The value judgments we make determine our actions, and upon their validity rests our mental health and happiness.
-- Erich Fromm
Introduction
The issue of values and evaluation represents a crucial problem in regard to man's life. On the one hand, man is free to evaluate and respond to the situations he is confronted with in his day-to-day life as he or she pleases, but on the other hand, man is not free from the very real consequences that these evaluations and responses on his or her life and well-being.
A person's evaluations then, can be said to be 'effective' or 'functional' to the extent that they are life-serving -- that is, they work towards protecting and/or enhancing the person's health and happiness. Conversely, a person's evaluations can be said to be 'ineffective' and 'dysfunctional' to the extent that they are life-negating -- that is, they work towards sabotaging the person's health and happiness.
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Editorial Commments, dgb, 2008
In 1979, I was 24 years old. My main influence in the top two paragraphs was Nathaniel Branden and his book, 'The Psychology of Self-Esteem'. Nathaniel Branden was working very closely with Ayn Rand at the time, herself an avid Capitalist writer-philosopher in the Adam Smith mold. I had read Rand's famous book, 'The Fountainhead', 1943which I was smitten by, and breezed through in short order, so I was not unfamiliar with Ayn Rand. On top of both of these factors, my dad was an 'Adam Smith-Ayn Rand Capitalist' and he had introduced me to The Fountainhead -- so none of this stuff I was reading in The Psychology of Self-Esteem was really new to me; it was simply building on a philosophy that I already largely believed in -- Nathaniel Branden was writing to a sold believer in me, he was singing to the choir.
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The Psychology of Self-Esteem*
This major psychological work presents a brilliant new concept of human nature, of mental health and illness, and of the conditions necessary for the achievement of mental well-being. Nathaniel Branden breaks radically with the mainstream of contemporary psychology, challenging and rejecting the basic premises of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism. his book is a revolutionary contribution to man's understanding of himself.
From the introduction to The Psychology of Self-Esteem
The central theme of this book is the role of self-esteem in man's life: the need of self-esteem, the nature of that need, the conditions of its fulfillment, the consequences of its frustration — and the impact of man's self-esteem (or lack of it) on his values, responses, and goals.
Virtually all psychologists recognize that man experiences a need of self-esteem. But what they have not identified is the nature of self-esteem, the reasons why man needs it, and the conditions he must satisfy if he is to achieve it.
Virtually all psychologists recognize, if only vaguely, that there is a relationship between the degree of a man's self-esteem and the degree of his mental health. But they have not identified the nature of that relationship, nor the causes of it.
Virtually all psychologists recognize, if only dimly, that there is some relationship between the nature and degree of a man's self-esteem and his motivation, i.e. his behavior in the spheres of work, love, and human relationships. But they have not explained why, nor identified the principles involved. Such are the issues with which this book deals.
If the science of psychology is to achieve an accurate portrait of man, it must, I submit, question and challenge many of the deepest premises prevalent in the field today — must break away from the anti-biological, anti-intellectual, automaton view of human nature that dominates contemporary theory. Neither the view of man as an instinct-manipulated puppet (psychoanalysis), nor the view of him as a stimulus-response machine (behaviorism), bears any resemblance to man the biological entity whom it is the task of psychology to study: the organism uniquely characterized by the power of conceptual thought, propositional speech, explicit reasoning and self-awareness.
This work serves as the theoretical foundation for much of Branden's later writings.
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The Fountainhead is a 1943 novel by Ayn Rand. It was Rand's first major literary success and its royalties and movie rights brought her fame and financial security. The book's title is a reference to Rand's statement that "man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress".
The Fountainhead's protagonist, Howard Roark, is a young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision. He refuses to pander to the prevailing "architect by committee" taste in building design. Roark is a singular force that takes a stand against the establishment, and in his own unique way, prevails. The manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers before a young editor, Archibald Ogden, at the Bobbs-Merrill Company publishing house wired to the head office, "If this is not the book for you, then I am not the editor for you." Despite generally negative early reviews from the contemporary media, the book gained a following by word of mouth and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, along with garnering critical acclaim over time.[citation needed] The Fountainhead was made into a Hollywood film in 1949, with Gary Cooper in the lead role of Howard Roark, and with a screenplay by Ayn Rand herself.
