In Which I Utterly Crush Ayn Rand

A while ago I purchased Ayn Rand's Introduction to an Objectivist Epistemology, with the intention of reading it, listening to her side of the story, and forming an unbiased opinion about Randian Objectivism.  I made it two pages before I threw the book across the room, and promptly tried my best to block it from my mind.  Until last night, that is, when I got in an argument with a stranger on Facebook about Rand, and in which I argued that because her epistemology is utter shit, objectivism as a whole is necessarily a flawed and useless ideology.  This stranger's curiosity was apparently roused, and her requested that I elaborate, citing specifics.  

So here we are.  

The first sentence of the first chapter is innocuous enough.  "Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials:  differentiation and integration."  Ignoring the fact that she would have lost nothing by writing "Consciousness is an active process consisting of differentiation and integration," and that a single sentence does not a paragraph make, there's not really anything wrong with her first sentence.  Consciousness actively differentiates a plenum of phenomena into individual objects, and creates an abstract sense of the relationship between things through integration.  Got it.  Good work, Ayn Rand.  

Then come sentence number two:

Although, chronologically, man's consciousness develops in three stages: the stage of sensations, the perceptual, the conceptual-epistemologically, the base of all of man's knowledge is the perceptual stage.

 Again, with the one sentence paragraphs.  Honestly, this sentence in itself is enough to discredit objectivism, but for those of you who don't have philosophy degrees, I'll include sentences three and four so that you can get a better feel for what Rand is saying here.  

 Sensations, as such, are not retained in man's memory, nor is man able to experience a pure isolated sensation.  As far as can be ascertained, an infant's sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos.  

To elaborate, sensation is input sensory data, untouched by consciousness, prior to differentiation and integration.  One example would be visual data received by your eyes and transmitted along the optic nerve, before your brain gets ahold of it and sorts it into something meaningful.  Perception, then, is sensory data that has been differentiated and integrated by consciousness, and concepts are abstractions drawn from perception.  




At the level of sensation, she is dealing with pure objectivity: light reflects off an object, it enters an eye, physical processes within the eye turn the light striking the retina into impulses along the nerve, which enter the brain.  Consciousness is removed from the process completely.  


As soon as we reach the perceptual stage, however, things have become hopelessly subjective.  Consciousness has differentiated and integrated, and these processes don't reflect objective reality.  The object as a thing in itself has been lost, and has become an object as understood by consciousness.  The film industry is built entirely around this principle.  A movie is a rapid succession of still images, but because of consciousness' automatic processes, our brain unifies this succession of still images into a single subject, moving within its surroundings over a period of time.  


 Thus, in noting the distinction between sensation and perception, Rand is essentially making Hume's point about the fundamental subjectivity of consciousness, although she anachronizes her point using the language of later philosophers.  Hume, however, followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion, which is the death of metaphysics and the fundamental groundlessness of human knowledge.  Rand does not, although she hopes to obfuscate the fact that OBJECTIVITY IS IMPOSSIBLE by using the language of Kant and phenomenology.   


The term "objectivism" implies that objectivity is possible, and her works make an appeal to the popular belief in Cartesian rationalism, albeit devoid of the ethical restraint Descartes borrowed from Christianity.  Given the fact that the second sentence in Rand's objectivist epistemology is enough to completely discredit the concept of objectivity as something meaningful to human experience, objectivism is nothing more than sophistry.  

If treated fairly, the subjective nature of perception, with its inherent tendencies towards distortion and inaccuracy, render the surety of the concepts derived from perception doubtful.  Accordingly, concepts cannot be treated as though they have the imprimatur of TRUTH.  The era of Cogito ergo sum, pregnant with the infallibility of human rationality, is gone.  

Philosophy has realized that this infallibility has been lost to us, and rightfully celebrated this loss, inasmuch as the loss of TRUTH destroys the possibility of absolute ethical codes of good and evil that are separated from the manifest facticity or the infinite variability of human experience.   Because all knowledge is fallible, it has become impossible to conclusively negate the validity of the other's subjective truth.  Ethics, morals, language, and all the other fundamentals of society become realized for what they actually are:  a compromise between a riot of competing self-interests, and a compromise that attempts to accommodate all of those self-interests while preventing one self-interest to triumph at the expense of all other self-interests. The loss of TRUTH has taken us from "Stealing is always wrong, and should be harshly punished," to "Would you steal to feed your starving children?  Why don't we try to make sure that there aren't starving children?" 

Rand's sophistry aside, objectivism acknowledges the dissolution of the TRUTH framework of ethics, but rather than replacing it with the consensus reached by a dialogue of fallible viewpoints, she contradictorily treats subjectivity as the discovery of a subjective TRUTH that cannot be chastised by another's subjective TRUTH except through force of will.  The contradictions between Rand's epistemology and her broader ideology create the justification for a soulless selfishness unrestrained by any sense of the common good.  

Objectivism is a lie that is easily refuted by philosophy.  Thus, I wrote the statement which kicked off the whole Facebook argument in the first place.  

I have concluded that Ayn Rand is an idiot, and should have been killed by a totalitarian dictator while she was a child because she cannot possibly have contributed anything useful to the corpus of Western thought. I want to find her grave, exhume her, pop the top off her skull, and defecate inside because my average bowel movement is smarter and more beneficial to humanity than Ayn Rand's entire existence.