This post is part of a series on Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff. The last post wrapped up the final section of Chapter 1, all about the Objectivist view on Reality. Today, we dive into a topic, Sense Perception.
The Bridge Between Metaphysics and Epistemology
As Peikoff identifies, the Objectivist view of metaphysics is very limited. It simply identifies the fact of existence and the corollaries that follow from that. It does not offer any guidance on how to achieve goals. That, instead, is the realm of epistemology.
Objectivist epistemology rests on the premise that humans can acquire knowledge only if they perform certain, definite processes. Humans cannot accept ideas at random or simply because they feel like it.
Why not? Because knowledge is knowledge of reality, and existence has primacy over consciousness. In other words, to gain knowledge of what’s out there, we cannot stay inside our own heads and let our ideas and values follow from our emotions or wishes or desires.
Human consciousness is conceptual. It is neither automatic nor infalible. Indeed, humans can err in thinking. They can distort, deny, and depart from reality in their thinking. Thus human consciousness needs a method of cognition. This method is epistemology. It guides humans in thinking so that our thinking can remain aligned with reality.
Necessary Groundwork
However, before we dive into Epistemology, we first need to cover the concepts of sense perception and volition.
The Objectivist position holds that all concepts are integrations of sense perception. It holds that all humans are born without any innate ideas (i.e. Plato’s Forms). At birth, the human mind is a blank slate – or a tabula rasa as according to Aristotle. All thinking, and all ideas, rest upon human senses. Or, as Peikoff states:
If seeing is not believing, then thinking is worthless
The entire realm of epistemology rests upon the premise that cognition is not automatic. If humans cannot choose how to use their cognition, then discussing how they should use it is worthless. If the ideas that a human being holds are simply determined by the forces acting upon his/her mind, then the entire field of proof, validation, persuasion, and argument are completely useless. Or, as Peikoff states again:
Without volition, there can be no standards
Validity of the Senses as an Axiom
That the senses provide valid information to the mind is a question that is outside the realm of proof. To prove an idea is true means to reduce it back to the level of sense perception. At the point you get to the level of sense perception, proof is no longer possible. All that is possible is to simply point and say “look!”
The validity of the senses is an axiom. And it is a corollary of the axiom of consciousness. The axiom of consciousness holds that humans are conscious of what is. And if they are conscious of what is, then they must have a means to be aware. The means are the senses, and thus the senses must be valid. As Peikoff puts it.
If man is conscious of what is, then his means of awareness are means of awareness (i.e. they are valid)
Beyond this, it is evident that the sense organs function automatically. They have no capacity for choice. They have no capacity to invent information that isn’t there, to distort the information they pass along, or to deceive the mind. It is the role of the mind, and the role of the process of cognition, that must identify sense perceptions and integrate them into concepts.
A Stick in Water
Consider the classic example of distorted sense input of how a straight stick appears to bend when half of it is submerged beneath water. The Objectivist position holds that this is not an example of the senses failing. Instead, it is an example of the senses are reliable.
This is because the senses do not merely respond to a single attribute (i.e. the shape of the stick) in a vacuum. Instead, the senses respond to the full context of the facts of reality. In this example, the senses are responding to the fact that light travels at a different speed through air than through water.
The sense perceptions are accurate. Thinking that the stick is actually bent when it is slid underwater is an error in cognition – in integrating the information that the senses are sending. It is not a failure of the senses themselves.
What of Dreams?
The other classic example of sense error is the phenomenon of dreams. But dreams simply are not an example of sense perception. Dreams are the result of the conscious mind simply contemplating its own content.
But aren’t dreams an example of the failure of human knowledge? After all, how do we really know that we are humans? How do we know that we are not simply butterflies dreaming that we are people. For this, Peikoff turns to Aristotle to furnish the answer.
As Aristotle put it, there is no difficulty distinguishing a dream from what is real. In fact, that is why we have the word “dream”. The only reason that the word “dream” has any meaning is because we know that dreams are not real, and that reality is not a dream. Were it otherwise, we would have no such word, and no such idea.
Wrap Up
That’s quite a bit of content for today! We covered a look ahead at the rest of this chapter – building the bridge from metaphysics to the next topic, epistemology. We covered the necessity of volition (i.e. free will) at a high level. And finally, we explored how we know the senses to be valid, including answer to two common attacks on the validity of sensory input. Until next time!
Ryan Sawatzky 