Greetings all! It’s been a while since I’ve been online, but I’m excited to become active once again.
I’m not sure how Ayn Rand fares in these waters. It seems like something adolescents and young adults would be more prone to study. I’ve only recently become hip to all the hype. My research has been exclusively online. I thought about reading Atlas Shrugged, but by the time I got around to a book store, I was also shrugging. I ended up buying a road atlas instead. No joke, I thought it would be more useful to my career goals.
So let’s get into it. I want this to be an interactive conversation, so let’s take it one pillar of philosophy at a time. I find that each one becomes more flawed than the previous, slowly diluting the whole worldview into nonsense. Let’s look at metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.
Metaphysics: reality is objective and independent of human consciousness. This is something I can get on board with. I do believe that reality exists regardless of what we happen to think, feel, or believe about it. The whole scientific enterprise seems to be about discovering and understanding this objective reality.
However, it starts to lose me whenever it denies the subjective realm. I see reality as both objective and subjective, like two sides to the same coin. Objectivism rejects this and claims dogmatically that we have direct absolute knowledge of objective reality through our sensory-perception. No further questions needed. It seems to be all downhill from here.
Any thoughts? Counter-arguments? Where are my diehard Objectivists at?
Personally I'm ok with these concepts,
Objectivism as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity,
However IMO, our connection to an object reality via our perceptions isn't a reliable basis for objectivity.