Reading Notes: December 16th, 2021

“One of the most important and fundamental elements in the Objectivist philosophy is the concept of man as a being of volitional consciousness….The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not….Psychological determinism denies the existence of any element of freedom or volition in man’s consciousness.” (Rand and Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, May, 1963)  

“Every state of consciousness involves two fundamental attributes: the content (or object) of awareness, and the action (or process) of consciousness in regard to that content.” (Rand and Branden, “The Contradiction of Determinism,” The Objectivist Newsletter, January, 1963) 

“There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind.” (Rand, “Aristotle,” The Objectivist Newsletter, May, 1963) 

“Man’s soul or spirit is his consciousness; the motor of his consciousness is reason; deprive him of freedom, i.e., the right to use his mind—and what is left of him is only a physical body, ready to be manipulated by the strings of any tribe.” (Rand, “Requiem for Man (Part III),” The Objectivist, Sept 1967) 

“Now the deepest thing Objectivism has in common with Aristotle—and it has many things in common—is this: Aristotle was the first to grasp what most people still do not, namely, that everything that exists is a specific, concrete entity, or an aspect of one, such as an action of an entity, an attribute of an entity, a relationship it bears, etc. But the base of everything is an entity—not an idea or abstraction.” (Rand, The Art of Non-Fiction, 28) 

“By existence, I mean objective reality, i.e., that which can be perceived by a human consciousness. That which exists in your own mind is only a state of consciousness.” (Rand, The Art of Non-Fiction, 73)  

“Objectivists are not dualists in the Platonic definition [of dualism], of two worlds opposed to each other; but that does not make us monists either—monist, meaning, that there is only one entity, and that everything has to be subsumed under that one entity. For instance, “everything is matter”—that’s materialism—“consciousness is an illusion.” Or, “everything is consciousness, therefore matter is just a content of consciousness”—that’s the idealists. Both of those are wrong because the perceivable facts are: there is matter, and there is the faculty of perceiving it. [These facts] are what you get by extrospection and what you get by introspection. Now, you can call that dualism—there’s two [kinds], but they’re integrated in living organisms, they’re not opposed to each other. They obviously have different characteristics. You can drop a ball, like Galileo did, and gravity will pull it down; but you can’t drop your mind. A consciousness of a certain level can introspect; but a stone cannot. I mean, you have a huge list of different attributes, so you cannot subsume one under the other and say that it doesn’t exist. And one of the attributes of consciousness is free will.” (Peikoff, The Peikoff Podcasts, Oct 27th, 2008)