Individuality and Intellectual Independence; A. Wortham

both lines of reasoning, a man is little more than a sophisticated primate who in time can be trained to accept a form of socio-political collectivism that prevents him from achieving any more or less than the man next to him. They tell us that man's similari ties to other animals in the realm of perceptual awareness are more important than his distinction from them as a being of concep tual awareness; that his similari ties to other men as Homo sapiens outweigh his differences from them as an individual. Indeed, be haviorist B. F. Skinner tells us that in order to prevent the aboli tion of the human species, science must abolish autonomous man (Le., the individual) - "the man defended by the literatures of free dom and dignity." "His abolition has long been overdue," writes Skinner. "To man qua man we 463 464 THE FREEMAN August readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes of human behav ior."1 Intellectual Independence and free Will If they could the abolitionists of individual autonomy would eradi cate the intellectual boundaries that distinguish the identity of one man from another. They persist in judging men according to the sim ilarities found in such statistical and categorical classifications as their biological ancestry, their na tional ancentry, their income level, their sexual attributes or the en vironment in which they live.

While these ·classifications of attri butes are useful in describing groups of individuals, they are not sufficient to distinguish one indi vidual from all others', including those with whom he shares certain characteristics and circumstances. The fundamental characteristic that all men share is their posses sion of a conceptual faculty. And it is within the realm of man's identity as a reasoning being that the primary distinction among in dividuals must be made. That dis tinction is man's use of his con sciousness. All other variations, such as his values, motivations and 1 Skinner, B .F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971), pp. 200-201. attitudes, and their consequences flow from this primary condition. The ruling force of man's use of his consciousness is his power of volition, what Nathaniel Bran den defines as "the power to regu late the action of his own con sciousness."2 It is the power to focus one's mind to achieve a level of awareness - to initiate thinking and to be aware of the nature and consequences of his thinking. En tailed in this self-regulatory men tal activity and fundamental to man's intellectual independence is his free will. Free will is defined by Branden as follows: "Free will" - in the widest mean ing of the term - is the doctrine that man is capable of performing actions which are not determined by forces outside his control; that man is cap able of making choices which are not necessitated by antecedent factors.

... Man's free will consists of a single action, a single basic choice: to think or not to think. It is a free dom entailed by his unique power of self-consciousness. This basic choice - given the context of his knowledge and of the existential possibilities confronting him - controls all of man's choices, and directs the choice of his actions. 3 The doctrine of free will refutes 2 Branden, Nathaniel, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing Corporation, 1969), p. 37. 3 Ibid., p. 50.

1975 INDIVIDUALITY AND INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE 465 the deterministic claim that man has no control over his conscious growth and development; that he is no more than a mass of proto plasm molded by his genes and social environment whose fate is determined by the stars or a witch's spell. The use of reasoning is not something done to man; he makes reasoning occur. Even when men behave as if they could not help what they do, given the pos session of normal faculties, they must be held accountable for their thought and actions. They must choose - whether out of ignorance, or in order to evade and repress, or whether to achieve· truth and freedom of the spirit. Whatever the reasons for their choice, whether for good or evil intentions, men must choose to act; and the choice to act presupposes the choice to think - to initiate rea soning. Putting Reason to Work All men are equally equipped with the capacity to reason man's basic tool of surviva1. But it is in his choice to apply (or not to apply) his reason to the problem of survival, from the first hour of birth until the last breath of life, that each man stands unequal to other men. In the broadest sense, the conditions of human survival are equally the same for all healthy men at the onset of their lives. But it is each man's perc'eption of those conditions and the manner in which he translates those perceptions in to integrated knowledge that makes one nran unequal to other men. The decision to be conscious to foc~s one's awareness - and to perform the process of thought necessary to live in his evironment is original with each man and must be initiated (or suspended) by him.

