Objectivism -2

Ayn Rand's philosophy is based on three axioms: the Axiom of Existence, the Law of Identity, and the Axiom of Consciousness. Rand defined an axiom as "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. As Leonard Peikoff noted, Rand's argumentation "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are axioms that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable.

Objectivism holds that reality exists independent from consciousness; that individual persons are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that human beings can gain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest; that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform man's widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and respond to.

The Objectivist ethic begins with a meta-ethical question: why do human beings need a code of values? The Objectivist answer is that humans, as beings of volitional consciousness, need such a code in order to survive as human beings.

Objectivism maintains that human beings, unlike lower organisms, cannot act automatically to further their own survival. For man, the conceptual faculty is his tool for survival. An organism that possesses a faculty of sensation relies on its pleasure-pain mechanism; an animal that operates at the level of perception can use its perceptions to instinctively go through its essentially cyclic life; but a human being must rely on an integrated whole of his perceptual (rooted in sensations) and conceptual faculties.

(Contributed by Padma)

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