IN THIS SECTION we will analyze the first of several presentations by people who were courageous enough and good enough to volunteer to speak. I would suggest you try to focus in part on the content, and in part on the method of presentation. In regard to the content, you should be concerned with questions like, “Essentially, is this true? Is there something basically confused about the viewpoint being presented? Is it riddled with non sequiturs or illogical connections? Is there some vital, crucial point that is being omitted by the speaker?” In essence, it comes down to, “Does this make sense as a basic philosophic viewpoint?” But also, from the aspect of this course even more primarily, I would like you to focus on the method of presentation. I am using that term in the broadest sense, to encompass not simply the narrow techniques of oral delivery (although that is included), but all the kinds of points that I have been making since the course began: the crow epistemology, the nature of an audience’s context, and all the rest.
Presentation: “Effective Child Rearing”
Can you hear me? All right, I’d like you to imagine that you are parents at a PTA meeting in either a Montessori, a public, or a private school. The topic tonight is an effective approach to child rearing.
How many of you would expect an eighty-story skyscraper to be constructed without using a blueprint prepared by an architect, or without organized human effort provided by skilled construction workers? While few of you would expect a skyscraper to result without rational human effort, many of you do expect your child to develop into a mature, rational adult without your having to use a systematic approach, or possessing the skills or methods necessary to assist your child’s development. The role of an architect is to develop a blueprint, to guide construction, and to see that there’s an orderly step-by-step process, beginning with a foundation and going into a framework, and, eventually, a skyscraper is built. The role of an adult is to supervise a child’s development. The adult should possess a blueprint. That is, he should be aware of the goal and the direction and the steps involved in a child’s development. He should understand what are the qualities an independent adult possesses, and how are these developed. Then he should have the skills and the methods necessary to help the child develop these qualities. And finally, he should use a systematic approach to enable the child to develop a broad foundation and a sturdy framework during the childhood years.
Tonight’s topic is to look at what a systematic or an effective approach to child rearing is. And we are going to note that it involves four ingredients. These four ingredients are: It should be an objective approach, a rational approach, an individual approach, and an integrated approach. By an “objective approach” to child rearing, I mean child rearing must look to the facts of reality and observe children to discover the nature and needs of children, and to identify the exact steps in a child’s development. The adult should be aware of the goal, the direction, and the process involved in self-development. By sticking to the facts of reality, you then will be able to develop realistic guidelines, expectations, and rules, so that you’ll know what the child can do and when he can be expected to do it, and you will not be expecting or demanding the impossible, or neglecting aspects of his development, or expecting too little. By using realistic guidelines and objective rules, you will find that you will be treating the child in a just and fair manner. The child will soon see that the rules, the same rules and needs and laws, apply to everyone, not just to him.
Secondly, an effective approach to child rearing should be a rational approach. Child rearing must involve the use of reason to develop the understandings of what child development involves. You have to also use reason to apply these understandings to your particular child. The adult involved should trust his mind and trust his ability to think for himself when applying these principles to your particular child. Using a rational approach involves treating the child in a rational manner—not telling the child, “Do this because I say so, or else,” but rather, taking the time to explain to the child, “This is what I want you to do, this is why I want you to do it, this is how you are to do it, and this is when I expect you to do it.” And finally, a rational approach to child rearing is an approach that will help the child to become a rational person. This involves starting with the child when he’s young, to do all you can to help him to understand reality. Eventually the child will realize that reality is knowable, it’s orderly, and it’s predictable. The child should be able to develop a trust in his ability to learn, and trust his ability to think. And we can do this by actually instructing the child in how to think. This would involve helping a child learn how to make decisions, how to solve problems, what’s involved in formulating your goals and how to go about achieving them. It also involves introducing the child to logic, helping the child to develop a code of values that he can use to guide his actions, and eventually helping the child to develop a philosophy that will guide his life.
Aside from using an objective and a rational approach, you must use an individual approach to child rearing. Child rearing is concerned with the self-development of individual children. Now, this involves accepting and treating your child as the individual he is. Each child is unique; they are entitled to their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own interests, and their own needs. It involves comparing the child to himself and his development, not to others. And it also involves helping the child to understand himself as the unique individual he is, so that he will become aware of himself as a valuable person, as a person competent in certain areas, and as a person able to develop competency in other areas. And finally the child will realize that he possesses a potential for human greatness that we are there to help him explore and to develop.
Finally, an effective approach to child rearing is an integrated approach, rather than a fragmented, haphazard, hit-or-miss approach. We are dealing with a whole child, and all these different aspects of child development are related and integrated. We can achieve an integrated approach to child rearing by using the child’s life as the standard to which we relate all we are doing, all that we expect the child to do, and all that he does, so he will see that everything he does is related to his needs, his interests, and his goals. He will see that certain of his actions are either going to help him grow and develop and achieve his goals, or that other actions will not let him grow and develop and they will hinder him from achieving his goal. An integrated approach to child rearing will let the child know that he has an active role in his self-development. He’s basically a self-made individual; our role is just to be there to guide him in his self-development. He will realize that he is responsible for all he does, all he becomes, in life.
Now in summary, we discussed three points tonight. The first was the importance of using an effective approach to child rearing. Secondly, we looked at the role of an adult in such an approach, and we found the adult should possess an awareness of the goals and the steps of human development; they should possess certain skills and methods and use a systematic approach in guiding the child’s development. And third, we looked at what this systematic approach would be, and we found that it would be an objective approach based on the nature and the needs of the child, a rational approach involving the use of reason in dealing with the child, an individual approach based on the self-development of your child, and an integrated approach which uses your child’s life as the standard to relate all of his actions to. Just as it is up to an architect to supervise the entire process of constructing a skyscraper, it is up to you, the parent, to supervise your child’s development. By using an effective approach to child rearing, you will help your child construct a foundation and a framework that will enable him to achieve his life’s goals and his individual greatness. Thank you.
COMMENTARY
This presentation is an excellent demonstration, because it definitely has virtues, as well as certain problems. The speaker did certain things extremely well, and if you are sufficiently enthusiastic about the things she did well, then you would not pay as much attention to the others.
Let us first of all establish what was done well in this talk. It was a very organized presentation, something that is always a pleasure to hear. The audience always relaxes when a speaker says, “We are going to cover this subject. I have four points: one, two, three, four. Now here is my review.” In other words, he explains to the audience why he is going to cover each point, and then summarizes it at the end. That way we always know where he is; it is easy to take notes within certain limits, but we know where he is. Leaving aside now any questions about the content, then, on the point of organization this presentation was easy to follow and straightforward.
The speaker also had a good, strong opening with her reference to the skyscraper and the blueprint. That comes under the general heading of motivation. She motivated the audience by giving them an analogy, something they understand—there is such a field as architecture, and that requires a certain kind of knowledge and approach, and she is going to do the same thing with regard to building the character of children. That is an analogy, but a very apt analogy, one that an audience can get. It is, moreover, a good analogy for a completely raw audience, because even if they know nothing, it invokes in them the idea, “Obviously, you have to do something to produce a certain kind of effect, and there is a certain way in which I am forming my child the way you would form a skyscraper.” Per se, that does not necessarily convince people, but no opening is going to convince them; it might, though, intrigue them and give them a motivating framework. So I would say this presentation was very good with regard to motivation.
Another positive aspect was that the speaker spoke loudly. I like the fact that she started by saying, “Can you hear me?” That is a good thing, because it is urgent that you be able to be heard. Therefore, by the speaker’s sheer act of starting that way, an audience thinks, “She’s not going to drone on; she is aware that we have to hear her.” That is a forthright opening, and there would be many speeches highly improved if the first words were, “Can you hear me?” So I regard as a definite virtue that it was loud and unequivocal. She did not whisper her words or drop them; you could definitely hear her.
