Good evening everyone and welcome to the A&M Objectivist Club’s first meeting this semester. My name is Keenan Nichols. Tonight, I will present to you Objectivism and afterwards I will go over our plans for the semester. I will mention first that the speaker I am trying to get is Dr. Edwin Locke, the author of The Prime Movers. A really great book that gives an up-close look at 70 great wealth creators revealing core characteristics shared by each: independent vision, an active mind, competence and confidence, the drive to action, egoistic passion, love of ability in others, and virtue. Since we will be focusing on Ethics I think he would be a great speaker this semester for two reasons. He can speak on this semester’s topic: the Objectivist Ethics, and because this is an absurdly religious school, his speech “Post-Modernism vs. Religion vs. Objectivism: Which Is the Proper Code of Morality for Living on Earth?” would be on topic and get a great deal of attention and hype. Ok, let me begin.
Objectivism is a philosophical system originated by Ayn Rand. It is a closed system, as is every philosophy, by the nature of the subject, it is immutable. New implications, applications, integrations can always be discovered; but the essence of the system, its fundamental principles and their consequences in every branch, is laid down once and for all by the philosophy’s author. Objectivism is a fully integrated and consistent philosophical system that defines the abstract principles by which a man must think and act if he is to live the life proper to man. Ayn Rand presented it in detail in Atlas Shrugged, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, and The Virtue of Selfishness.
Briefly, Objectivism holds that:
1.) Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.2.) 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.) 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.) The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism.
Before continuing with Objectivism, I will state what is an axiom, quoting from Atlas Shrugged, “An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. 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. Let the caveman who does not choose to accept the axiom of identity, try to present his theory without using the concept of identity or any concept derived from it—let the anthropoid who does not choose to accept the existence of nouns, try to devise a language without nouns, adjectives or verbs—let the witch-doctor who does not choose to accept the validity of sensory perception, try to prove it without using the data he obtained by sensory perception—let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic—let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours—let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of man’s mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.
Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand’s intellectual heir and best student, summarizes the fundamentals of Objectivism as so:
The base of Objectivism is explicit: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists”.Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof). Knowledge presupposes that there is something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped. Every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.
The third axiom at the base of knowledge—an axiom true, in Aristotle’s words, of “being qua being”—is the Law of Identity. This law defines the essence of existence: to be is to be something, a thing is what it is; and this leads to the fundamental principle of all action, the law of causality. The law of causality states that a thing’s actions are determined not by chance, but by its nature, i.e., by what it is.
It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms. Existence is the first axiom. The universe exists independent of consciousness. Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but as Francis Bacon said, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Novum Organum.). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification’‘.
The philosophic source of this viewpoint and its major advocate in the history of philosophy is Aristotle. Its opponents are all the other major traditions, including Platonism, Christianity, and German idealism. Directly or indirectly, these traditions uphold the notion that consciousness is the creator of reality. The essence of this notion is the denial of the axiom that existence exists.
Now, following from these axioms, the metaphysics of objectivism is “reality, the external world, exists independent of man’s consciousness, independent of any observer’s knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are — and that the task of man’s consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.” Thus Objectivism rejects any belief in the supernatural, and any claim that individuals or groups or any assemblage of persons create their own reality. Not only are we are atheist, well are also a-devilist, a-demonist, and a-gremlinist. We reject every “spiritual” dimension, force, Form, Idea, entity, power, or whatnot alleged to transcend existence. We reject idealism. Said a little more positively: we accept reality, and that’s all.