Regardless of where he lives or un.der what circumstances, he has the option' to act in support of his ex istence - or he can act against it, blanking out thought, evading effort and thereby sabotaging his life. An individual has no choice about the color of his eyes, but he can choose to color his personality by a view of a gray, fogbound uni verse in which he feels hopelessly lost and powerless to comprehend; or he can color his personality by a view of a. sunswept, integrated universe in which he feels at ease and confident in his ability to master. An individual has no choice about his need' for oxygen, but he can choose to pollute his mind with the smog of doubts, fears and rationalizations; or, he can choose to keep his mind filtered with continuous inquiry, knowl edge and validation. An individual has no choice about the physical height of his body, but he can 466 THE FREEMAN August choose to reach the intellectual height of a virtuous man of cour age; or he can sink to the depths of a cowardly guttersnipe.

Free Will Makes the Difference It is man's free will that indi viduates him. Free will gives him an autonomy that is inviolate, pull ing him out from the family of man, separating him from his neighbors, friends, loved ones and associates. In this sense, each man is cognitively alone - not linked to any other men before, during or after him; not linked to any living entity or social institution, con ventions, mores or traditions. Even if all men had the same quantity and quality of genetic endowment, the conscious choice of each indi vidual to activate his mind would remain the controlling force of all other life choices. And the charac ter and personality that results would still make the person dis tinct from all other men. As an end in himself, man has sole control over his mind; neither his physical nor social environment can compel him to think (or not to think) , to act (or not to act) . Even when a man chooses to follow the crowd, the choice is his - born in his mind, not in the "collective mind" of the crowd. He may live in an environment where the will of the tribe is law, but there is noth ing to prevent him from possessing a sovereign consciousness ex cept his own will. He may live in a society where to exercise his mind is punishable by the pain of death, but there is nothing short of death that can prevent him from using his mind except his own will. His body may be destroyed by others, but only he has the power to de stroy his mind.

Like all Iiving things, man is a part of nature but he is the only living organism that is in any de gree free of the forces of nature Le., not controlled by his external environment. Unlike other organ isms, the greater freedom man has of nature, the greater are his chances of survival. "An animal obeys nature blindly," writes Branden, "man obeys her intelli gently - and thereby acquires the power to command her."4 Unlike the lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin, man c,a,nnot survive in his environment merely as a passive reactor. The facts of reality exist for all to comprehend. It rains on the irrational as well as the rational but what a man makes of the rain is entirely his own affair. A simple but profound dif ference between the lilies of the field and man is that while the sur vival of the lilies is dependent on their strength to withstand the 4 Branden, Nathaniel, The Disowned Self, (Los Angeles: Nash Publishing Corporation, 1971), p. 239.

1975 INDIVIDUALITY AND INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE 467 rain they cannot escape, man builds a shelter. And the difference between individuals is that while one man will build a shelter of straw, another will build his shel ter of stone. All lilies everywhere rea.ct bio chemically to their environment in much the same way. But each man, at any time and under any circum stances, must face the facts of his environment alone - not with the purpose of being a chemical reac tor but with the purpose of identi fying the facts and using that knowledge to further his life. There are no exceptions. The rules are the same for each man whether he inhabits a mud hut in the most primitive jungle or a marble man sion in the most technologically advanced society. A Twentieth Century housewife's responsibility to activate her consciousness is no less than Aristotle's was. And all her claims to an intellectual heri tage based on the thinking of Aristotle will not make her any less responsible for the original thinking she does or does not do.

What links the housewife and Aristotle, or the caveman and the astronaut is that regardless of their knowledge, context and val ues, each must function in the manner of Homo sapiens: each must choose to focus his awareness or not to focus it. It is not enough to choose to think; one must then proceed to think - to understand the identity and cause of things. "Theirs [is] not to reason why," wrote Alfred Tennyson of the Light Brigade, "theirs [is] but to do and die." But if man is to exist in harmony with reality, he must ask why. (as well as what and how) and he must live to live, not to die. Intellectual Independence and Understanding If a man is to control his en vironment rather than rely on the thinking of those who do control their environment, he must be willing to understand that environ ment. Guesswork, hunches, or faith won't do. He must be willing to distinguish between who and what in his environment is bene ficial to his existence and who and what is inimical to it. But under standing is not a quality man is born with. It does not come to him overnight (even a sudden "brain storm" has a cognitive history in an individual's mind) and it can not be merely wished into exist ence. It is an intellectual level of awareness one must work for - the end product of a. logical process of independent thought.