Similarly, the titles of her various sections—“objective,” “rational,” “independent,” and “integrated”—were a little louder and set apart from the content. In that sense, the emphasis was correct; you could tell that there are four main concepts operating here. She made her structure clear to the audience. I have questions about emphasis in another way, but let us leave that for the moment.
I did think that the speaker could have done with less reliance on the notes. I had the impression that she had overprepared this presentation, that it was not completely extemporaneous. While she did not have it all written out, she admits that she had, in fact, practiced in a mirror more than five times, and that definitely came across in the presentation. If you are going to do that with a talk—if you are going to go over it so many times that you effectively commit it to memory—then you have to counteract that with some kind of technique that will give the audience the impression that this is extemporaneous. But in this case, what the speaker never did was stumble; she never paused to grasp a word; she never gave the impression that she was thinking of her material as she was presenting it.
In the ideal extemporaneous delivery, you do not want to pause so often that the audience gets lost, but you also do not want to just zip through the material. The people listening want to feel that you are getting to it as they are getting to it. This speaker definitely communicated that she had rehearsed the material thoroughly, and that she knew exactly what she was going to say when, and then she just went right on. There was some eye contact with the audience, but I, at least, did not have the impression that if people had frowned, it would have stopped the speaker in her tracks and made her add something. She had her eye on the notes and the time, and she was going to make it to the end, and she was just kind of looking at the audience with the idea, “Well, I will give them a glance.” That is very understandable if you are nervous. The best way around that is actually to jump in at some point and simply lecture to an audience without that much preparation. Have more fragmented notes, and take advantage if your mind goes blank. For example, you get to, say, the middle of “objectivity,” and you do not have it prepared. You look at your notes and it says “objectivity (explain),” and you cannot remember what the explanation is—you go blank. You can make an asset of that by saying, “Now, the next point we want to cover is the role of objectivity in child rearing. What do you think that would consist of?” That is actually helpful, because if you need the pause, the chances are that your listeners need the pause, too. (True, in the act of doing that, you are losing time, so you have to make a mental note, “Good-bye to ‘integration’ then, I suppose,” and you would then have three points instead of four.) Then somebody from the audience will say, “Well, objectivity, that has to do with facts rather than emotions,” and that might jog your memory. Meanwhile, you have also had your listeners participate a bit, and you have also slowed it down somewhat.
You do have to risk something for this. In other words, if you want a true extemporaneous quality, you have to go up with just a few notes, with the idea that if you go blank, you are going to have to think on the spot. But that is correspondingly a more effective presentation than just rattling right through it. That was one of my criticisms of this presentation. The positive side of that, however, is that the speaker was terrific with regard to timing; she came out to the minute.
One more virtue of this presentation was repetition. I liked the fact that the speaker stated in advance what she was going to do. That is the classic three-part lecture—“I am going to cover these four points; here are the four points; I have covered these four points”—and that is always a perfectly valid way of giving a talk. The transitions were also clear; she consistently said, “Now let us go to the next point.” Another positive is that there was no rhetoric in this talk. By “rhetoric” I mean, in this context, not the ancient Greek sense of the term, but empty verbiage, such as the way politicians speak; they go on and on, not simply uttering floating abstractions or the like, but saying nothing at all—just clacking their uppers, so to speak. There was none of that. This presentation was condensed; it was taut; the speaker had her points and knew what she wanted to say, and she just kept pouring the material out.
There were, however, some aspects in which this talk could be improved. A very important criticism is that the talk was too abstract. We kept waiting for it to cover specific issues and problems that would arise in the home and in daily life. This is the essential reason I would regard this talk as mixed rather than positive; I do not believe that an audience could take it in. The material was organized, and the speaker definitely motivated her listeners, but she pitched it on a level of such abstractness that it is questionable to me how much an outside audience—that is, one that does not already know “objectivity,” “rationality,” “integration,” and all these complex philosophic concepts—would get out of it. For instance, I tried to put myself into the framework of that type of audience, and I started the first point, but I could not take down the definitions (I am not a fast writer, but I did get through many years of college). The speaker zipped through them without a pause, and thus did not give us time to digest them or illustrate them. Consequently, I had the experience as though she was, in effect, giving a definition and then saying, in a generalized way, why it would be helpful, rather than actually concretizing it.
Take, for instance, “objectivity.” I wrote down in my notes, “facts of reality—too fast,” meaning I could not keep up with it. The speaker’s definition of “objectivity,” in this context, was: “Look to the facts of reality and observe children to discover the nature and needs of children, and to identify the exact steps in a child’s development.” On the face of it, that definition is too unwieldy to be graspable. By “objectivity” we mean: Look to the facts of reality and of children in order to determine the proper approach. That is the essential concept, and it is very, very abstract. The questions immediately arise: What facts about reality, and what facts about children, and what would be a contrasting policy?
A beginning audience does not know the alternative to looking at the facts of reality, nor even necessarily what you mean by “the facts of reality.” Sometimes, they might take you to mean by “reality” some superdimension beyond us. The same difficulty arises when you invoke the “facts about children.” Does that mean, for instance, that it is a fact that my child does not want to go to bed, and therefore I should respect that fact whether or not it is his bedtime? A term such as “objectivity,” then, creates a vast chaos in the audience’s mind. Just saying simply, “Look to the facts of reality and of children to know what to do,” is, in itself, too abstract. It is okay to tell a beginning audience to look to the facts of reality, but then, to make that point clear, you have to give a contrast and a concrete example.
Presumably, the point the speaker means to make here is, “Look to the facts of reality, as opposed to your arbitrary emotions.” If you put it that way, then what you really mean to convey is, “Look to the facts of reality, as opposed to merely acting arbitrarily,” and to an audience, that sounds like you are repeating, in a generalized way, your introduction. If your introductory point is, “We have got to be organized and systematic, just like in building; we cannot just do this helter-skelter,” then when you come to point one, it has to be something more specific than, “Do not be arbitrary,” because that sounds like a mere reiteration of what you said at the beginning. For instance, you might say, “You made a promise to your child that he could see this movie, and now Saturday morning comes and you do not feel like taking him. There is no good reason that you can think up; you just do not feel like it. So you tell him, ‘I do not feel like it,’ and you are not going to go. That is a case of putting your emotion above the facts. You made a certain promise; you led the child to believe that reality would be a certain way, that this would be the fact; he counted on it, and now you are letting your emotion override it.”
I do not say that this is a brilliant or captivating example. But it does pin down the abstract idea. You know, in pattern, what the speaker is talking about, as against what, and how it would come up in daily life. You need a couple of such examples, and the homier, the better, because the more abstract your abstraction, the more familiar and daily must be the concrete. Ideally, you would want to give several concretes—one to say, “I do not mean anything frightening; I mean something really everyday that you can understand,” and then, after the audience gets it, another, more intriguing concrete so they get the idea that there is a broader issue here that they have not thought about. That is what is sometimes called “chewing” an abstraction: putting it before an audience and saying, “I mean this; I do not mean that; here would be a simple example; here is a more important example; this is how I differentiate it from this other point,” and so on. At a certain point, the audience grasps it.
Obviously, to do that, you have to move at a certain pace. If you have ten minutes, one of the four points is all you could really “chew,” given that your talk has a beginning and an end. But it is interesting that this speaker attempted to do the four, because she was put in that position throughout. This same problem, of not concretizing, ran throughout all four points in this presentation. Not counting her introduction and wrap-up, the speaker had about two minutes per item, of which about twenty seconds would be just uttering the abstract definition. So she had a minute and forty seconds, and that is just impossible—the greatest genius of presentation in the world could not do it in that time.
