Michael Mitchell: Archive

Thanks to Ayn Rand, this is how I see everything. In every branch of philosophy, there are basically only two alternatives. In her view, which I fully agree with to the best of my knowledge and ability, the ones on the left are right and the ones on the right are wrong.

• Metaphysics: This World vs (Any) Other World
• Epistemology: Reason vs Faith
• Ethics: Self-Interest vs Self-Sacrifice
• Politics: Individualism vs Collectivism
• Esthetics: Romanticism vs Naturalism

There's a logical dependency, too. They're all connected. That's philosophy.

Your political ideas, for instance, are determined by your ethical ideas. Killing someone is wrong, therefore it should be illegal. Murder shouldn't be allowed in society. It isn't wrong because it's illegal. It's illegal because it's wrong. Not everything that's wrong should be illegal and not everything that's illegal is necessarily wrong, but it should be because ethics is a more fundamental concept than politics. In other words, nothing that's right should ever be illegal.

If you lived all alone in the world, you'd still need to know the difference between good and evil, you'd still need to know what's a value and what's not. If you live with other people in a civilization, then any social system should be based on what's moral, because what's a value to you doesn't magically change merely because other people exist. That's the fact of reality that logically lead to the concept of rights, which serves as a bridge between ethics and politics, if your ethics and politics are logically consistent with reality.

Politics is dependent on ethics and ethics is dependent on epistemology and epistemology is dependent on metaphysics.

Esthetics is actually logically connected to metaphysics, on your world view in general, which is why you feel an immediate, almost impossible to define, intellectual and emotional reaction to a work of art.

Metaphysics is about the nature of reality, not any particular tree, for instance, but all of them. Any time you use the word "all", you're thinking philosophically. There's not much to think about in metaphysics, though. Shit exists. It is what it is and whatever it is it can't act against it's nature. Toss in all that transcendental nonsense, however, and there's no limit to where your imagination may take you.

Epistemology is about consciousness, which basically means concepts. It's what most people think about when they think of philosophy. It's about thinking itself, thinking about thinking. Very complicated stuff, way too intricate and important to summarize here. So I'll just say that words are the key to everything. Almost every mistake we make is ultimately the result of improperly formed concepts, words we use and rely on but don't fully know their meanings.

Whether your beliefs are consistent and logical or not, you have beliefs. Your only choices are the alternatives above.