Since the objects we perceive have a nature independent of us, it must be possible to distinguish between form and object; between the aspects of the perceived world that derive from our form of perception [such as colors, sounds, smells] and the aspects that belong to metaphysical reality itself, apart from us. What then is the status of the formal aspects? If they are not "in the object," it is often asked, does it follow that they are merely "in the mind" and therefore are subjective and unreal? If so, many philosophers have concluded, the senses must be condemned as deceivers - because the world of colored, sounding, odoriferous objects they reveal is utterly unlike actual reality. This is the problem, a commonplace in introductory philosophy classes, of the so-called "two tables": the table of daily life, which is brown, rectangular, solid, and motionless; and the table of science, which, it is said, is largely empty space, inhabited by some colorless, racing particles and/or charges, rays, waves, or whatnot.
The answer is: we can distinguish form from object, but this does not imply the subjectivity of form or the invalidity of the senses.
The task of identifying the nature of physical objects as they are apart from man's form of perception does not belong to philosophy, but to physics. There is no philosophic method of discovering the fundamental attributes of matter; there is only the scientist's method of specialized observation, experimentation, and inductive reference. Whatever such attributes turn out to be, however, they have no philosophic significance, neither in regard to metaphysics nor to epistemology.
Let us see why, by supposing for a moment that physics one day reaches its culmination and attains omniscience about matter.
At that point, scientists know the ultimate ingredients of the universe, the irreducible building blocks that combine to make up physical objects part from any relationship to man's form of awareness. What these ingredients are I do not pretend to know. For the sake of the argument, let us make the extravagant assumption that they are radically different from anything men know now; let us call them "puffs of meta-energy," a deliberately undefined term. At this stage of cognition, scientists have discovered that the material world as men perceive it, the world of three-dimensional objects possessing color, texture, size, and shape is not a primary, but merely an effect, an effect of various combinations of puffs acting on men's means of perception.
What would this sort of discovery prove philosophically? It would prove nothing.
If everything is made of meta-energy puffs, then so are human beings and their parts, including their sense organs, nervous system, and brain. The process of sense perception, by this account, would involve a certain relationship among the puffs: it would consist of an interaction between those that comprise external entities and those that comprise the perceptual apparatus and brain of human beings. The result of this interaction would be the material world as we perceive it, with all of its objects and their qualities, from men to mosquitoes to stars to feathers.
Even under the present hypothesis, such objects and qualities would not be products of consciousness. Their existence would be a metaphysically given fact; it would be a consequence of certain puff-interactions that is outside of man's power to create or destroy. The things we perceive, in this theory, would not be primaries, but they would nevertheless be unimpeachably real.
A thing may not be condemned as unreal on the grounds that it is "only an effect," which can be given a deeper explanation.
One does not subvert the reality of something by explaining it.
One does not make objects or qualities subjective by identifying the causes that underlie them.
One does not detach the material world as we perceive it from reality when one shows that certain elements in reality produced it.
On the contrary: if an existent is an effect of the puffs in certain combinations, by that very fact it must be real, a real product of the ingredients that make up reality. Man's consciousness did not create the ingredients, in the present hypothesis, or the necessity of their interaction, or the result: the solid, three-dimensional objects we perceive. If the elements of reality themselves combine inevitably to produce such objects, then these objects have an impregnable metaphysical foundation: by the nature of their genesis, they are inherent in and expressive of the essence of existence.
The dominant tradition among philosophers has defined only two possibilities in regard to sensory qualities: they are "in the object" or "in the mind." The former is taken to subsume qualities independent of man's means of perception; the latter is taken to mean "subjective and/or unreal."
This alternative is defective, however. A quality that derives from an interaction between external objects and man's perceptual apparatus belongs to neither category. Such a quality - e.g., color - is not a dream or hallucination; it is not "in the mind" apart from the object; it is man's form of grasping the object. Nor is the quality "in the object" apart from man; it is man's form of grasping the object. By definition, a form of perception cannot be forced into either category. Since it is the product of an interaction [in Plato's terms, of a "marriage"] between two entities, object and apparatus, it cannot be identified exclusively with either. Such products introduce a third alternative: they are not object alone or perceiver alone, but object-as-perceived.