The speaker’s second point was “rationality.” How does “rationality,” even in this speaker’s special context, differ from “objectivity”? When giving the audience points, the important thing is that you have to make clear the difference between the points. According to the speaker, “rationality,” in this case, means going by reason. How does that differ from accepting the facts of reality, which was the operative definition of “objectivity” in the first point? You might say “objectivity” would be looking at the facts about the child and putting them to use, and “reason” would be trying to understand the facts and use them. But that is not much of a distinction, because what is the use of looking at them if you do not use them, and how can you use them without looking at them? Philosophically, too, objectivity is an aspect of rationality. So really, it is the same one point.
In order to keep these points distinguished, I would suggest that the key point here is “rationality,” which should be defined first. Then, when you get to “objectivity,” you can say, “This is an application, one form of rationality, and it arises in this type of context.” The same would then be true of your other points. It is okay to have four points and say, “First is my broad point; second is an application.” But always remember that your structure will not hold if your audience does not see the interrelation of the points. Because this speaker was forced to be so abstract, the points kept falling, particularly points one and two.
Point four, integration, was also somewhat unclear. Here there is an issue of objectivity of formulation. By “integrated approach,” the speaker obviously did not mean racial balance or anything of that kind. Given the way the word is commonly used today, though, a contemporary audience will hear the word “integrated” as having nothing to do with mental processes, but rather with ratios of minorities and so on. Since you do not want to set up an expectation that you do not intend, that word would, therefore, not be advisable; perhaps “organized,” or “interconnected,” or “systematic.” Even so, the point about being “integrated” was not clear. The speaker contrasted it to being fragmented or haphazard. But that is, again, the same issue that was raised in the introduction, namely that we want a systematic approach. You cannot call for a systematic approach, and then have one of the elements of the system be, over again, that it has to be systematic. The speaker actually meant something more specific by “integrated” here, just as she meant something more specific by “objective.” But because of the generality of her definitions and her discussion, she did not have a chance to make it clear.
What might “integrated” specifically have meant here, in a way that differentiates it from merely “systematic,” “objective,” and so on? You might say, “By ‘integrated approach,’ I mean that every aspect of your child’s life has to be seen by you as part of one systematic plan, including his homework, his dancing, his piano lessons, his parties, his movies, etc.” Then you say, “For instance, some parents tell their child, ‘Do your best,’ and then they tell him, ‘It’s okay to cheat,’ and then they give him a similar contradiction in another realm,” and so on, and then you say, “That’s going to ruin him. You have to have one consistent approach.” (In that case, it is really consistency that you are talking about.) Then you could say, “Now, what will unite all these things? How will you know what to do to be consistent?” Then the audience says, “Well, I guess you need something to guide you.” And you say, “You decide according to a certain idea of how you want your child to develop, and that has to be the standard,” and then you have to give us some idea of what that is. (I am here myself guilty of being a little abstract. But I want to indicate the level on which you have to pitch it.)
You always have to do the following with broad abstractions: contrast them with their opposites, distinguish them from other crucial abstractions you use, and give the most concrete examples you can of their application. This speaker did not do any of these three things. There was a certain amount of concretizing; for instance, in connection with rationality, she mentioned, “Do not say, ‘Do it because I say so.’” That was fine; that would be a recognizable example, but more of that was needed. Many fewer abstractions, much more detail. For that reason, I thought that the pace was off; I thought too much material poured forth in a way the audience could not digest. But that is really a derivative problem, caused by the lack of concretization.
This speaker was trying to say, in effect, that you have to bring a child up in contact with reality, with reason, and with his own values. Yet it is not clear that she got those points across. There was a certain indefiniteness about the talk; it was slightly unclear whether it was about how to bring up the child, or how to think about bringing up the child. I believe she was focused on the first. But one of her central points was that you have to know how to think about bringing up a child in order to bring it up. So she was trying to, so to speak, give epistemological guidance on top of child-rearing advice. That is too much to attempt in ten minutes, because those are two distinct topics. One is, “what to do when,” even in broad philosophic terms; the other is, “how to get clear in your mind about this whole subject.” One is the content; the other is more the parents’ thinking method. The speaker had a certain tendency to combine the two.
A related criticism regards emphasis. I do not believe this talk was completely satisfactory with regard to emphasis. This is what I would ideally have liked: “The first important point I want to cover is objectivity—objectivity—and that is very important. By ‘objectivity,’ I mean that you have to pay attention to the facts of reality.” And then the speaker could go on. With an important point, you pause; you stress it. The speaker, though, sped right on through, so that even if she did give, let us say, a perfectly appropriate definition, and even if it was loud, louder than the rest, it still went by too quickly. Remember, too, that many people try to take notes, and there is nothing more frustrating—as students have told me bitterly—than to get down the first four words of somebody’s definition, only for him to move on to the next point; you throw your pen down and say, “Oh, hell!” and lose the whole thing. When giving any definition, it is crucial to pause, and it is particularly important when giving four heavy, abstract definitions of the kind this speaker was presenting. Go slower; stress the word; wait; repeat. Always repeat a key word. Say, “Objectivity—objectivity—O-B-J…”—whatever you have to do to hit your listeners over the head with it. Then you can zip through it again if your material is light enough to allow it.
One thing that struck me in this presentation was that the speaker would have been better off concluding somewhat differently. She had already milked the parallel to architecture, and therefore it kind of fell flat when she used it again at the end. You want to have a dramatic ending, because the ending sticks in people’s minds. The beginning and the end of any presentation are the most crucial, because the opening determines whether people will listen, and the closing determines whether they will remember. An effective ending to this talk might be what the speaker could not do in the beginning, because it would be arbitrary there: At the end, if she had concretized her points sufficiently, she could briefly depict a maladjusted or neurotic child in terms that the audience would recognize, and say, “This is going to be the product of irrational, dogmatic, arbitrary, nonobjective parents, as opposed to”—and then a few glowing words of what they could have instead. That would be a motivational conclusion. It would not be as arbitrary as it would be at the beginning, where there was no explanation of it, and it is a better, more effective ending than just using the architecture analogy over again, because there is no more mileage to be had from that.
The last content point I want to mention is that it is very important to realize that when you talk about individualism—“Treat the child as an individual, stress his self-development, compare him to himself and not to others,” and so on—there is always, particularly today, one blatant way in which that type of thing will be misheard. It can be interpreted as the attitude of, “Do your own thing,” or, in philosophic terms, as subjectivism. You have to take cognizance of that interpretation and, either in your choice of wording or explicitly, set yourself apart from it. This would not be true in a better world, but it certainly is true of even completely innocent and honest people today. A lot of people take “individualism” to mean “doing whatever you feel like.” Particularly, therefore, in the context of a talk in which you have just stressed objectivity, when you say, “Treat the child as an individual,” you need to indicate, “And I do not mean that I am contradicting everything that I said before.” So you have to say something like, “This is completely compatible with treating the child objectively and going by facts. But the fact is that in certain respects, your child is unique, and that is a fact that you have to respect.” You need merely put in something like that so that the audience understands that this is not the standard line of, “Do your own thing.” As a general point, this is the issue of the audience’s context. You have to take into account how you can be misheard, within limits.
To summarize, the main problem in this presentation, as I see it, was the pace of treating abstractions. It was not concretized enough; it was too floating, and that was consequently a big problem. The main virtue is that it was forthright, motivated, and organized, and we therefore knew exactly what the speaker aimed to do and how to criticize it.
The second talk has as its topic the Objectivist ethics. The speaker is presenting his talk to an audience of conservatives, that is, people who are already advocates of or sympathetic to capitalism, but who know nothing about Objectivism or the need for philosophy.
Presentation: “The Objectivist Ethics”
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. (Can you hear me?) Do you have trouble defending capitalism? Do you wonder why the noose of government control is tightening around our necks while the polls indicate that people, that public opinion, is swinging to the right? Do you wonder what these questions have to do with my topic, which is the Objectivist ethics? The answer is contained in a single sentence: In order to defend capitalism, you must do so from a proper moral base. That moral base is the Objectivist ethics. I’m not going to speak to you tonight about capitalism, about economics; I’m going to talk to you about the Objectivist ethics. Given the short amount of time, I’m only going to make three points. But I will illustrate each of those points with some examples to point out the trouble that you might have defending capitalism from some other base.
