Objectivism

• 1. Introduction

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  Objectivism is a philosophical system that Russian-American writer Ayn Rand once boiled down to a single sentence. She called it "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".

  Rand did not first reach the public through philosophy journals. She reached it through novels, among them The Fountainhead in 1943 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Only later did she spell the ideas out in essays, periodicals and non-fiction books.

  Even the name carries a small story. Rand wanted a word for a philosophy built on the primacy of existence. Her first choice was "existentialism", but that word had already been taken.

  So what does it mean to build a whole philosophy on the plain fact that things exist? Why would anyone argue that looking out for yourself is a moral duty? And why did the people who teach philosophy for a living want so little to do with it?

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• 2. Existence Exists

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  Three axioms sit at the base of Rand's system: existence, consciousness, and identity. She defined an axiom as a statement that identifies the base of all knowledge and is contained in every other statement, whether the speaker admits it or not. In her words, "An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it."

  Leonard Peikoff, her designated intellectual heir, explained what this argument does and does not do. It is not a proof that the axioms are true. It is a proof that they are axioms, at the base of knowledge and therefore inescapable.

  The first axiom is the one Rand compressed into three words: "existence exists". She treated it as the perceptually self-evident fact beneath everything else. From it she drew a second claim, that to be is to be something. A thing with no nature and no attributes cannot exist.

  She illustrated this with a leaf. As she put it, "A leaf... cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time... A is A." The axiom of existence separates something from nothing. The law of identity separates one thing from another, and it is where a person first meets the law of non-contradiction.

  The third axiom concerns the mind. Rand described consciousness as "the faculty of perceiving that which exists". In her phrasing, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something". A mind has nothing to be aware of until it meets a reality that does not depend on it.

  That gave Objectivism its central ordering. Existence has primacy over consciousness, and consciousness must conform to it. Rand named the opposite approach "the primacy of consciousness". She placed every variety of metaphysical subjectivism under that label, and theism as well.

  Identity also shaped her view of cause and effect. She called causation "the law of identity applied to action". Entities are what act, and they act the way they do because of their specific natures. Had they been different, they would act differently.

  If the mind only discovers a reality that is already there, the next question is how it does the discovering.

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• 3. Perception and Concepts

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  Belief in dragons, however sincere, does not put dragons into the world. That example captures how Rand treated knowledge. Going beyond what perception hands over, she said, takes two things. One is volition, the exercise of free will. The other is a method of validation built from observation, concept formation, and both inductive and deductive reasoning.

  The method begins with the principle that "consciousness is identification". Rand defined reason as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". Because consciousness has a specific, finite identity like everything else, she argued, it must work by a specific method. That ruled out both universal skepticism and any claim resting on revelation, emotion or faith.

  Perception received special protection. "Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident," she wrote. Rand considered the validity of the senses axiomatic. Anyone who argued against it, she said, committed the fallacy of the "stolen concept", because the argument borrows concepts that themselves depend on the senses.

  She went further and said that perception, being determined physiologically, cannot be wrong. An optical illusion is not a failure of sight. It is a mistake in the mind's identification of what is seen.

  Here she separated form from object. The form in which an animal perceives depends on its sensory physiology. What it perceives, the object, is reality. That separation let her reject Kant's divide between "things as we perceive them" and "things as they are in themselves". All knowledge, she argued, is processed knowledge, and processing does not make it subjective.

  Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology holds her most detailed work, a theory of concept formation. A concept, she said, forms by measurement omission. The mind groups concretes that share a characteristic in different degrees, sets aside their particular measurements, and fixes the result with a word.

  Omitting measurements does not mean they vanish. Rand wrote that "the relevant measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity."

  Concepts, in her account, form a hierarchy. 'Dog' can split into 'dachshund' and 'poodle', or join 'cat' in the wider concept 'animal'. 'Animal' can in turn merge into 'living thing'. A young child can form 'dog' without ever hearing of deep-sea tube worms. Because concepts stay open-ended, Objectivism rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction and denies that any knowledge is a priori.

  Feeling got no such standing. "Emotions are not tools of cognition," Rand declared. She granted that emotions matter to human beings, but she held that they follow from ideas a person already accepts. Faith and mysticism she used as synonyms. Reliance on revelation, she said, is like reliance on a Ouija board. Faith is not a short-cut to knowledge but a "short-circuit" that destroys it.

  She also dismissed the old quarrel between rationalists and empiricists. One side claims knowledge from concepts without perception, the other knowledge from perception without concepts. Rand said neither is possible. Peikoff added a modest note on certainty: a person is certain within the context of the evidence when everything available verifies the claim.

  Critics pressed on several points. John Hospers shared her moral and political views yet disagreed with her on epistemology. Tibor Machan argued that her epistemology is incomplete. Psychology professor Robert L. Campbell noted a puzzle. Rand made claims about human cognition, yet insisted that philosophy comes logically before psychology. Randall Dipert and Roderick Long argued that she blurred how judgments form with how they are justified.

  Her answer to what a person should do with knowledge begins with a word most moral philosophers avoid: selfishness.

