bogus sense of unearned self-esteem manifested itself in villainy. In addition, she showed how widely accepted ideas condemning individual achievement led to the unwarranted diminishment of self-esteem among productive people.

Throughout history, oppressive tyrannies of both the religious and secular varieties have attacked this fifth form of love. Consider the religious writings of Augustine, who denigrated the individual as "born between urine and feces" and destined for "eternal damnation" unless he forfeits self-love in favor of self-abnegation. Look at the secular writings of Karl Marx, who wrote in the preface of his landmark book Capital: "Here individuals are dealt with only as fact as they are personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests." Both views denigrate the individual as a thing either to cast aside as intrinsically evil or to mold to suit the needs of society. Both views thus negate the very concept of an individual who loves his own life.

A properly raised adult who has mastered the essential virtues of rationality and productiveness can think and act independently of others. His growth from helpless infant to capable adult transforms his very nature and thus his needs. A fully functioning adult needs first and foremost to exercise rationality to bond with reality through productiveness and with self through pride. These two bonds represent his two most important relationships. When he has mastered these basics of authentic individualism, he has a credible claim to an earned sense of self-esteem. This approach to living stands in stark contrast with much of what the religious and secular worlds preach today.

If you want to live well on earth, you must embrace self-esteem as the ruling value over all your other emotions. Your affections and loyalties with others must necessarily serve rather than master your love of self. To do otherwise leads you on the path to a living death known as self-sacrifice. It leads to a life of suffering rather than joy, of duty rather than causality. With the mastery of reason and purpose, self-esteem naturally follows.

Wednesday     Name Your Top Ten Most Joyous Emotions

High self-esteem results from a person affirming to himself his own ability to live and worthiness of living. He bases his conclusion on his level of rationality and productiveness, i.e. his embodiment of those virtues needed to live well. Interestingly, a growth dynamic takes place in the psychology of such a person. When he cultivates rationality and productiveness within his own character, the resultant pride generates positive feelings that motivate him to grow further in that direction.

A person of high self-esteem naturally seeks those emotions or governing values that let him enjoy his life even more. His attitude says, "I deserve this." Within the context of gaining and keeping his self-esteem, such a person will identify and then pursue those goals that will deliver the emotional payoffs he most desires.

For instance, a man who seeks Romance will first clearly identify to himself the type of woman he seeks. Based on his own personal tastes and preferences as well as those qualities he considers indispensable, he begins to program his subconscious to become aware of opportunities to meet such women. Further sharpening his focus, he learns about what sorts of men these types of women seek. He then decides which of those desired qualities in men he finds desirable to cultivate in himself.

If his ideal woman seeks a man of athletic build, and he considers athleticism a quality he desires for himself, he adds Vitality to his list of governing values and begins a well-reasoned diet and exercise regimen to get into that condition. If he decides the costs outweigh the benefits, he revises his vision for his ideal woman accordingly. At no stage in his thought process does he ever demand the unearned from a potential lover.

Likewise, if a woman seeks Passion and decides that a goal that will get her that result involves mountain climbing, she will proceed according to reason to learn all she can about the craft. She might have a fear of heights and decide to incorporate Courage into her list of governing values, seeking counseling if needed to overcome her irrational phobias. She regularly checks her payoffs against her costs and decides the "emotional ledger sheet" remains "in the black." She eventually climbs to the top of the mountain of her choice and experiences the profit of Passion she initially sought along with the bonus of Courage.

Take some time today to revisit the exercise from the beginning of this book in which you listed your ten most highly valued emotions. Revise the list as required or add more if you so choose. These forms of joy or governing values will serve as a reference throughout the remainder of this book.

Thursday        Name the Causes of Your Top Ten Most Joyous Emotions

What emotions do you most treasure? The previous exercise asked you to list them. Now you need to dig more deeply to understand some of the triggers or causes of these joyous feelings. To do this, ask yourself a straightforward question:

What has to happen for me to feel __________?

Relax and let the words flow from mind to hand to paper. For instance, if you named Vitality as one of your governing values, what evidence would you need to know that you will feel that emotion when that evidence presents itself? You might write, for example:

"When I can jump from bed in the morning, I feel vitality. When I choose the best possible foods to nourish my body, I feel vitality. When I exercise every single day, I feel vitality."

Notice that even to pursue this particular value demands that you first embrace the cardinal value of Self-Esteem, i.e. your conviction that not only are you able to live and worthy of living, but that you are able to experience and worthy of experiencing Vitality.