Okay, the first point that I want to make is that ethics is necessary; that is, you need ethics. What is ethics? Ethics, or morality, is a code of values to guide the choices and actions of man’s life. Ethics, let me repeat that, morality, is a code of values which will guide the choices and actions of your life. You can think of ethics as being a road map, except instead of telling you where you are going to go, it will tell you what you are going to be. So at each point of your life, it helps you make your choices; it helps you decide; it helps you move, act. It tells you, for example, if you want to be a success, if you want to be happy, then you should produce; you should work for yourself. If you do not mind winding up being a shiftless no-good, then you do not have to produce; you can steal, etc.
Now, no human action is independent of ethics. Everything you do depends on ethics. Now, in particular, economics is not independent of ethics. The relationship between ethics or morality and economics is very much the same in one regard as the relationship between biology and nutrition. By that I mean morality sets the standard for economics, and for nutrition it is biology which sets the standard. For example, if you were to study nutrition, or to make nutritious recommendations, without respecting the standards of biology, without respect to life or death, you would not know whether to prescribe protein or poison. And economics without reference to morality, the effect that you get is you will have some conservative economist advocating free trade and claiming that that means free trade with communist Russia, taking and selling planes to Red China. Ethics is necessary for you; it’s necessary for all human action. So that’s the first point that I wanted to make.
The second point is that the Objectivist ethics holds that the highest value is your life. Remember, I said ethics is a code to guide you and your actions. And the highest value of that code is your life. For example, in the economic realm, when you produce, you own the product. This is the answer that you need to answer, this is the—I guess I said it right—this is the answer you need to answer the welfare statists who are claiming that you should be sacrificing your product, that you should work and earn, and that somebody else should dispense your earnings to other people. In order to say that is wrong, you need morality; and in order to say that that is wrong, the standard by which it is wrong, the value, has to be your own life. So the second point that I have made is that you have to be selfish.
But you ask, “How can you defend such a term as ‘selfishness’?” The answer is that you need a standard, and this is the third point that I want to make. The trouble that you get into in economics is exemplified by those people who claim that a mugger in Central Park is acting in his self-interest. Now usually, the term is not put quite so boldly as that. You may get it put to you as, “Wouldn’t you steal a million dollars if you thought you could get away with it?” This makes me think of Oscar Wilde’s put-down of a very snooty aristocratic lady, and he said, “Madam, would you spend the night with me for ten thousand pounds?” And she said, “Yes, I believe I would.” And he said, “Well, would you do so for a shilling?” And she said, “Oh, heavens no, what do you take me for?” And he said, “We’ve already determined that. Now we are just dickering over the price.” In order to make that determination, you need a standard. In order to call the mugger a thief, you need a standard. Objectivist ethics holds that the standard is man’s life. The difference between the mugger and a man is that he is not surviving at the human level; he is surviving at the level of the brute; he’s surviving by purely using brute force. The difference between men and brutes is that men possess the faculty of reason. I cannot say more about that, however; I’m sure I’m running out of time; I forgot to set my watch at the beginning. But the point is that, the economic point with respect to this, is that production is good; that is, this is a combination of an economic and a moral point; production is good, and theft is bad. The way that you know that is the standard of man’s life. Production is the use of reason; theft is not.
Now, if I was really so fast that I have the two minutes left that Dr. Peikoff indicated, I’m now running short. Nonetheless, I’m going to sum up. With a long enough pause for laughter, then I will come out just right. Okay, I have illustrated my topic by examples from the field of economics. But the real point is that ethics applies to all of your life, not only to economic matters. So you need ethics to live your life. So let me sum up the three points that I have made. I just repeated the first one—you need ethics. The second point, the purpose of your life is you; the thing at the end of the road map will be your life. And the third point is that in order to guide yourself along that road map, you have to use reason. What you need for yourself, not only what capitalism needs but what you need, is rational selfishness. Thank you.
COMMENTARY
There were a number of virtues to this talk. The pace was excellent. This was an oral presentation; this was not a written presentation that you felt was going on no matter what and that you had to struggle with. He slowed up when he gave a definition; he paused; he repeated—you definitely had the feeling that he was monitoring the audience. It was a very good example of extemporaneous delivery, because you could see in many cases that he was thinking on his feet. I think a very effective touch, one that really helps to win an audience—and I do not believe he was diabolical enough to plan this, although some speakers do so—was that one where he hesitated halfway through a sentence and said, “I guess I said it right.” That was purely extemporaneous, and he was perfectly straightforward with the audience. You could see, therefore, that his mind actually was operating and thinking as he went, circling around and correcting. This was very good; he let you in on his mental processes, and that is what gives a talk the aura of an extemporaneous presentation. As far as I could see from where I was sitting, too, he was looking at the audience, aware of their requirements. Therefore, with regard to pace and the monitoring of the audience, I think this talk was excellent.
The only one sign I could see, in the speaker’s actual delivery, that he was not experienced was that he was nervous, as indicated by the timbre of his voice. That is something that a beginning speaker cannot do anything about; it is automatic. But this speaker did exactly the right thing; that is to say, you just go on no matter what. If an audience is at all disconcerted by that, they take your estimate of it, and if they see that your nervousness does not stop you, they just set it aside and stop paying any attention to it. It is not distracting, and it goes away across time as you see audience after audience and give talk after talk; you automatize the skill and all the “what ifs” vanish (“What if I forget,” “What if the audience revolts,” and so on). Then you relax and just do it normally.
The use of humor was very good, with one question. The speaker had a nice, dry humor, which came to him when he needed it and livened things up. He did, though, have one prepared joke, the one about Oscar Wilde. He got a polite laugh from that, but not the laugh that he got from his extemporaneous ones. That, by the way, is why I do not do that. He did, in effect, what I do when giving a prepared joke: He said, “That reminds me,” and then started telling a story that he had obviously thought at home would get a laugh. If you do it that way, an audience gets nervous, because they know they have to laugh, and they wait for it, and the thought goes through their mind, “Is this really relevant?” I must say it was a little bit stretched here, because he was going to talk about how a mugger thought it was in his self-interest to steal a million dollars; I could not get the connection to Oscar Wilde’s put-down of the woman losing her integrity. It was in common that they were doing something bad for a sum of money, but that is very broad, so broad that it was slightly disconcerting. The problem with a prepared joke is that first, it has to be relevant, directly perceptible, not obvious to the audience that you have got this prepared; and second, you have to say it with complete, consummate confidence, which I cannot do. If you can do it, fine. If not, and you happen to have a good, dry sense of extemporaneous humor, I would tend to rely more on that. Generally speaking, though, this speaker did make an effective use of humor, and the audience was definitely sympathetic and attentive to him.
The repetition was good, especially because the speaker used different words. For example, he said, “Ethics is necessary; you need ethics.” That kind of repetition is what I call circling around. He said it two different ways, not in the exact same words. He brought out two aspects—“It is necessary to man, and that means you”—and he got to say it twice for the same price, which served to emphasize it.
In general, then, the speaker’s repetition was good, his emphasis was good, he was loud, his timing came out fine, his transitions were perfectly clear, he knew what he was going to do, his structure was very straightforward. As a method of presentation, he did not overload the audience, and in that respect I think he handled the technical requirements very well. He also had good concretization. The intention to concretize, to give examples, ran throughout his presentation, such as the analogy to the road map. You did not have the feeling that this was a bunch of floating abstractions; you could see in each case what he meant concretely.
In general, to summarize the positives: The pace was excellent (and under “pace,” I subsume all the things that go to make a good pace—pauses, repetitions, and so on); concretization was fine; the structure was clear; humor was a valuable element; and he did give it extemporaneously, which held his audience.
