| the blog of human failure
Hi. When you were 18 did you ever try to develop your own life philosophy? I did. It was called Perspectivism. When you see Ayn Rand mentioned in the first paragraph you know I was on to something good. Enjoy!
An Outline of Perspectivism
Perspectivism is somewhat an amalgamation of several different preexisting philosophies and one theology, or anti-theology as it were. The first inspiration would be Objectivist philosophy as created by Ayn Rand. The ideals I find particularly appealing from that concentration are rationalization being the basis behind which all decisions are made and man being an end unto himself. I believe that the only true goal in life is happiness and the only way to achieve this happiness is to act in one’s own best interest at all times. This does not mean I condone a life of hedonism but rather a life of feeling satisfaction through personal achievement while neither taking from others or having others take from me.
My personal philosophy is, at its core, a map towards finding personal happiness and achieving satisfaction from life. I believe that the way to accomplish this is to put my own happiness and satisfaction as the goal towards which I strive. In doing this I am forced to decide things that will make me happy and the goals I truly want achieve and move toward fulfilling them. With these goals as my only focus I will not feel the emotional strain of achieving the unwanted goals of others and inversely will not hurt others by taking from them what they do not truly wish to give. I also agree with Objectivist philosophy on the idea of capitalism being the best economic system under which all are treated as equal and others are not forced to care about others but only forced to take care of themselves. Man’s only true interest is his own survival and the survival of the people he cares about. To ask him to work for survival of others has a twofold result of him not caring as much as he could about his work and therefore not producing to the best of his ability. To me, it is a fallacy that there is a limited amount to be produced. There is in fact an infinite amount to be produced. People however, can only be motivated into maximum production if what they are producing benefits them directly and honestly.
There is one place where I disagree with Objectivism. The philosophy concludes that existence is objective and man’s role is to perceive existence as rationally as he can. It further states that man’s perspective cannot alter existence, only view it irrationally. I would argue instead, as the Post-Modernists would, not that perception can change existence as it sees fit, but rather that an individual perception predicates existence. It is unimportant to me whether men look at the same world and perceive it in many different ways or if they look at very different worlds and actually perceive them all quite similarly. If it is the individual’s good that matters to the individual, then his unique perspective must be from where that sense of good originates. It does not matter whether man’s perspective creates the world or the objective world creates the man. I live through the perspective of my individual self and not through the perspective of the objective world, therefore I must see the existence of an objective world as predicated upon the existence of myself.
The second philosophy through which my personal philosophy was gleaned is Existentialism. This is a philosophy that further states that life is an end in itself. The ideas I find specifically interesting in Existentialism are that man is responsible for his actions, that there does exist a general malaise that plagues man in his natural state, and that man must either find satisfaction in his own existence or he will not find satisfaction at all. Responsibility for ones actions is tied directly into my ideal of individual perception. To take responsibility is to prove your own existence. It does not matter whether we truly exist or not, we are working from the perception that we exist, therefore to question it is meaningless. This much relates to the question of free will. Some say free will exists because it is obvious that we can do as we please. Others say that free will is an illusion created by a combination of terms set from birth and the nature of our environment.
In my opinion this is not a point worth arguing. The universe as we understand it is infinite. Even if it is not infinite we perceive it to be infinite because from our perspective as humans on earth it is. This means that there are an infinite number of natural factors that are affecting the earth and the people who live on it in an infinite number of ways. If our actions are predicated upon an infinite number of random natural factors, then we can only perceive our actions to be done upon our free will because there is no way to otherwise decipher the infinite number of random natural effect. Conversely if all of our actions are predestined then they would have had to be predestined an infinite amount of time ago creating an infinite timeline of creation into the future. The point I’m making is that because both scenarios end in the same result and neither scenario can be proven, it is meaningless to try to discover a conclusion. Do humans have free will? The answer is that it doesn’t matter whether we objectively have free will – from the perspective of the individual we have free will, so we must therefore take responsibility for our actions.
The second premise of man feeling malaise in his natural states needs to be explicated in order to be understood correctly. Man’s goal in life is happiness. If this is his goal, then he cannot exist in a natural state of happiness otherwise there would be nothing to aspire towards. This natural state that man is in would thought to be neutral in feeling being that nothing is positively or negatively affecting the individual but it is not. Man’s natural state is in a gentle malaise that presses on his unconscious. There is a thin layer of unhappiness that blankets man in this natural state, unsettling him and disrupting his equilibrium in the slightest way. This state must first and foremost be accepted consciously. It is this inherent uneasiness that encourages us to seek happiness and achievement in the first place. If man was naturally neutral emotionally, then he could be comfortable without happiness. He would have no reason to seek it again and again because he could rest comfortably in his natural state. In fact, man can not rest comfortable is his natural state. He must always strive for happiness because it inherently eludes him. My final observation in Existentialism’s effect on Perspectivism is that man must find satisfaction in his own existence.
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