.The principle of understanding occupies both ends of the knowl edge-acquiring spectrum; it is an ongoing process that is both the cause and effect of man's reason468 THE FREEMAN August ing. A man activates his reasoning because he wants to understand himself and reality; and as the re sult of his logical reasoning, he achieves understanding. Mere rep etition or imitation does not con stitute learned knowledge, as it does not require understanding. But learning requires thinking and thinking requires the will to un derstand. While it is possible for one man to learn from another, it is not possible for one man to do another's thinking. What he learns must be his knowledge, or he can not claim to have learned. This is not to say that a. person's ideas must necessarily be original with himself. He may hold the same ideas as other men, but what must be original with him is the think ing and the manner of thinking he does to reach the same conclusions as other men. However, the goal of his thinking should not be to reach the conclusions that others have reached but to arrive at convic tions that are legitimately his own - whether they stand in agreement or disagreement with those of others.

Entailed in the will to under stand is the commitment to cre ativity and honesty. One must not only be certain about what he knows but also the extent and lim itation of his knowledge. He must be the prime architect, organizer and administrator of the content of his consciousness. He must be at once selective about the facts he integrates and scrupulous about the relevance they hold for his life. It is in this manner that under standing is necessarily contextual. It is by this monitoring of his thinking that an individual main tains cognitive harmony with the facts of reality and it is in this manner that he remains honest. Achievement through Experience Contextual and honest under standing forbids claiming more understanding than one's actual thinking and experience can pro vide. A person's knowledge and the understanding it entails is his own when he has reached the point of experiential affirmation of his con victions - when he can relate the abstractions of his mind to the concretes of his existence. But it takes time for intellectual under standing to be transformed into an experiential achievement. A child does not understand facts about himself or his existential environ ment that a mature adult is re quired to understand. The intel lectual growth span of a person is in many ways analogous to the cultural growth span of the human race. His movement from the level of mere perception to the higher level of conceptualization and fi nally to psycho-intellectual matur ity is as impressive as the dynam1975 INDIVIDUALITY AND INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE 469 ics of mankind's progression from the Stone Age across the centuries to the Space Age. Each individual begins life at the level of an in tellectual Stone Age. But whether he reaches his own personal Space Age and beyond depends on wheth er he chooses to think and how skilled he becomes in the exercise of his reason toward that goal not on his genetic endowment, his socio-economic status or how well he can mimic the reasoning of others.

The Possibility of Error There are aspects of reality which one may not be able to un derstand until the context of his life is broad enough to provide room for that knowledge which he does not yet possess. Yet it is also possible to have an abstract under standing of certain facts and never have an experience in one's life that reflects that understanding. One does not have to be a candle stick maker to understand how candles are produced. For the same reason, one is not prohibited from inventing a better source of light than candles simply because it has not been done before. This creativity, or what Branden calls "cognitive self-assertiveness," is the factor of man's consciousness that underlies his esthetic expres sion: he is able to create a fiction .al hero unlike any person he has met - or paint a landscape he has never seen - or devise a theory for a social system that has never ex isted.

Since man is not infallible-since knowledge and the understanding it entails is not automatic in hu man beings - since man must dis cover what is beneficial and what is inimical to his existence - there is always the possibility that he may commit errors of knowledge and judgment. The will to under stand requires that he be willing to admit those errors and to cor rect them. It requires that he op erate on the premise of intellectual honesty, confidence and courage. Rather than a source of humilia tion, an error should be seen as a green light signaling the necessity for new thought that can lead to another level of understanding, in creased knowledge and intellectual growth. It presents one with the opportunity to expand his ability to deal with the world around him; to increase his efficacy as a person. Man cannot be right all the time, and he cannot be certain about everything all the time. One's past assumptions may be proven in er ror by his future knowledge; and by the same principle, his answers to today's questions may become his validated convictions of tomor row. What is important is that he does not attempt to fake his own nature or the nature of reality by 470 THE FREEMAN August evading his errors or refusing to acknowledge and resolve his un certainties.