The motivation in this presentation went by a little too quickly. Right at the beginning this speaker asked why government controls keep getting bigger even though there is a swing to the political right. I would have slowed that first part down a bit. Even if your content is okay, you have to set that motivation firmly. You would just have to elaborate with a couple sentences more. For example, “You know capitalism is the best system; I do not have to convince you of that. But it is failing. Why? Why do you have trouble? The public is with you, logic is with you, economics is with you, but you are losing—why?” Just that much, and then they will listen. That is not much more than the speaker said, but it is just that little extra bit to pass from a kind of dutiful motivation—“You have trouble; I am going to give you the solution”—to emphasizing it so that the audience is gripped.
One criticism of this talk is that the speaker made it clear why one would need ethics in general, but not why one would need specifically the Objectivist ethics, as opposed to any other ethics. Now, he did say something about the Objectivist ethics. After all, he said the highest value is your life, and he tied that to economics by making the point that you own the products that you yourself create, as opposed to the need to sacrifice them, and why the Objectivist ethics stresses production, which is essential to capitalism. Further to this criticism, then, what is it that this speaker did not do to emphasize the need for the Objectivist ethics, as opposed to ethics as such? There are clearly two different topics here. One is: Why should an audience with an economic viewpoint care about ethics at all? Then, more specifically: Why should they care about this particular ethics? Given the subject, you have to do both. This speaker did, in a general way, cover why you cannot get around ethics. But he did not do so well with the question of the Objectivist ethics.
Remember that the intended audience knows nothing about Objectivism or philosophy; they are simply advocates of capitalism, just typical conservatives. What, then, was the problem? The speaker actually ran out a minute early, so he had nine minutes, and let us say he took about four of those minutes on his introduction and the role of ethics. So he had approximately five minutes to speak to this audience on why they need Objectivism in particular. And in that five-minute period, he tried to cover the points that life is the standard, that this involves selfishness, that selfishness involves production as opposed to surviving on a subhuman level, and that this means the use of reason. The question is, can you do that in a way that is convincing in that amount of time? In fact, you cannot.
In this type of assignment, you have to decide whether you are going to try to give a kind of a contour of Objectivism, four big points (life, reason, selfishness, production) with one quick tie-in of each to capitalism (“It has to be life, otherwise you cannot keep your property; it has to be reason, otherwise the mugger can run wild,” etc.); or whether you will give a more in-depth analysis of a few essential points, given a limited time. This speaker tried the former approach, and for reasons that we will illustrate shortly, it was not really convincing. It had the effect that the formulations were so generalized that it did not really hit home.
In a case like this, you have to pick your spot. You have to decide breadth or depth, a whole survey or one dagger to the heart. In a ten-minute speech, you take the dagger approach. You do not have to pretend that that is all; an ethics consists of a great many different theories. But because of the time required to grasp these things, it would be a much more effective strategy, in terms of conviction, if you said: “You need ethics in general, but you need specifically the kind of ethics that makes capitalism possible. Now, what does capitalism consist of? People left free to pursue their own profit, to make money by trade on a free market. Under capitalism, does the government have the right to control you? No. Does it have the right to control you even if that would help the needy? No.” And so on. Give it just on the terms of what capitalism is, terms that the audience can recognize. Say, “The government under capitalism cannot do this even if…” and then give various situations in which altruism would say the government can and should do it. Then you say, “But in fact, today in the world, the government is doing all those things, and what is it appealing to for justification? It says, ‘So-and-so needs it, so-and-so needs it, we have to sacrifice,’ and so on. Now it should be obvious to you. If you know nothing else about ethics, you have to know this: If sacrifice is the imperative, capitalism is out. Therefore, if you want to advocate capitalism, give up sacrifice.” Finally, you tell them, “But then how do you live? Then you have to have some other approach—say, be selfish. But what does ‘selfish’ mean? That is a big question; there are many different theories, and you need an ethics to tell you. That is what Objectivism would tell you. Read such-and-such. Thank you.”
In both types of talk, you can give your listeners only a hint. But it is a question of pace. I speak now not of the pace of your oral delivery, but of the content of abstractions that people can take in who do not know them. The hardest thing for people without experience to grasp is how slowly you have to go in terms of the amount of content. In ten minutes, the most you can do is to say, “Do not sacrifice.” You say it, and you say, “I mean by that so-and-so, as against such-and-such, and here is an example, and this is why it is important,” and your ten minutes are gone. You have to rid yourself of the idea that you can say, “Reason, point one, one minute; no sacrifice, point two, one minute; production….” You cannot hit those things that way. If you could, the world would be in a completely different state. It would mean that those terms are familiar, the context is familiar, what you want to say is familiar, and you are more or less reminding the audience. You always have to decide about a point: Is this new to your audience, or are you reminding them? If you are merely reminding, you can throw it away. You could say, “As we all know, man has rights” to a conservative group. But you cannot say, “As we all know, man should be selfish,” even without the “As we all know.”
Let us now look at some of this speaker’s formulations just from the aspect of the questions that he raised. They were not floating abstractions, in the sense that the speaker did what was possible within the limits of ten minutes. When he got to the Objectivist ethics, though, his first point was, “The highest value is your life.” The question that would raise, in an audience that does not know the rest of your viewpoint, is: Can a criminal then say, “It is my life”? In other words, does “your life” mean anybody’s life at any price? True, as the speaker went along, he did ultimately indicate that he does not approve of muggers and sacrifice and so on. But if the standard is “your life,” the question is, Why not? All he said, at a later point, was that a mugger is not surviving on a human level. He did not say anything about why man has to use reason if life is the standard, or if he did, it was only by implication. But that is an essential point.
If the people in the audience do not see that reason is man’s actual tool of survival, if the extent of the message they get is, “Your life is the standard, and you have to do things in a human way, and a human is rational,” then what is “rational”? The speaker has said that he does not like muggers, but if “life is the standard,” what if the mugger gets away with it? In the beginning the speaker said, “Either you produce and work for yourself, or you can steal, if you do not mind winding up being a shiftless no-good.” That, perhaps, was simply an appeal to the fact that the audience would, obviously, disapprove of stealing. But we hear this now as a total presentation. We are told at one point, “It depends; do you mind or not?” Then later, we learn that the standard is your life, and the reason you cannot do certain things is that it would not be human—but we do not see why it would not be human, since human beings do it, and he has not told us what human faculty has to be employed if life is the standard. If you then throw in, “You have to be selfish,” with only the briefest indication that you need a standard, and that the standard is man’s life—the net effect that comes across is that it is some kind of subjectivism.
It is not that the speaker’s formulations were bad. The audience’s context, as it would have to be today, combined with the density of points he was trying to make, forced him into that position. So even though he went out of his way to try to exemplify and define, the assignment defeated him. He ended up giving the net impression, “I need some kind of values, but I do not see why I need this particular code, or why I need any code as such—it is whatever you do not mind, or whatever fits your sense of the human.” It is the same type of problem, in a way, that the presentation on child rearing had. When presenting ideas in today’s world, the problem is always how not to fall into one or the other of two false views: assuming objectivity at the price of saying there is nothing in it for you (in other words, of being disinterested), or falling into subjectivism when stressing selfishness.
Even within the framework of the way this speaker approached his task, he would have had to give a little more emphasis. Remember that his point here is why advocates of capitalism need Objectivism. Therefore, he would constantly have to make his emphasis follow his theme, rather than just throwing his points away, as he tended to do. For instance, he said, without any further elaboration, “The highest value is your life. For example, when you produce, you own the product.” As far as I could follow his reasoning, it was, “I gave them the application to capitalism, and now I have to get on to new material.” But given that audience and that theme, this is the point that matters. You would at least have to pause and say something to the effect of, “Private property is essential to capitalism. How are you going to defend it if you do not have a private life?” It is more important that the listeners understand why they need a certain type of ethics, than that they grasp what it is. You do have to tell them something about it, because otherwise they will not know what you are talking about. But if you are going to present your case scattershot, one point after the other, you must consistently stress the theme of why they need this to defend capitalism.
