Month: July 2013

In January and February of 2009 I wrote a number of posts critical of Ayn Rand.  The Objectivists, as they call themselves, showed up in force to defend their master.  I want to revisit one of the topics today to see if what I said then still holds up.  The occasion for this exercise is my having found Allan Gotthelf's On Ayn Rand (Wadsworth 2000) in a used bookstore.  Gotthelf is a professional philosopher who teaches at Rutgers.  So I thought that if anyone is able to disabuse me of my extremely low opinion of Ayn Rand he would be the one to do it.

On p. 48 of Gotthelf's book, we find:

The "first cause" (or "cosmological") argument maintains that God is needed as the creator and sustainer of the material universe.  But that is to say that existence needs consciousness to create or sustain it.  It makes a consciousness — God's consciousness — metaphysically prior to existence.  But existence exists.  It can have no beginning, no end, no cause.  It just is.  And consciousness is a faculty of awareness, not of creation.  The first cause argument violates both the axiom of existence and the axiom of consciousness.

Now axioms are self-evident truths needing no proof. (37)  So if the cosmological argument violates the two axioms mentioned, it is in bad shape indeed!  But what exactly are the axioms?

According to the axiom of existence, "Existence exists."  Gotthelf takes this to mean that Something exists. (37)  If that is what it means, then it is indeed a self-evident truth.  For example, it is self-evident (to me) that I exist, which of course entails that something exists.  But it is equally self-evident (to me) that I am conscious.  For if I were not conscious then I would not be able to know that I exist and that something exists.  "That one exists possessing consciousness is the axiom of consciousness, the second philosophic axiom." (38)

The first axiom is logically prior to the second.  This is called the primacy of existence and it too is axiomatic though not a separate axiom. "The thesis that existence comes first — that things exist independent of consciousness and that consciousness is a faculty not for the creation of its objects but for the discovery of them — Ayn Rand call the primacy of existence." (39)

Now how does the cosmological argument (CA) violate these axioms?  Gotthelf tells us that the argument makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, and therefore violates the axiom of consciousness.  But it does no such thing.

'Existence' just means all existing things taken collectively, as Gotthelf points out. (p. 48, n. 6)  So if the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, then the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things.  But this is just false: the CA does not make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to God's existence, nor does it make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to the existence of abstract objects.  So the CA does not make the divine consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things.  What it does is make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to some existing things, to contingent beings, including all material beings.

One reason, and perhaps the main reason, why the vast majority of professional philosophers consider Ayn Rand to be a hack is that she argues in an intolerably slovenly way.  She gives arguments so porous one could drive a Mack truck through them.  It is surprising to me that a philosopher with Gotthelf's credentials could uncritically repeat these arguments in the same slovenly way.  Surely he understands the difference between all and some.  Surely he can see that the argument of his that I quoted is a bad argument trading as it does on an equivocation on 'existence' as between all existing things and some existing things.

A cosmological arguer could cheerfully grant that the following are self-evident truths: Things exist; consciousness exists; the existence of conscious beings is metaphysically prior to their being conscious.  The existence of God is logically consistent with each of these truths and with the three of them taken in conjunction.

One of the problems with Rand is that she smuggles substantive, controversial content into what she calls her axioms.  I grant that it is axiomatic that "existence exists" if that means that something exists.  But how is it supposed to follow from this that the things that exist "have no beginning, no end, no cause"?  My desk exists, but it obviously had a beginning, will have an end, and had a cause.

Or does she and Gotthelf mean that what has no beginning, end, or cause is that something or other exists?   That is rather more plausible, but obviously doesn't following from the trivial truth that something exists. 

Gotthelf uses retortion to show that it is undeniable that something exists. (37)  For if you maintain that nothing exists, you succumb to performative inconsistency.  The propositional content of the statement that nothing exists is shown to be false by the existence of the speech act of stating, the existence of the one who speaks, and the existence of the context in which he speaks.  But please note that there is nothing performatively inconsistent in stating that the things that exist have a beginning, an end, and a cause.

There are similar 'smuggling' problems with respect to the axiom of consciousness.  It is indeed axiomatic and self-evident that conscious beings exist.  And it too can be proven retorsively.  For if you maintain that no one is conscious, then your performance falsifies the content of your claim.  (38)  But how is it supposed to follow from conscious beings exist that every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists independently of the consciousness?  For this is what Rand and Gotthelf need to show that "The very concept of 'God' violates the axioms . . . ." (49)  They need to show that "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of." (49)

Rand and Gotthelf are making two rather elementary mistakes.  The first is to confuse

1. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something (objective genitive)

with

2. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists. (objective genitive).

(1) may well be true; (2) is obviously false.  One who consciously seeks the Fountain of Youth seeks something, but not something that exists.  There can be no consciousness without an object, but it does not follow that every intentional object exists. 

The second mistake is to think that (2) follows from conscious beings exist.  One lands in performative inconsistency if one denies that conscious beings exist.  One does not if one denies (2). 

It is important not to confuse the subjective and objective genitive construals of (2).  (2) is plainly false if the genitive is objective.  (2) is trivially true if the genitive  is subjective.  For it is trivially true that every consciousness is some existing thing's consciousness. 

One gets the distinct impression that Rand and Gotthelf are confusing the two construals of (2).  They think that because consciousness is always grounded in the existence of something, that every object of consiousness must be an existent object.

Gotthelf's claim that  "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of" (49)  is plainly false and deeply confused.  For one thing, God is conscious of himself and of all necessarily existent abstract objects.  And 'after' the creation of the universe, he has that to be conscious of as well.

What Rand does is simply smuggle the impossibility of a universe-creating conscious being into her axioms.  Gotthelf uncritically follows her in this.  But that has all the benefits of theft over honest toil, as Russell remarked in a different connection.

I come to the same conclusion via  different routes in Existence, God, and the Randians and Peikoff on the Supernatural. 

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Ayn Rand on the "Abysmal Bastard" C. S. Lewis