ShottleBop
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From the version of Scott Ryan's book that was posted on his website in 2001:
. Rand appears to share the fairly common view that idealist epistemology is “subjectivist.” But this characterization is based on a misconception, or at least on a hidden assumption.
The idealist claim, as expressed vigorously by Thomas Hill Green especially in his Prolegomena to Ethics, is that the relations involved in knowledge are themselves constituted by intelligence. However, this claim is an impediment to objectivity only on the assumption that relations “out there,” in “real” reality, are not constituted by intelligence. Absolute idealists and several sorts of theist would claim that this assumption is just wrong: “objective reality” itself is the product of an Absolute Mind, a Divine Intelligence Whose thought actively constitutes, or manifests as, the existing intelligible order of things.
Of course I am not here trying to mount a case for this “strong” form of objective idealism. Nor do I think Green himself made a successful argument for it. He seems to have thought it was self-evident, and I happen to share his intuition on this point. However, it is important not to confuse intuitions with conclusions, and I certainly have not offered anything like a proof of the claim. I am merely pointing out that even this strong claim does not devolve into subjectivism.
For present purposes I shall be satisfied with the weaker claim, for which I have argued to some extent, that the world consists of (or at least includes) real universals, at least some of which can be directly grasped by the mind, and that everything which exists is in principle intelligible. And we have already seen that Rand, for all her dismissals of idealism, universals, nonsensory intuition, and the “primacy of consciousness” premise, relies on this weaker form herself at numerous key points.
Moreover, Rand’s claim is questionable on other grounds. If God created the universe (the latter term meaning “all that exists other than God Himself”), then this fact itself is just the way things really are. Theism is not a denial of the “primacy of existence” premise as Rand has initially formulated it; every theist in history has held that God exists, and that His existence is logically and/or causally prior to the existence of anything else. (And why the existence of a divine Creator should amount to a denial of the Law of Identity is more than I can fathom.)
Rand’s further formulation—that the universe is independent of any and all consciousness, including God’s—is a simple nonsequitur. But Rand seems to conflate three distinct claims, holding that her axiom actually says the “universe” is independent of “consciousness” altogether merely because it is (allegedly) independent of human consciousness, when she has not even established the latter as a corollary of her “axiom.” (We have already seen Leonard Peikoff allow for the possibility that the universe we know is not independent of human consciousness.) The leap from “existence exists” to atheism is doubly unwarranted.
Of course if all she means is that God cannot create “existence as such” if God already exists, we shall simply agree. But this is a trivial point that has no bearing on the truth or falsity of theism. We have already seen Hugo Meynell (in The Intelligible Universe) expose an important ambiguity in the term “world”; Objectivism uses words like “existence” and “universe” with the same ambiguity.
Nor, again, is Rand entitled to make even this trivial point, since her epistemology should not allow her to speak of “existence as such.” Cf. the following mystical insight (or is it a “rational intuition”?) from Nathaniel Branden:
I became an atheist at the age of twelve when one day . . . I had . . . [what I would call] a spiritual experience. I was hit by a sudden sense of the universe as a total, in all its unimaginable immensity, and I thought: if God is needed to explain the existence of the universe, then what explains the existence of God? . . . [If] we have to begin somewhere, isn’t it more reasonable to accept the existence of the universe—of being, whatever its form—as the starting point of everything? (Begin with existence itself, I would later learn to say, as the ultimate, irreducible primary.) [The Art of Living Consciously, pp. 188-189; emphases his]
Our discussion in the preceding chapter has already replied adequately to most of this. What we must note here is that Branden is perpetuating an error he clearly learned from Rand: “existence” cannot be an “irreducible primary” in a philosophy that, on its own terms, should be unable to regard “existence as such” as anything other than an unreal abstraction.
Not that it is clear what “existence” is supposed to mean anyway; Objectivism seems to treat is as some sort of attribute or existent in its own right. Some remarks of Blanshard’s are apt:
It is idle to search beneath the surface of things for an indescribable something called existence, which is neither a quality nor a relation nor any complex of these. The existentialist pursuit of this will-o’the-wisp has been an unprofitable quest; it has developed a baffling mysticism whose object is without content, and its dark pronouncements about existence preceding essence leave its critics curiously helpless, since nothing definite enough for a clear refutation is being said. And what would be the gain, from the philosophic point of view, if the unfindable were somehow found? One is tempted to quote William James’ sardonic advice to the troubled philosopher to seize firmly on the unintelligible and make it the key to everything else. At any rate, it seems to me that if existence, in this sense—assuming it is a sense—were to vanish from the universe tomorrow, leaving all the qualities and relations of things what they are, we should never miss it. [“Interrogation of Brand Blanshard,” in Philosophical Interrogations, Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds., p. 255.]