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• 4. Selfishness as Virtue

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  The Virtue of Selfishness appeared in 1964, but Rand argued about morality in other books too. She wrote on it in We the Living in 1936 and again in Atlas Shrugged. She defined morality as "a code of values to guide man's choices and actions", the choices that determine the purpose and course of a life.

  She thought the usual starting point was wrong. Before asking what the code of values should be, she asked whether man needs values at all, and why. Her answer began with life itself. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible," she wrote.

  The argument turned on a contrast. Inanimate matter exists unconditionally. A living organism does not, because its existence depends on a specific course of action. Only a living thing faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death.

  Free will made the picture harder. Rand held that the basic human choice is to think or not to think. Thinking is not automatic, she said, and a person can focus his mind or drift in a semiconscious daze. Nothing in human physiology hard-wires the pursuit of one's own well-being. In her blunt words, "Man has the power to act as his own destroyer".

  Atlas Shrugged states the point as a chain. "Life is given to him, survival is not," she wrote, and "His mind is given to him, its content is not." Nobody can dig a ditch or build a cyclotron without knowing the aim and the means. To stay alive, she concluded, a person must think.

  A moral code, then, tells a person which principles serve a chosen life. Reality issues many "must's", but she said all of them are conditional. The formula is "you must, if", and the "if" stands for the person's own choice.

  From this came ethical egoism. A person's first moral obligation is to his own well-being. Rand rejected altruism, in the sense Auguste Comte popularized: a moral duty to live for the sake of others. She rejected subjectivism as well. The "whim-worshiper" treats whatever he happens to value as the standard of value, which she saw as living on a sub-human level.

  She drew a hard line between rational selfishness and its counterfeit. The counterfeit she called "selfishness-without-a-self". Her list of virtues was rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness and pride. Her characters dramatized them, and John Galt's oath in Atlas Shrugged sums up the code. He swears by his life and his love of it "that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

  Philosopher Robert Nozick found the foundation unsound. He argued that Rand never explains why someone could not rationally prefer death, and no values, in order to serve one particular value. In his view her defense of selfishness begs the question, and her handling of Hume's is-ought problem fails. Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl replied that Nozick misstated her case. Charles King attacked her indestructible robot example as confusing, and Paul St. F. Blair defended her conclusions while admitting Rand might not have approved of his arguments.

  Where force enters, Rand said, this moral code collapses, and her politics begins there.

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• 5. Force and Freedom

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  "Man's mind will not function at the point of a gun." That sentence is the seed of Rand's politics. Since reason is each person's basic means of survival, force from the state or from a criminal neutralizes it. The only organized behavior that suits reason is voluntary cooperation, and persuasion is reason's method. The irrational, she said, must eventually resort to force.

  Objectivists therefore call the initiation of physical force immoral. That covers indirect forms such as threats, fraud and breach of contract. Defensive or retaliatory force is another matter, and it is appropriate.

  From this follows a theory of rights. Peikoff described one fundamental right, the right to life, with major derivatives in liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Rand defined a right as "a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context". These are rights to act, not rights to particular results. The duties they create are negative: each person must refrain from violating the rights of others. Objectivists reject positive rights, collective rights and animal rights.

  The only system that fully recognizes such rights, Rand said, is "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism". Objectivism holds that capitalism is most beneficial to the poor, but that is not its main justification. Its main justification is that it is the only moral system.

  Government keeps an essential place. Objectivism describes it as "the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control". Its proper functions are the police, the armed services and the law courts, plus an executive and legislatures. Rand opposed anarchism because she thought police and courts sold on a market make justice miscarry.

  Property reached into ideas. Rand defended limited patents and copyrights, granted first-to-file, because she considered all property fundamentally intellectual. She also insisted on limits. Granted in perpetuity, they would produce de facto collectivism.

  Her individual stands crossed party lines. She opposed racism and called affirmative action legal racism. She backed legal abortion and opposed involuntary conscription. She opposed capital punishment "on epistemological, not moral, grounds", fearing that innocent people could be executed. She opposed all censorship, and she once quipped that in the transition to statism, "every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners".

  Objectivists later opposed antitrust laws, the minimum wage, public education and existing child labor laws. They also opposed faith-based initiatives, religious symbols in government buildings and teaching "intelligent design" in public schools. Rand opposed involuntary taxation and thought government could someday be financed voluntarily, after other reforms.

  Murray Rothbard, David D. Friedman, Roy Childs, Norman P. Barry and Chandran Kukathas argued that Objectivist ethics fit anarcho-capitalism better than a minimal state.

  The novels that carried these arguments to readers rested on a theory of their own.

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• 6. Art and the Ideal

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  Objectivism defines art as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments". The phrase means the artist shows what he believes is ultimately true and important about reality and humanity. Art, on this view, presents abstractions in perceptual form.

  The theory grows out of the epistemology. A concept is mental shorthand for a huge number of concretes, but nobody can hold unlimited concepts in mind at once. People still need a comprehensive framework to guide their lives. Art solves this by letting a person grasp a wide range of abstractions, including metaphysical value-judgments, as though they were things seen and heard.

