 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. On the Influence of Ideas. In the Objectivist newsletter, Leonard Peacock heaped a fusive praise on Wilhelm Wendelband's two-volume work, A History of Philosophy. Wendelband, according to Peacock, was a master of philosophic integration, and his history, which cannot be too highly recommended, is one of the great classics on the subject. The rewards of reading this book are invaluable. Indeed, if it is possible to acquire a truly profound understanding of the inner logic of the history of philosophy by reading just one book, then to my knowledge, that one book would be Wendelband's History. I agree with Peacock's evaluation of Wendelband's history. It is without question one of the best histories of philosophy ever written, a true classic. It was owing to Peacock's review that I purchased my first copy of the book through the NBI Book Service in the late 1960s, and to that extent I am indebted to Peacock. But Peacock failed to mention that Wendelband was a leading Neocontian of the Bodin School, also called the Southwestern German School of Neocontianism. Although Peacock called Wendelband a Hegelian, this is true only to the extent he was influenced by Hegel's approach to the history of ideas. In his fundamental epistemological views, Wendelband was a Contian, as were other prominent thinkers such as F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who made important theoretical contributions to social theory and history. The Contian inclinations of Wendelband would scarcely be worth mentioning, were it not for Einrann's condemnation of Cont, as the most evil man in mankind's history. Cont developed a grotesquely irrational philosophy, and in critique of pure reason, he originated the selling of irrational notions by concocting proofs that paralyzed the critical faculty of readers through a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, and much more. Given Peacock's remarks about Cont and the ominous parallels, it is evident that he agrees with Rann's assessment of Cont and his influence. But this raises an obvious question. How did the Neocontian Wilhelm Wendelband, whose critical faculty should have been paralyzed by Cont's nonsensical obfuscations, managed to become a master of philosophic integration and write an invaluable book that exhibits a truly profound understanding of the history of philosophy? It would seem that Cont's poisonous theory of knowledge caused only partial brain rot in Wendelband's case, leaving enough of his rational faculty intact to write Peacock's favorite book on the history of philosophy. According to Rand, Cont's purpose was to corrupt and paralyze man's mind. We must understand the full import of this comment. As Rand saw the matter, Cont deliberately set out to destroy the efficacy of reason and he spent countless hours over many years writing books to achieve this purpose. Nevermind that Cont claimed precisely the opposite. Nevermind that Cont claimed to be laying a rational foundation for science, especially Newtonian physics, by refuting the skeptical arguments of David Hume in regard to causation and other matters. Nevermind that Cont developed a number of important arguments against skepticism that objectivists would later call the fallacy of the stolen concept, which consists in showing that the skeptic must presuppose the validity of certain propositions in the course of attempting to refute them. Nevermind that Cont, in his theory of synthetic a priori judgments, attempted to show that, contrary to many previous philosophers, some necessary truths, such as those found in mathematics, are based not solely on the relations of ideas, but are grounded in both reason and experience. No, nevermind any of this, for Cont's real purpose was to corrupt and paralyze man's mind. How did Rand know this? To my knowledge, she never explained the source of this insight, but presumably it should be obvious to any rational person with psychic abilities. Having discussed Rand's outrageous assessment of Cont in my last essay, no useful purpose would be served by dumping on her even more. I raised the point about Peacock and Vindalbond and the point about Cont's supposed desire to destroy the efficacy of reason, because they serve as platforms to discuss some broader issues. There are many such issues, of which I can discuss only a handful, and most of those more briefly than I would like. The fact that a Neocontian, and to a lesser extent, a Hegelian like Vindalbond could produce a masterful history of philosophy should come as no surprise, even if we agree with Rand's opinion that Cont's epistemology was a god-awful irrational mass. As with many elaborate philosophical systems, the philosophies of Cont and Hegel were complex and at times inconsistent, so their self-proclaimed admirers could choose to elaborate upon many different features of their theories. This is why when historians speak of Neocontians, they typically distinguish between six or more different schools of Contianism, as found in Germany during the 19th century. These schools were often at loggerheads, even to the point of attempting to block their wrong-headed Neocontians from teaching at their universities. The same is true, but even more so, of the serious disagreements among self-proclaimed followers of Hegel, one historian of Hegelianism put it this way. The influence of Hegel has been felt not only in systematic metaphysical thinking, but also in aesthetics, political and social theory, Protestant theology and philosophy of religion, and historiography, particularly the interpretation of intellectual history. But Hegel's influence has functioned differently in different fields, and movements which have been influenced by one aspect of his thinking have generally been very critical of other aspects. Different but recognizably Hegelian movements have often reached nearly opposite conclusions among themselves. This great diversity within Hegelianism is due not only to historical contingencies, but also to contradictory tendencies within Hegel's system. The lesson here should be obvious. It is thoroughly improper to place the admirers of Kant or Hegel or any other philosopher, such as Plato, into the same baskets and condemn or praise the lot. Such evaluation should be made on a case-by-case basis. My next point, which is fundamental to my entire discussion, is this. No person can be held responsible for the thinking that other people do or fail to do. This should be obvious to admirers of Ein Rand, given that she argued that the choice to think or not to think is the essence of free will. In a previous essay, I noted Isaiah Berlin's observation that ideas do not beget ideas as butterflies beget butterflies. When Rand communicated an idea to her readers, it is not as if she