The same goes for the way the speaker treated sacrifice. He mentioned it, but he said, in effect, “You need the kind of ethics that recognizes man’s rights, as against the kind that tells him to sacrifice for others,” and then he went right on. That, however, is a big point, a bombshell; that really is the essence of the whole issue, as far as politics is concerned. Therefore, when you get to that, you have to stop. You have to look at the audience after you have elaborated on it and say, “The choice is capitalism or the ethics of sacrifice. It is either-or. If you see that, you see why you need Objectivism, because every other ethics tells you otherwise.” This speaker covered it, but his emphasis was completely off—not in the narrow sense that he raced over it or swallowed it linguistically, but in terms of its centrality to the presentation. He did not take that point and stun the audience with its impact, yet that is really what you would have to do in this type of talk. (You also need to be careful when throwing out a term like “sacrifice,” which the audience might hear as a good thing.)
The problem really comes down to the question of how much an audience can take in of what they do not know in advance. My general advice is: If in doubt, reduce the number of abstractions; give more emphasis, more contrast of your view with some other view, more examples.
To summarize, this presentation was definitely good in its mechanics, but it had the problem of too much content, which had to be too vague. Therefore, in its net effect, the talk was not convincing. But it was very helpful, and I think it helped illuminate issues for us.
This next speaker is addressing just a general audience, one unfamiliar with philosophy or Objectivism, and her subject is the defense of Romanticism in art.
Presentation: “Romanticism in Art”
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to speak on the state of contemporary art. And I may say, to start, that it is rather hellish. We find that within the avant-garde, we have examples of artistic works where an artist nails his own body to his Volkswagen. We have art in which John Cage takes a dead fish and slaps it on the string of a piano. So you see, Francis Ford Coppola may be right—artistically, at least, this may be apocalypse now. Audiences still seem to want to go to the movies and have a good story, however. Audiences still seem to want portraits of beautiful things. They still seem to want music that has melody. Intellectuals laugh. They cannot imagine why people still want that kind of art. Well, what can we do as a general public?
I suggest to you that what we can do is combat art by identifying the kind of art that we want. When we go to an artwork, what we seek is a refueling experience. We work through the week, and then on the weekend we seek to go to a film in which we can, in a sense, be refueled, be recharged. We go to a museum and we seek to enjoy ourselves. What we need to say is, we do not want mindless entertainment; we want entertainment that will stir us emotionally and that will stimulate us intellectually. I suggest to you that what we want is Romanticism, the kind of Romanticism that maybe is best shown in Cyrano de Bergerac, a hero fighting for what he believes in; maybe best heard in the music of Tchaikovsky, a music of powerful melodies; maybe best seen in the sculptures of Rodin, in which man is shown as powerful with any struggle. Romanticism seems very mixed, though. When you try to define it, it seems to have such a wide variety that many people consider Romanticism undefinable. It is that that is our task. We must define “Romanticism”; we must identify its premises in order to defend it. Let us look to the roots of Romanticism.
If we look at the German Romantics or the French Romantics, like Friedrich Schiller, like Victor Hugo, we find that they said that “Romanticism” was defined as being emotional. And that makes some sense, yes; Romantic works do have very powerful emotion. However, what happened to Romanticism was the emotion became so strong that eventually it lost its contact with reality; emotion became so strong that Romanticism became irrational. So to find the definition of “Romanticism,” let us look deeper into this idea of emotion.
What is the root of emotion? In the twentieth century, we’ve come to the idea that emotion is rooted in values—that when we value something, we feel positive toward it; when we do not value something, we feel negative toward it. So our emotions are tied to the kinds of things that we value. Now we are getting a little closer to what might be the root of Romanticism.
How can we value something? The whole idea of values, you see, is on the premise of free will. Without free will, values make no sense. If you cannot choose to value something, then you have no values; your values are merely insignificant. You must have volition or free will in order for the idea of values to make any sense at all. And what I’m suggesting to you now is that now we have reached the root of Romanticism, and that is volition. It is volition that makes values possible, it is values that make emotion possible, and that’s why Romanticism has such a strong emphasis on emotion—because it has a strong emphasis on value, and therefore has a strong emphasis on free will.
So we can get a better, clearer idea, I think, of emotion if we look at some specific people again within Romanticism. If we say that Cyrano then chooses values in the form of his white plume (if you remember that symbol); if we say that Tchaikovsky is struggling to maintain values within the music; if we say that Rodin is showing people trying to hang on to their values, then we are beginning to make some sense out of free will in terms of Romanticism.
I’d like to go back to this idea of Romanticism dissolving into irrationalism. The early Romantics were tied to reality. Later on Romantics became kind of pie-in-the-sky—you know, Romantics got the idea of escapist entertainment, some guy riding off on a white charger, and so on. Romanticism has to be tied to reality and how do we make choices, how do we attain our values, but only through reason. So I’m not talking about a Romanticism in which reason is not included. Obviously we are talking about emotions that are based in some sense on some reasonable premises.
Let us look at Romanticism and contrast it with a few other kinds of theories. The most obvious one in literature is Naturalism. The basic premise of Naturalism is deterministic; that is, it is fate that determines what will happen to you, whether your fate is from social circumstances, whether you have inherited it, whether you had a psychological problem when you were five years old that made you an ax murderer—whatever that is, it determines the outcome of the story in the case of literature. If we look at art, we see Romanticism replaced by abstraction. That is, figurative art is totally out the window, subjectivism is in, and when we look at art we no longer see, say, Rembrandt, but we see Picasso. We see total irrationalism where, you know, if you want to paint somebody with a blue nose, you paint somebody with a blue nose because that’s what you feel; that’s how you perceive it in your subjective state.
Let us look at music. What has replaced Romantic music? Well, to a certain extent, in popular music we’ve kind of forgotten about melody and in popular music gotten into a beat idea, a primitive beat, so that the waltzes of the nineteenth century are replaced with a disco thump.
As popular audiences, what we are calling for is a Romantic vision. We want exciting plots where heroes act upon their values. We want paintings with a clear vision of reality that does not give up beauty. We want melodic music that stirs our emotions. Who does this? Not many people today. We have some people who have Romantic values, but they are so mixed that it’s difficult to cite a Romantic artist. I suggest to you that if you look at the works of Ayn Rand, you will find both romance and realism united. Rand was the person in the twentieth century who discovered that the premise of Romanticism is free will. She also mentions that reason is the thing that ties free will to reality. If we look at her work called The Romantic Manifesto, you will see this brought out in detail.
However, I think what we have to do as audiences in general is encourage the Romanticism within future artists. We have to say to filmmakers, “You can be as clever as Hitchcock, but you do not have to be horrible. You can paint like da Vinci, but you do not have to be naturalistic about it. You can compose as brilliantly as Sondheim, but you do not have to write Sweeney Todd. You can perform with the joy of Astaire, but you can do it on the stage of the Met; you do not have to do it in a disco.” Reason is on the side of the artist and on the side of the audience; reality is on the side of artist and the audience. We can say to artists now, “You can uphold Romanticism because we’ve identified its basis.” And its basis is volition, and now we can defend it. Thank you.
COMMENTARY
It was a very difficult assignment to define, discuss, and defend Romanticism, which is a highly abstract artistic category, in ten minutes. In fact, it is impossible as an assignment, and we cannot ask whether it was completely successfully done.
