フィロソフィー・オン・ワンフット

アイン・ランドは、かつて「片足で立ったまま、自分の哲学の基本を短く説明できるか」と問われたことがある。彼女が言った言葉はこうです。

1. メタフィジックス（METAPHYSICS）。客観的現実

or “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. EPISTEMOLOGY:リーズン

or “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. 倫理：自己利益

or “Man is an end in himself.”
Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. 政治資本主義（CAPITALISM

or “Give me liberty or give me death.”
The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

最終的な感想

もし、あなたがこれらの概念を自分の信念のベースとして完全に一貫して保持するならば、あなたの人生の道しるべとなる完全な哲学的体系を手に入れることができるでしょう。しかし、これらの概念を一貫して理解し、定義し、証明し、適用するためには、膨大な量の思考が必要です。だから、哲学は片足立ちでは語れないし、両足立ちでは語れないのです。特に政治の分野では、この最後の立場が今日の哲学の主流である。

Copyright © 1962 by Times-Mirror Company
This article has been edited by The Atlas Society. It was originally published on June 17, 1962 in the Los Angeles Times as "Ayn Rand Ties Her Beliefs to Today's World"

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