At times Objectivism does seem to seize on the unintelligible and make it the key to everything else; its own pronouncements on “existence” sometimes recall those of the existentialists (and Rand is in fact committed to the existentialist view that “existence precedes essence” whether she puts it in this language or not). At other times, when Objectivists remember that, on their philosophy, there simply should not be any such thing as “existence as such” or “being, whatever its form,” we learn—as we have repeatedly learned throughout the rest of this volume—that by “existence” Objectivism really intends the physical existents which are allegedly given in axiomatically-valid sensory perception.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that by “existence” Rand, Peikoff, Branden, et alia mean merely “presentation in sensory-perceptual experience”—perhaps with a certain vividness or resistance to the will. This meaning is simply masked by the occasional insistence that one is saying something important when one speaks of “existence as such.”
Be that as it may, the premise that “existence exists” tells us nothing whatsoever about what exists, and cannot—if we are careful with our language—be used to infer that matter exists altogether independently of mind. (And in fact Branden himself acknowledges—ibid., pp. 201-202—that matter and consciousness, which are clearly not independent of one another in a causal sense, might both arise from some more fundamental reality that is capable of explaining both of them in a way that they do not seem to explain one another.)
Rand, however, is clear that her “primacy of existence” premise is supposed to have atheism as a corollary; she says that the “primacy of consciousness” premise amounts to “the notion that the [nonconscious] universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both).”
But even if this were correct, it would show only that God could not have created “existence as such,” which we have already acknowledged. If the physical universe is a product of an eternal consciousness, then that consciousness presumably exists. That the world we know might be the creation of a divine consciousness does not in any way negate the “primacy of existence” premise; Rand has simply assumed that possibility away by implicitly equating “existence” with the physical universe.
For it is fairly clear from her remarks on “basic constituent elements” that by “nature, i.e., the universe as a whole,” she does mean the physical universe. And her objection to the argument, “If there is no God, who created the universe?” makes sense only on the buried assumption that the physical universe itself is self-existent. This, of course, is the very assumption the propounders of the offensive argument would deny: the physical universe, we have said, just does not seem to be the sort of thing that is even self-explanatory, let alone capable of explaining all the apparently nonphysical features of our world. Those of us who believe in intelligibility will therefore continue to hold out for “mystical insight,” with or without Rand’s blessing.
What has all this to do with her epistemology? Rand is presumably thinking here of her claim that the fact of awareness implies both that one is conscious and that something exists of which one is conscious. She wants to argue that because consciousness always has content, the object of our awareness is always something other than our awareness itself.
Of course it is; but this point applies just as surely when we are thinking of Sherlock Holmes as when we are looking at a table. This bare-bones “realism” means only, as Josiah Royce puts it, that “an object known is other than the idea, or thought, or person, that knows the object. But in this very general sense,” Royce continues, “any and every effort to get at truth involves the admission that what one seeks is in some way more or less other than one’s ideas while one is seeking; and herewith no difference would be established between Realism and any opposing metaphysical view. Idealism, and even the extremest philosophical Skepticism, both recognize in some form, that our goal in knowledge is other than our effort to reach the goal” [The World and the Individual, p. 95].
Rand has thus offered us a false dichotomy, which she has generated through her assumption that the fundamental constituents of the universe do not matter to her thesis. That they do not matter is one of the very points at issue. If nearly any version of objective or absolute idealism is correct— if, for example, Timothy Sprigge is right that (as he argues in The Vindication of Absolute Idealism) the fundamental constituents of existence are little nuggets of “experience” or T.H. Green is right that (as he maintains in his Prolegomena to Ethics) relations, in order to exist, must be constituted by an objectively existing intelligence—then neither “existence” nor “consciousness” is “primary”; either one considered alone is an abstraction which, in reality, cannot occur without the other. But on any such view, we are not justified in equating “existence” with “nature” or the “physical universe.”