In terms of overall introduction, the good thing about this talk was that it used vivid examples. The speaker’s purpose in bringing in nailing bodies to Volkswagens or slapping fish on pianos, obviously, was on the premise of motivating the audience. That is a very reasonable motivation, if you assume a decent audience. Most people, if they reach the stage of coming to a talk called “Defending Romanticism,” would know what kind of nonsense goes on today under the name of art, and presumably would not be too sympathetic to it; they see this horrible stuff, and they need something from art that they are obviously not getting. It might be a way of intriguing your listeners to let them see that they are missing something, and you are going to fill the void. (One might object that the extremity of the examples made it sound exaggerated, but the speaker might counter that objection by just giving a one-sentence survey to indicate that this sort of thing, while extreme, is indeed representative of the whole nonobjective trend in art.) There is a caveat, though. Suppose you have an audience of people who do not necessarily agree with you, or who like modern art; if you keep saying “we,” as this speaker did, they can very reasonably object to that. You can simply alienate them. Moreover, it is a kind of crutch on your part, because it amounts to saying, “I cannot prove all of this, but I am assuming you believe it, too.” It would be better to say, “A rational audience would want such-and-such,” and then, if your listeners do not like it, let them argue it. But to ascribe it directly to them potentially creates a certain difficulty.
The motivational element was undercut by the speaker’s manner of delivery. The talk desperately needed pauses. The speaker wanted to be sure that she finished within the time limit, and that is desirable, but it is much better not to do it by the method that she used, which is to go full speed ahead, nonstop. It is much better to pause and let something sink in, if you can. You should always have a cushion of points that you can dispense with. If you feel, as you are delivering a motivation, for instance, that you need a beat for the audience to take it in, a beat you did not anticipate, you stop right there and just let your listeners mentally digest what you have said. As they are thinking, you say to yourself, “Well, there goes one of my dispensable points,” and you just let it go. By that means, you keep a certain pace.
By way of increasing the motivation, one intellectual point to include would be, “There is a reason for this kind of art. There once was a different kind of art, as a result of two different kinds of philosophy that dominated the world. I want to tell you what an alternative would be and depend on, and then you will see why today’s art has come to be what it is.” If people do not get the idea that there is some deeper significance to it, that there is some basic issue involved, then they can hear it as, “She does not like this kind of stuff, and I do not either—but it is all a matter of taste, and there is no disputing about taste.” It leaves a certain subjective cast, not by what is said, but by the cultural implication that aesthetics is completely subjective and arbitrary. Whenever I am discussing aesthetics, therefore, I try to stress, “There is a right and a wrong answer. It depends on the kind of philosophy you hold. We see this stuff today because of a certain kind of philosophy. There once was a different one.” That way, you derail it from the subjective track in the audience’s mind and onto a cognitive track. Then they think there may be something to learn, there may be some objective points here, and even if they do not agree, they go on the premise of listening, rather than thinking, “It is her taste, my taste; nobody can know; it is all a matter of opinion.” In art, it is important to counter that at the outset. But I do think this speaker definitely did intend a good motivational approach, one that could work with just a little of this other element injected.
From the point of view of monitoring the audience, the speaker gave the impression that she had her talk all prepared, and she was going to deliver it no matter what the audience did. I did not notice any stumbling or circling; she went ahead like a speeding truck. That definitely detracts from any extemporaneous presentation, because you leave the audience out of it. They do not have time to digest or question anything. You do not tailor your presentation to what they seek, so you achieve safety at the price of a canned quality, which I am trying to urge you not to do. Just take the risk of giving the talk, not being fully prepared, and falling flat. You will find, probably, that you will stumble, and it will be a more agonizing experience for you, but a more interesting one for the audience (and not simply because they are sadistic).
The speaker was definitely good as far as her level of volume; that was good; she could be heard. She had a brisk delivery. She made a few stabs at a kind of unobtrusive humor, enough to give the audience a little titter that kind of eased her over an edge here and there. Her sentence structure and vocabulary were simple. I could definitely have done with more repetition—but that will get me to the major problem running through this presentation, namely the crow epistemology.
There was definitely more material than could possibly be grasped in ten minutes. This is a common denominator in the presentations we have been discussing. You have to overcome the idea that because something is clear to you, you can just rattle off an enormous content to an audience of people who do not know it, and they will be able to understand it. The essence of objectivity, of a self-contained presentation, and of the crow—of all those points in this context—is that you have to figure out how much your listeners need in order to grasp a given point. The present speaker’s main problem throughout her talk was that she gave the audience many points, any one of which could have been grasped if she had paused for a minute, repeated, given an example, given a contrast, summarized it, and then said, “Okay, hold that and let us go on.” But when the points come one after the other after the other—assuming that we do not already know the points—it is not graspable. In part, it is too abstract without examples, and in part it is simply too fast to know what to do with. There is no way to assess it all. You have a limited time, and after all, even if you have a two-hour talk, it is limited compared to what you could do in a ten-hour talk. You have to decide between two different strategies: a whole bunch of points done hit-and-run, or a few, more essential points done more slowly and in depth, and the second is always a preferable strategy.
What I suggest you do, in general, is make a list of all the points that you would like to cover if you had lots of time on a given topic, and then cut out everything that you think is optional. Then look at what you have left, that which you regard as indispensable, and estimate reasonably how much time it would take you to explain each point to a raw audience. Finally, add up the times. You will find that you exceed by far what can be done in ten minutes—in which case, then, you simply have to be more ruthless; after you cut the flesh, you have to cut the bone and the vital organs. The only way you can justify it in your own mind is this: If the universe were coming to an end, and your listeners were going to hear this and then die, you might be able to say, “My God, I just have to cram it all in.” But if they are going to be around, and they have agreed to come to a ten-minute talk (or whatever it happens to be), then they must know that you cannot do the impossible. Therefore, the way to get around it is simply to say, “This topic would take hours to cover. I am going to give you a couple of highlights, which I will try to explain, and I will say a few things that I cannot even explain, but will give you the general drift; and then I refer you to so-and-so.” That is a much better way than trying to do the impossible.
Let us get to some examples. The statement that emotions come from values is an example of a statement that per se was okay, but that there was no time to digest, illustrate, elaborate, or develop. If you have to inject that topic, you are already lost, because that emotions come from intellectual content is already more controversial than Romanticism versus Naturalism. By “values,” you mean some intellectual conclusions that you have come to, as opposed to reflexes caused by social conditioning or your heredity or your genes or glands or whatever, or as opposed to simply inexplicable primaries. That in itself is a very revolutionary theory. You cannot take a theory like that and say, “We in the twentieth century have come to the idea that emotions are rooted in values.” Only a very small minority in the twentieth century has discovered any such thing. The great majority, including the major schools of psychology, such as the Freudians or the behaviorists, would say that that is a fantastic notion.
This speaker retained some plausibility because she kept her statement very generalized. She did not specify that by “value” she means an intellectual conclusion that a person reaches. As a result, the people listening could say, “I guess by ‘value’ she merely means what you like and do not like, which is a synonym for ‘emotion.’” They thus hear her as saying, “Emotions come from emotions,” or, “Some emotions come from other emotions,” both of which are acceptable. In other words, they can accept her point on emotions at the price of collapsing her next connection, which was going to be where values come from. Then she went right to, “If we cannot choose, values are insignificant.” Now, why is that? It is not very clear unless you can give some kind of elaboration. If “values” are simply a name for certain kinds of feelings—which is how the audience is hearing this—why do we have to choose them? It seems plausible that you are just born, and grow up, and develop, and start to feel titillated at certain points, and you like certain things and you hate certain things, and that is it; that is the way you are. So where does choice come in?
The speaker was not too clear about that, because she said, “If you cannot choose, there are no values,” which she then amended to say, “If you cannot choose, values are insignificant.” In other words, she was not very clear, and she could not have been, given her structure. Suppose “values” were conclusions that the mind came to—why would they, in fact, require choice? Why could not there be such a thing as values that are determined, built into the mechanism? Why do values necessitate free will? She is counting on this kind of contrast: “If man were a helpless puppet, completely a product of factors outside of his control, then he would just be buffeted by fate, in which case he would have no decisions to make, no choices to make, no goals to select, no values to choose, meaning he would be effectively indifferent. As against the opposite.” But she did not have time to give us all this. It is so generalized and so vague that by the time you get to free will, it just kind of leaves the audience with, “She believes in free will, but why this is connected to emotions is completely unclear.” Which means that the whole definition and defense is gone.