  This makes art an effective carrier of a moral or ethical ideal. Objectivism nevertheless does not call art propaganda. Its purpose is not to educate but to show or project. Art also need not come from a full explicit philosophy. More often it grows from an artist's sense of life, which is preconceptual and largely emotional.

  Rand's own goal was to portray the ideal man, and The Fountainhead is her best example. Its architect Roark embodies the higher man she believed great art should show. Artistic expression, in her view, should extend the greatness in humanity.

  She ranked Romanticism as the highest school of literary art. It was "based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition", and without volition, she believed, literature loses its dramatic power. What the Romanticists brought, she wrote, was "the primacy of values". Values are the source of emotions, so their work carried color, imagination, originality and excitement.

  The word carries a trap. Romanticism is often tied to emotionalism, which Objectivism entirely opposes, and many historical Romantic artists were philosophical subjectivists. Most Objectivists who are artists prefer the term romantic realism, which is how Rand described her own work.

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• 7. Heirs and Heretics

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  In 1982, Rand described Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels as "the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself". Peikoff went on to publish Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand in 1991, a comprehensive exposition. He insisted that the system is closed: its "fundamental principles" came from Rand and cannot change. Yet he added that "new implications, applications and integrations can always be discovered".

  Others wrote about her ideas from different angles. Chris Matthew Sciabarra traced their intellectual origins in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical in 1995. Newcomers could start with briefer guides. They include On Ayn Rand by Allan Gotthelf in 1999, Ayn Rand by Tibor R. Machan in 2000, and Objectivism in One Lesson by Andrew Bernstein in 2009.

  Specialists pushed into narrower territory. Machan developed Rand's contextual view of knowledge in Objectivity in 2004. David Kelley explained her epistemology in The Evidence of the Senses in 1986 and A Theory of Abstraction in 2001. Tara Smith stayed close to Rand's ethics in Moral Rights and Political Freedom in 1995, Viable Values in 2000, and Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics in 2006. David Harriman worked with Peikoff on a theory of scientific induction in The Logical Leap in 2010.

  Politics and economics drew their own authors. Bernstein wrote The Capitalist Manifesto in 2005. George Reisman tried to merge Objectivist method with Classical and Austrian economics in Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics in 1996. Edwin A. Locke and Ellen Kenner applied her ideas to love in The Selfish Path to Romance. Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi wrote What Art Is in 2000, and Harry Binswanger wrote about teleology in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts in 1990.

  Kelley's work caused a rift. In Unrugged Individualism in 1996 and The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand in 2000, he argued that Objectivists should give more weight to benevolence and less to moral sanction. Peikoff and Peter Schwartz replied that he contradicted core principles.

  Kelley coined the term "Open Objectivism". He defined it as "a commitment to reasoned, non-dogmatic discussion and debate", the recognition that the philosophy can be expanded, refined and revised, and "a policy of benevolence toward others, including fellow-travelers and critics". Peikoff answered with his "closed system" and refused any change.

  None of this work changed the verdict in philosophy departments, where the question was whether Objectivism counted as philosophy at all.

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• 8. Outside the Academy

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  Nathaniel Branden, Rand's former protégé, spoke of her "especially powerful appeal to the young". Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute agreed that she "appeals to the idealism of youth". One Rand biographer observed that most people meet her work for the first time in their formative years.

  That pattern worries some critics. Many young readers later drop their favorable opinion and are said to have "outgrown" her. Her supporters accept the pattern but explain it differently, blaming lost idealism and the pressure to conform intellectually.

  Historian Jennifer Burns took a third view in Goddess of the Market in 2009. Some critics dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker for adolescents, she wrote, but they "miss her significance". Burns saw her as a "gateway drug" to right-wing politics. Objectivism has indeed persisted among right-libertarians and American conservatives.

  University philosophers have mostly kept their distance. Objectivism has been called "fiercely anti-academic", partly because Rand attacked contemporary intellectuals. David Sidorsky, a Columbia University professor of moral and political philosophy, called her work "outside the mainstream" and more ideology than comprehensive philosophy.

  British philosopher Ted Honderich said he deliberately left an article on Rand out of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. She is mentioned there only in Anthony Quinton's article on popular philosophy. Rand does have entries in several reference works on philosophy and political thought. Yet Chandran Kukathas noted that her influence was strongest among American college students and drew little attention from academic philosophers. Her defenses of capitalism and selfishness, he wrote, "kept her out of the intellectual mainstream".

  The 1990s brought some change, and her books were more likely to turn up in American classrooms. The Ayn Rand Society, which fosters scholarly study of Objectivism, became affiliated with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. Allan Gotthelf, an Aristotle scholar and the society's late chairman, argued for more academic attention. He saw a unique and intellectually interesting defense of classical liberalism.

  A refereed Journal of Ayn Rand Studies began in 1999. Programs and fellowships followed at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The case Gotthelf made was modest: not that Objectivism is right, but that it is worth debating.

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