Steps in the Growth Process But there are those who would rather die than admit their errors. Equating right with good and wrong with bad, they feel that to admi t they have erred means to admit that they are bad people. To be judged in error is to them the same as having their morality called into question. Hence, they build up all manner of defenses and rationalizations to protect the image of perfection and omnisci ence they would like to project. But in choosing such deception, they commit an even greater error - not one of knowledge, but a breach of morality: they wish to fake reality. But the man committed to un derstanding does not experience such fears or contradictions. He knows that to be wrong does not mean that he is morally bad; he knows further that being right does not make one necessarily mor ally good. He knows that one is morally bad only when he tries to make a mistake appear to be cor rect when it isn't; he is then bad because he is a liar. He knows that mistakes are tools; they are warn ing signals that more knowledge is required of him. He does not feel that because he has made mistakes, he cannot be certain of anything.

And he never uses the phrase "to err is human" as an excuse not to correct his mistakes. To be human is to grow; human error, properly seen, is a force of motivation - not an excuse to do nothing. The man who chooses to think and does so with the will to under stand is a person of sovereign consciousness, a self-regulating consciousness. To be such an indi vidual means accepting the respon sibility for being cognitively inde pendent of other men; it means being responsible for one's own thinking - being the initiator of the thought and action necessary for one's existence. Because he is a self-regulator, the sovereign in dividual does not depend on the judgment of .others to motivate his self-understanding. He is intellec tuany adventurous and secure in his convictions, but always on the alert to improve and expand his store of knowledge and correct his errors. Not only does he seek knowledge to benefit his existence; he enjoys the search. Repeatedly, he enthusiastically initiates the process of identifying aspects of reality, of integrating those facts into concepts and those concepts into wider abstractions and prin ciples to add to his contin'lal ac cumulation of knowledge.

Yet he knows that disaster can result from resting on the laurels 1975 INDIVIDUALITY AND INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE 471 of mere intellectual understand ing; that the test of one's under standing lies in the application of it to his thought and action. He knows that the constancy of cog nitive and existential independence is not automatic but must be con tinually asserted; that one is not born intellectually and existentially sovereign but must discover the means of becoming so; and that there is no guarantee that he will remain so at any given time or under any given set of circum stances. For this reason he guards his consciousness against irration ality as rigorously as armed troops guard the territorial sovereignty of a nation. His sovereign con sciousness is his most prized pos session, his greatest achievement, and the means by which he remains the unique entity that he is. But there are many men who do not want to be unique and orig inal, who do not want to assume the responsibility of their intellec tual independence of other men.

And when they declare that all men are equal and should be forced to exist as such, it is not the dig nity of man that is their goal as they claim. Rather, it is either in forced equality that such men hope to escape what is to them the hor ror of man's solitary, independent means of existence - or, it is in forced separation that they at tempt to escape having to deal with the autonomous consciousness of other men. But the intellectual independ ence of man's existence is a fact of reality that cannot be escaped and all the rhetoric to the contrary will not make it any less an issue of his survival that each man must contend with. For if men are to be human, if individuals are to be persons, it is the principle of in tellectual independence that they must hold as their priority. I) IDEAS ON LlBERTY Equality and Justice IN THE FULL ENJOYMENT of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally en titled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial disfunctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of so ciety - the farmers, mechanics, and laborers - who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

ANDREW JACKSON, from a Veto Message of July 10, 1832 e on Government of the law is not to abolish nd enlarge freedom. For in all t capable of laws, where there m. For liberty is to be free fro m others; which cannot be wh not, as weare told, a liberty for e ts (for who could be free whe ht domineer over him?), but a rder as he lists, his person, ac is wh01 e property-':H~'!liW~\Mit!,:h~;~in1i!lFt~hf.t\le~jM'li~'n;.~i';~i~~fl;;~~:der whi~; ate is no free violence law; and what he humour pose, and sions, and those laws subject of th his own. Dr. Watts, author and lecturer, is Burrows T. Lundy Professor of the Philosophy of Business at Campbell College, North Carolina, and Director of Economic Education for Northwood Institute, with headquarters at Midland, Michigan. ' 472 1975 THE LAW 473 THE RECENT RISE of militant nihilism l in the United St.ates is reminding liberty lovers that there can be no liberty without law. Not only is there no freedom without restraint, but we gain freedom only a~ we discover and obey "The Law."