There were other cases of this in this presentation—that is, the attempt to cover too much, and therefore being reduced to a very abstract, floating presentation. Consider the discussion of free will. There is a certain problem here—if you are going to give the Objectivist defense of Romanticism, the defense does depend on the fact that it is based on the actual facts of human nature, namely free will. Free will would be a whole topic in itself, so in the context of this talk you would have to cover it in a brief, commonsense way. But you would have, at least, to give one level of elaboration.
You have not got time to say, “By ‘free will’ I mean the mind’s power to think or not to think,” because that will raise ten thousand questions, and you will lose everyone. But you also do not want simply to say “free will” and let it go so fast that the audience does not know what it is. One way of doing it briefly would be to say, “Are you responsible for your own actions, or is something outside of you the cause of what you do?” In other words, do not just use the jargon term “free will,” but take some familiar terms applicable to free will. “Are you the master of your fate? Are you a puppet pulled by destiny? Are you responsible for what you do; do you select it? Or are you just dragged by forces beyond your control wearily to your fate, with no say, no input, no choice, no control?” It does not take much longer; just by doing it, say, twice, in the kind of language that people would recognize, you make the point clear. (Note that it is obviously slanted language. A determinist will have apoplexy at hearing his position described that way, but that is okay—you are presenting your view; you never said you were arguing against determinism.) In short, you indicate what you are saying, and since it is so crucial to you, you repeat it. That is essential emphasis.
You also include its opposite. It bears repeating that you really cannot make philosophic points clear except by contrast. To make clear what you are talking about you have to contrast your central ideas with their antonyms, with what they exclude, so people will know what you are saying, as against what you are not. You cannot make “free will” clear except by saying, “As against determinism.” You cannot say, “Emotions come from values,” clearly unless you say, “As against the view that they come from chemistry or from God, or that they are inexplicable.” You always have to set a contrast. Philosophy is made up of such broad abstractions that one absolutely indispensable means of clarification, in writing or in speech, is to say, “I mean this as against that.”
This same type of problem came up at another point, when the speaker, in discussing how Romanticism dissolved into irrationalism, stated that Romanticism has to be tied to reality and to reasonable premises. She is trying to exclude escapism from Romanticism, saying, in effect, “If somebody sets something in a fantasy world, that is not Romanticism.” But isn’t it? Romanticism is not exclusively what Ayn Rand calls Romantic Realism. Romanticism is a very broad category. You can be wildly irrational and still be a complete Romantic in art. In fact, this was true of a great many of the leading Romantics. Dostoevsky, to take an example, is hardly an apostle of reason; in terms of the content of his views, he is an ardent Russian Orthodox religious maniac. By his own statement, the values that he espouses are completely separate from reality. Therefore, you must not restrict Romanticism to one particular philosophic interpretation of it; it is a much broader category.
On the other hand, what the speaker wanted to do was to cover the philosophical point. She was trying to say, “Do not think that because I am for emotion, I am therefore against reason.” What left that question open, and prompted the need to clarify it, was the point made early in the presentation about traditional Romanticism. The speaker said that the emotion found in the works of figures like Schiller and Hugo became so strong that eventually the whole movement became irrational. In oral presentation, you cannot be held to exact wording, but that one is pretty extreme—it contains the obvious implication that emotion is appropriate only up to a point. It implies a view of emotions as nonrational, not to say irrational, elements in the personality. Plato would be quite prepared to accept that particular formulation (not that this speaker agrees with him, but simply by inadvertency). Plato held that emotions are like a roaring beast within you, ready to spring and take over and topple the reason.
Romanticism, in the minds of most people, is associated with strong feeling, emotion, passion. People therefore have two different reasons, in today’s cultural context, to want to associate Romanticism with irrationalism: because it is emotion, and because it is art. If you know that context, the first thing you have to think in defending Romanticism is how to avoid suggesting to your listeners that it is completely irrational. That is tricky, because you cannot go into what emotions are, and you cannot go into the idea that art is really rational, because both of those are more controversial than Romanticism. This speaker, though, sabotaged herself at the beginning by confirming the original opinion her presumed listeners came to the talk with. They would say, “Yes, that is right—emotions get too strong and make you irrational.” Then the next step will be, “Well, then, modern art is really a continuation of Romanticism, because the artists got so emotional that they went over into the nonobjective; the fish on the piano is just what the artist felt like doing, completely irrationally. But we were already told that emotions lead you to irrationality, and we know that, so what is really the difference?” If the speaker then invokes free will, they will reply, “Well, he was free to decide whether to slap the fish on the piano or not.” You just lose them completely.
The speaker’s very definition of Romanticism, the subject of her talk, suffered from the same problem as her other points: She tried to take in so much territory that she necessarily had to leave it unclear. This arose from the fact of putting in Cyrano, Tchaikovsky, and Rodin, all in one shot, and then later bringing in Hitchcock and Fred Astaire and so on. Take just those initial three. What is the problem if you try to introduce Romanticism by including literature, music, and sculpture all at one time? True, the term does apply to all of them. And the advantage you get is that you show the total range, so if people are not interested in literature, you are also giving them music, thereby motivating them. But there is one enormous problem with including all these branches of art. In part, it is that the differences among them are so outstanding that the essential is hard to identify. But that, in turn, is partly because some of these cases are extremely treacherous to define in their own terms.
Romanticism is a specific term standing for a very distinct school of art. If you wanted to talk about Romanticism in sculpture, for example, you could not equate it with any type of heroic sculpture.* As for music, I always avoid it in lecturing about art, because there is no objective vocabulary to discuss it; you say you hear the swell of aspiration in Tchaikovsky, and somebody else says, “Well, that is just what I hear when I hear some modern stuff”; or you say disco music sounds primitive, and he says, “I hear the pulsing beat of the man of achievement.” So you cannot say those things are self-evident. Literature is the easiest art to discuss, because it is a conceptual art, one actually expressed in words. You can therefore identify what the author is after, what his message is, and what his means are. Painting and the visual arts are much harder to do on this count. You have to have slides and a really excellent knowledge of the field to point out what a given piece of sculpture means, for instance, and what about it conveys that meaning. But the way this speaker approached Romanticism, bringing in all those art forms at once, all that comes across is a very generalized “something aspiring” or “something positive.” Precisely because it is so generalized, though, it could apply to anything the viewer or the listener happens to like. Therefore, at the end of the talk, all he knows is, “You want the kind of art that is going to make you feel good”—but what, specifically, does it consist of? This presentation fell down in explaining that, partly because the speaker set her scope of examples too broad, and partly because she put in too much theory.
To summarize, the broadest criticism of this presentation would be that the speaker was basically off with regard to the crow epistemology. More specifically, it was the issue of pace again—too much material attempted in an impossibly short space. If I were going to do this assignment, all I would attempt to do in a ten-minute presentation would be to say, “Romanticism is a very broad school. It is completely opposed to anything you know about from today. Let us take just an example of it from a couple of plays, just that much. The general application and the other things I will have to leave for another time.” And I would cover, let us say, one or two plays, but from the aspect specifically of something like plot and characterization, because that is what gives you the real content. If you simply say, “Aspiration and the positive and refueling,” people can take it to mean anything. But if you say, “A certain progression of events, and a certain type of character, as against what you see today,” they get a more specific idea. The whole thing here is to try to specify within a delimited time. So this presentation was helpful, because it gave us an idea of what complexity you have to choose from in order to undertake such a difficult assignment.