For the New Intellectual is essentially a “best-of” collection from Ayn Rand’s fiction novels. It begins, however, with a lengthy, original essay which shares its name with the book’s title. It spans the history of philosophy and presents the fundamentals of Objectivism, Rand’s philosophy, in contrast to the Attilas (brute leaders) and the Witch Doctors (irrationalists) that have ruled for almost all of history. The following notes are select passages from the title essay.
“When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency – not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehow – or they can identify the situation, check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.” (7)
“The essential characteristics of (force and faith) remain the same in all ages; Attila, the man who rules by brute force, acts on the range of the moment, is concerned with nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but the physical reality immediately before him, respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club or a gun as the only answer to any problem – and the Witch Doctor, the man who dreads physical reality, dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.” (10)
“For an animal, the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological.” (11)
“(The men of faith and force) seek to exist, not by conquering nature, but by adjusting to the given, the immediate, the known. There is only one means of survival for those who do not choose to conquer nature: to conquer those who do.” (11-12)
“Attila feels no need to understand, to explain, nor even to wonder, how men manage to produce the things he covets – ‘somehow’ is a fully satisfactory answer inside his skull, which refuses to consider such questions as ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ or such concepts as identity or causality.” (12)
“(Attila’s) view of the universe does not include the power of production. The power of destruction, of brute force, is, to him, metaphysically omnipotent. An Attila never thinks of creating, only of taking over.”
“The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher.” (21)
“The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all other fields.”
“The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession.”
“A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable, precise and objective as the printing press and the television sets that carry their voices.”
“If it were possible for an animal to describe the content of his consciousness, the result would be a transcript of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s conclusions would be the conclusions of a consciousness limited to the perceptual level of awareness, passively reacting to the experience of immediate concretes, with no capacity to form abstractions, to integrate perceptions into concepts, waiting in vain for the appearance of an object labeled ‘causality’ (except that such a consciousness would not be able to conclusions).” (24)
“The major line of philosophers rejected Kant’s ‘noumenal’ world quite speedily, but they accepted his ‘phenomenal’ world and carried it to its logical consequences: the view of reality as mere appearance; the view of man’s conceptual faculty as a mechanism for producing arbitrary ‘constructs’ not derived from experience or facts; the view of rational certainty as impossible, of science as unprovable, of man’s mind as impotent – and, above all, the equation of morality with selflessness.” (26-27)
“The relationship of reason and morality is reciprocal: the man who accepts the role of a sacrificial animal, will not achieve the self-confidence necessary to uphold the validity of his mind – the man who doubts the validity of his mind, will not achive the self-esteem necessary to uphold the value of his person and to discover the moral premises that make man’s value possible.” (31)
“Having accepted the premises, the moral values and the position of Witch Doctors, the intellectuals were unwilling to differentiate between the businessman and Attila, between the producer of wealth and the looter. Like the Witch Doctor, they scorned and dreaded the realm of material reality, feeling secretly inadequate to deal with it. Like the Witch Doctor’s, their secret vision (almost their feared and envied ideal) of a practical, successful man, a true master of reality, was Attila; like the Witch Doctor, they believed that force, fraud, lies, plunder, expropriation, enslavement, murder were practical. So they did not inquire into the source of wealth or ever ask what made it possible (they had been taught that causality is an illusion and that only the immediate moment is real). They took it as their axiom, as an irreducible primary, that wealth can be acquired only by force – and that a fortune as such is the proof of plunder, with no further distinctions or inquiries necessary.” (33)
“(Witch Doctors) proclaimed themselves to be the defenders of the poor against the rich, righteously evading the fact that the rich were not Attilas any longer – and the defenders of the weak against the strong, righteously evading the fact that the strength involved was not the strength of brute muscles any longer, but the strength of man’s mind.” (34)
“The businessman, historically, had started as the victim of the intellectuals; but no injustice or exploitation can succeed for long without the sanction of the victim. The businessman, who could not accept the intellectual leadership of post-Kantian Witch Doctors, made his fatal error when he conceded to them the field of the intellect. He gave them the benefit of the doubt, at his own expense, he concluded that their meaningless verbiage could not be as bad as it sounded to him, that he lacked understanding, but had no stomach for trying to understand that sort of stuff and would leave it respectfully alone. No Witch Doctor could have hoped for a deadlier concession.” (39)
“(The businessman) repressed and renounced any interest in ideas, any quest for intellectual values or moral principles. He could not accept the altruist morality, as no man of self-esteem can accept it, and he found no other moral philosophy. He lived by a subjective code of his own – the code of justice, the code of a fair trader – without knowing what a superlatively moral virtue it represented. His private vision or understanding of altruism – particularly in America – took the form of an enormous generosity, the joyous, innocent, benevolent generosity of a self-confident man, who is too innocent to suspect that he is hated for his success, that the moralists of altruism want him to pay financial tributes, not as kindness, but as atonement for the guilt of having succeeded.” (40)
“Who are to be the New Intellectuals? Any man or woman who is willing to think. All those who know that man’s life must be guided by reason, those who value their own life and are not willing to surrender it to the cult of despair in the modern jungle of cynical impotence, just as they are not willing to surrender the world to the Dark Ages and the rule of the brutes.” (42)
“(The New Intellectual) will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action. He will know that ideas divorced from consequent action are fraudulent, and that action divorced from ideas is suicidal. He will know that the conceptual level of psycho-epistemology – the volitional level of reason and thought – is the basic necessity of man’s survival and his greatest moral virtue.” (43)
“The businessmen need to discover the intellect; the intellectuals need to discover reality. Let the intellectuals understand the nature and the function of a free market in order to offer the businessmen, as well as the public at large, the guidance of an intelligable theoretical framework for dealing with men, with society, with politics, and economics. Let the businessmen learn the basic issues and principles of philosophy in order to know how to judge ideas, then let them assume full responsiblity for the kind of ideologies they choose to finance and support.” (44)
“That which is merely implicit is not in men’s conscious control; they can lose it by means of other implications, without knowing what it is they are losing or when or why.” (45)
“Perhaps the most obscene legacy of altruism among modern intellectuals is their axiomatic acceptance of brute force and of somebody’s sacrifice as a normal and necessary part of a human society, and their refusal to consider the possibility of a non-sacrificial, non-compulsory co-existence and co-operation among men.”