laid an egg in their brains that would inevitably hatch and reap consequences, whether intellectual or practical, regardless of the desires and mental activities of those readers. I am here using idea to signify any mental phenomenon considered as a single unit, a concept, a proposition, an argument, a theory, et cetera. We communicate ideas by means of language, but words must be converted by each person into ideas, and each person must, when appropriate, assess the epistemological value of a given idea for himself or herself. Each person must decide whether a concept is clear or fuzzy, whether a proposition is true or false, whether a theory is justified or unjustified, whether a proposed course of action is moral or immoral, and so forth. The fact that many people accept important ideas passively and uncritically, on faith or on authority or simply from laziness, merely means that they have declined to exercise their critical faculties. But this is still a choice, even if it has become so habitual as to seem automatic, so such people are still responsible for their ideas. Therefore, even if we were to agree with Rand's extreme position that Kant deliberately set out to destroy the efficacy of reason, he cannot be held responsible, whether morally or in any other way, for subsequent philosophers who embraced his ideas, nor was Kant responsible for how those ideas were used by other philosophers. Thus, although it is accurate to say that my ideas, when I communicate them to you, may influence your thinking and therefore your beliefs, we must keep in mind that to influence is not to determine the outcome. Here, a bit of a digression is necessary to substantiate and amplify my claim. It is essential that we distinguish the psychological concept of belief from the cognitive concept of truth. Belief is the ascent of the mind to the truth of a proposition and to ascent or to affirm requires an act of consciousness. My beliefs, like my emotions, are my beliefs. They are psychological phenomena that cannot coexist in or be transferred to the mind of another person. A belief is the mental affirmation of an individual believer. A belief cannot exist outside of, independently of, or in addition to the consciousness of a particular individual. A belief must have a content or subject matter. To believe is to believe something. To ascent is to ascent to something. To affirm is to affirm something. Merely to say, I believe without indicating implicitly or explicitly the object of one's belief is to say nothing at all. Thus, where we have a belief, we must also have an object of belief. And in the case of a cognitive belief, that is a belief that such and such is true, this object is abstract rather than concrete, general rather than singular. To believe that such and such is the case is to affirm that P, a proposition, is true. This proposition is the abstract object of a cognitive belief. It is owing to its abstract object that a belief can be something more than the subjective affirmation of a particular individual. It is the abstract object that makes a belief objective as well as subjective. My psychological world is private. No one else can share or participate in my subjective experiences, whether perceptual, emotional, or mental. Thus, my belief, when viewed psychologically as my subjective ascent to the truth of a proposition, is necessarily mine and mine alone. When we say that two people have the same belief, we're speaking objectively rather than subjectively. My subjective ascent cannot be your subjective ascent, but we can both ascent to the same abstract proposition. My belief, psychologically considered, cannot be your belief, but we can both believe in the same truth. In other words, our mental acts of affirmation, though separate and distinct, can have the same abstract object. It is in this objective sense when we affirm the same abstract truth that we are said to have the same belief. In addition to the subjective act of ascent and the objective content of a belief, there is yet a third aspect that is in some respects the most important. This is the cognitive value of a belief, that is, the justification or grounds of belief. To justify a belief is to assess its cognitive value and to pronounce it worthy of acceptance. Justification is the intermediate link that joins the subjective act of ascent to the abstract object of belief and thereby transforms belief into knowledge. For knowledge is more than true belief. It is belief which is both true and justified. Justification is neither psychological ascent nor the abstract object of belief, but a judgment of cognitive value which determines whether we should or should not give our ascent to the truth of a proposition. This is what I mean when I say that justification serves as a bridge between the subjective and objective aspects of belief. In seeking justification, we must make judgments of cognitive value. We must determine whether a belief is or is not worthy of our ascent, and this process of evaluation has both subjective, psychological, and objective, abstract components. A belief cannot evaluate its own object. Only a thinking person or other rational being can assess the truth value of a belief. In this sense, therefore, justification is a psychological process, one that can only occur in the mind of a particular individual. This process of evaluation, if it is to serve its cognitive purpose, must employ abstract norms of cognition, and this gives to justification its objective character, but only the individual can render judgments of cognitive value. Let us assume, per rant, that Kant's epistemology had no objective justification whatsoever. Nevertheless, each person who read Kant and found his epistemology credible would be responsible for his own judgments about Kant's philosophy. A devoted disciple of Kant, assuming he was concerned with the justification of Kant's ideas, would need to retrace Kant's arguments in his own mind and by applying cognitive norms that he deems acceptable reach his own conclusions. At that point, the ideas of the disciple are his ideas, in the psychological sense explained above, not Kant's, so the disciple can in no way blame Kant for any errors in his own thinking. Nor may an observer hold Kant responsible if his disciples committed the same errors he did, for Kant was not a Svengali who could compel others to think as he wished them to think. If I defend irrational ideas, then that's my problem. But if other people agree with my irrational ideas, then that is their problem, not mine. We're all responsible as individuals for our own beliefs, regardless of the source that may have influenced our beliefs. There are several other points I wish to discuss, but those must await my next essay. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.