Freethought & Rationalism Archive

3DChizl · 08-18-2002, 06:42 PM

I posted this and the comments at SAB and I thought this might be a good place to discuss it also.

From The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand ISBN 0-451-1639-1 Chapter 2 Mental Health verses Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice by Nathaniel Branden
Quote:

Quote:

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof.

When a man rejects reason as his standard of judgment, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feeling with knowledge.

To practice the "virtue" of faith, one must be willing to suspend one's own judgment; one must be willing to live with the unintelligible, with that which cannot be conceptualized or integrated into the rest of one's knowledge, and to induce a trancelike illusion of understanding. One must be willing to repress one's critical faculty and hold it as one's guilt; one must be willing to drown any questions that rise in protest--to strangle any trust of reason convulsively seeking to assert its proper function as the protector of one's life and cognitive integrity.

Once I became aware of the true nature of faith, I was no longer able to accept at face value that for which it were required.

Branden "disassociated" himself from Objectivisim a few years after writing this piece. Since that time, he "reconciled" with the movement. Anyway, his later works clarify his point. His use of faith in this instance does not perclude creativity.

In view of a response elsewhere, I think I should clarify: Having faith in a hypothisis built on some observed or logical phenomina, in an effort to prove the same is NOT the same as having faith in the unknowable.

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