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More Editorial Comments, dgb, 2008
Having said what I just said in my editorial comments above, Erich Fromm had also become one of my 'philosopher-heros' back in the mid to 1970s. And Erich Fromm was a known post-Marxian humanistic philosopher. So without knowing it at the time, this was perhaps my first academic introduction to what we might call a 'dialectical split' -- two obviously very intelligent sets of men and women believing in two totally opposite philosophical points of view -- Capitalism vs. Socialism. I was left trying to walk down the middle and sort out the strengths and weaknesses of each respective philosophical system -- and then decide where this left me and my own particular philosophical viewpoint.
A second and a third dialectical split were also starting to crop up in my work with or without my awareness. The second was the dialectical split between 'freedom and determinism'. You can catch Branden talking about this dialectical -- and philosophical -- split in his introduction where he sees his own 'Psychology of Self-Esteem' approaching man's life and his philosophy from an entirely different angle than two of his philosophical-psychological competitors: 1. Psychoanalysis (and its theory of 'instinctual determinism'; and 2. Behaviorism (and its theory of 'external, social-conditioning determinism'). In contrast, Branden -- following partly in both Adam Smith's and Ayn Rand's philosophical footsteps, laid out a 'cognitive-free-will' philosophy-psychology of man.
So did/do I, in what was/is to come in 'Evaluation and Health', although today, I incorporate a strong Freudian and post-Freudian influence into my philosophical-pscyhological thinking.
At issue in Evaluation and Health -- although buried in my lack of knowledge and awareness at the time -- was the famous 'Kantian subjective-objective dialectical split' How do we know that what we believe to be true -- is true? This is the 50 million dollar epistemological question of the last 225 years in Western philosophy, going back to the epistemology of Emmanuel Kant in 'The Critique of Pure Reason', 1781, and longer even than that if you want to go back to the epistemology of John Locke, The Conduct of Understanding (published posthumously in 1706, John Locke, 1632-1704), and before that to Sir Francis Bacon, The Four Idols, 1620, or still even further back to William of Ockham, famous for 'Ockham's Razor'...
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Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"): "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", roughly translated as "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".
This is often paraphrased as "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.
Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as an heuristic maxim (rule of thumb) that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity, often or especially in scientific theories.
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Final Editorial Comment, dgb, 2008
At stake in the famous 'subjective-objective' split is not only the epistemological issue of 'truth' and 'fact', but also the ethical-moral issue of 'value'.
How do you know or judge which is better: Capitalism or Socialism; religion or science, evolution or creation theory, conservatism or liberalism, Republicanism or Democratism, the Kantian moral imperative, or the Nietzschean Dionysian existential imperative?
Do we live every day as if it is our last -- or would that make our life too 'wild', too 'Dionysian', 'too existentially extreme', not properly factoring in the feelings of our loved ones? Is a life of 'existential balance' the better way to go, the better way to be?
'To be or not to be.' -- Shakespeare wrote that.
'How should I be. How do I want to be. How do I want to behave each and every day. Am I living the life I want to live? Or am I living a 'shadow' of the life I want to live.? God, can you divide my mind and my body into two different people -- call one the 'Apollonian David Bain, and the other the 'Dionysian David Bain' -- and I will live one life according to Kant's moral imperative, and the other life according to Nietzsche's Dionysian existential extremism -- and we can meet again after this life is over, in either Heaven and/or in Hell -- and take up the argument again. Then I will be able to make perhaps a better judgment based on my dual, dialectical experience.
Apollo and Dionysus went for a walk. They argued with each other, had a fight with each other, defied each other, defiled each other, both were strong -- but only one came back.' Who came back for you? Apollo or Dionysus? Or both partly beaten up but one, the smiling victor, the other, the grudging loser, still beating you up from the shadows? Who's the grudging loser -- Apollo raging righteously at you with guilt-trips from his corner in your personality? Or Dionysus and Nietzsche second-guessing you for not having 'made a move', or fully experienced a potential encounter, for in effect, having turned your back on life?
These are the types of questions that haunt me now...
These are the types of questions whose answers define you in your life, from moment to moment, day to day. They determine your personal history.
You are what you choose.
But, of course, that is me at 53, not 24. At 24, I was simply racing ahead on my cognitive-expistmological horse -- with just a hint of what was to dialectically and existentially come.
Let's go back to my 1979 'charging epistemologically idealistic horse'.
-- dgb, Sept. 13th, 2008, modified Sept. 15th, 2008.