In a deeper sense, however, such products are "in the object." They are so, not as primaries independent of man's sense organs, but as the inexorable effects of primaries. Consciousness, to repeat, is a faculty of awareness; as such, it does not create its content or even the sensory forms in which it is aware of that content. Those forms in any instance are determined by the perceiver?s physical endowment interacting with external entities in accordance with causal law. The source of sensory form is thus not consciousness, but existential fact independent of consciousness; i.e., the source is the metaphysical nature of reality itself. In this sense, everything we perceive, including those qualities that depend on man's physical organs, is "out there".
Those who condemn the senses as deceptive on the grounds that sense qualities are merely effects on men are guilty of rewriting reality. Their viewpoint amounts to an ultimatum delivered to the universe: "I demand that the senses give me not effects, but irreducible primaries. That is how I would have created reality." As in all cases of this fallacy, such a demand ignores the fact that what is metaphysically given is an absolute. Perception is necessarily a process of interaction: there is no way to perceive an object that does not somehow impinge on one's body. Sense qualities, therefore, must be effects. To reject the senses for this reason is to reject them for existing - while yearning for a fantasy form of perception that in logic is not even thinkable.
As to the claim that the racing particles, puffs, or whatever that make up tables do not "look like" the peaceful brown things on which we eat in daily life, this is the literal reverse of the truth. "Looks" means "appears to our visual sense." The brown things are exactly what the puffs "look like." There are not "two tables." The brown things are a particular combination of the primary ingredients of reality: they are those ingredients as perceived by man.
In regard to the senses, the standard argument, long a staple of skeptics, has already been indicated: "A certain object looks red or sounds loud or feels solid, but that is partly because of the nature of human eyes, ears or touch. Therefore, we are cut off from the external world. We do not perceive reality as it really is, but only reality as it appears to man."
Here is the same argument presented by Kantians, in regard to the conceptual faculty: "Certain abstract conclusions are incontestable to us, but that is partly because of the nature of the human mind. If we had a different sort of mind, with a different sort of conceptual apparatus, our idea of truth and reality would be different. Human knowledge, therefore, is only human; it is subjective; it does not apply to things in themselves."
Here is the argument a third time, as applied to logic: "Even the most meticulous proof depends on our sense of what is logical, which must depend in apart on the kind of mental constitution we have. The real truth on any question is, therefore, unknowable. To know it, we would have to contact reality directly, without relying on our own logical makeup. We would have to jump outside of our own nature, which is impossible."
We cannot escape the limitations of a human consciousness, the argument observes. We cannot escape our dependence on human senses, human concepts, human logic, the human brain. We cannot shed human identity. Therefore, the argument concludes, we cannot gain a knowledge of reality. In other words: our consciousness is something; it has specific means and forms of cognition; therefore, it is disqualified as a faculty of cognition.
This argument is not confined to human consciousness. It is an attack on all consciousness, human, animal, or otherwise. No matter how keen an animal's senses, the argument indicts them equally: since the animal cannot escape its organs of perception, it, too, must be imprisoned by them and cut off from reality. The same would apply to a Martian with unearthly senses; such a creature would never encounter things as they are, only things-as-processed-by-the-Martian-mechanism.
What sort of consciousness can percieve reality, in the Kantian, anti-identity approach? The answer is: a consciousness not limited by any means of cognition; a consciousness which percieves no-how; a consciousness which is not of this kind agains that; a consciousness which is nothing in particular, i.e., which is nothing, i.e., which does not exist. This is the ideal of the Kantian argument and the standard i t uses to measure cognitive validity: the standard is not human consciousness or even an invented consciousness claimed to be superior to man's but a zero, a vacuum, a nullity - a non-anything.
In this view, identity - the essence of existence - invalidates consciousness, every kind of consciousness. Or: a means of knowledge makes knowledge impossible. As Ayn Rand observes in a critical formulation, this approach implies that "man is blind, because he has eyes - deaf, because he has ears - deluded, because he has a mind - and the things he percieves do not exist, because he percieves them."
Ayn Rand rejects all these errors, because she rejects their root: she begins not by bewailing the nature of human consciousness, but by insisting on it. The fact that man's cognitive faculties have a nature does not invalidate them; it is what makes them possible. Identity is not the disqualifier of consciousness, but its precondition. This is the base from which epistemology must proceed; it is the principle by reference to which all standards of cognition must be defined.
Authored By Peikoff.
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Edited by SkorpivoMusterion (10/25/05 12:12 AM)
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