Observe that some of these emotions you can experience in solitude while others will require that you relate with other human beings. While Vitality remains a "do-it-yourself" project, for instance, Friendship will require interacting with others. How will you know that you experience this value? You might jot an evidence procedure like this one:

"When my friend and I reflect back each other's statements in a way that resonates completely with what we each intended the other to understand, I feel friendship. When we both experience the joy of living in activities we both love, I feel friendship. When we share with each other what we need to know to live well, I feel friendship."

Spend some time today to draft an evidence procedure for each of your governing values. Take care to inspect your statements for grounding to reality and to your own ultimate value -- your own life. Be sure to word them in first person "I" statements to indicate the fact that responsibility for your emotional wellness belongs ultimately to you.

In keeping with the theme of this chapter, culling duty from your emotions may prove your greatest challenge. By all means incorporate the trader principle into the evidence procedures for those emotions that require others. But do any of your statements involve unchosen, joyless "duties" of yourself to others or even of others to yourself? If so, rewrite them to expunge such nonsense. Flow the causality from your love of your own life to the various joys you can experience from loving that life while demanding no sacrifices from self or others in the form of "duty."

For example, if you had written your evidence procedure as follows for Friendship, it would need a rewrite:

"When I give to others and expect nothing in return, I experience friendship."

In this case, you employ the standard of selflessness to define Friendship. You could also have stated:

"When others give to me and expect nothing in return, I experience friendship."

In this instance, you foist the standard of selflessness onto others. Both variants of selflessness fall squarely at odds with the trader principle. Moreover, they clash with the needs of human beings to live as producers and traders rather than as parasites and hosts. Both treat duty rather than causality as a moral ideal.

Begin working now on this process of emotional self-discovery so you can purge the scourge of duty from your life once and for all.

Friday                         The Joy of Not "Needing" Others

As you have learned from the exercises in this chapter, you can experience many forms of joy without the assistance of others. You can employ the virtue of rationality to connect with reality through productiveness and with yourself through pride. Your can look at a finished product of your own honest efforts and say, proudly, "I did that!" This gives you a positive emotion that no relationship with another human being ever can.

For example, if you embarked on a rigorous regimen of diet and exercise because you embraced Vitality as a governing value, you might eventually shape your body into an object of pride. No one else can eat or exercise for you. Only you can do it for yourself. You may rely on others impersonally for products and knowledge, but the actual efforts and results belong entirely to you. Not only do you get the benefit of the governing value, but more importantly, you can experience the cardinal virtue of Pride and the cardinal value of Self-Esteem as a result of your own solitary efforts.

Likewise, when you choose a particular career at which you can excel because of your own cultivated efforts, you can enjoy the various positive emotions such as Passion that result from doing well in that career. More profoundly, you can point to the results and say, "I did that!" This again grants you an experience of that overall value of Self-Esteem.

Herein lays the central thrust of this chapter: As a fully capable human being able to use reason to live productively and independently of others, you can satisfy your most basic needs without the need for bonding with others. The nature of reality dictates your most important bonds as bonding with reality and bonding with your own soul. When you master these bonds, all other bonds naturally serve them. When you fail to master these two most important bonds, you remain perpetually locked into dependent bonds with others for your very survival.

If you want the best possible for yourself, you will want the highest sense of self-esteem a person can achieve. To do this, you must focus on making your bond with reality and your bond with yourself your most valued relationships. Only then can you grow into a fully capable, independent adult truly able to live and worthy of living. Only then can you experience the joy of not "needing" others in that infantile way so many adults still sadly suffer.

Saturday                     Reviewing This Week's Lessons

[Note to reviewers: This closing format duplicates that in Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. I give it mixed reviews. On the one hand, I like being able to turn his methods against him and for us. On the other hand, people could read it as just a "cheap shot." I will try it this week for feedback.]

Week Eight
Thinking about My Vision

Point to Ponder: Because your own life represents your own ultimate value, all your actions need ultimately to benefit you in some way. Actions that meet this requirement qualify as "causality" while all other actions amount to "duty."

Quote to Remember: "The disciple of causation faces life without inexplicable chains, unchosen burdens, impossible demands or supernatural threats."

Question to Consider: What duties do I currently accept that I need to examine and to shrug to make room for actions caused ultimately by my love of my own life?

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