The other night I induced my father to read this blog. He commented that it came across as a stream of consciousness and suggested that, if I turn it into a PhD thesis, I should make it a Socratic dialogue. This is a legitimate point: I tend to pick up ideas, discuss them and reject them. In this dilettantish spirit, I now turn my attention to Objectivist aesthetics. Objectivism is interesting because it presents, I believe, a view of aesthetics that is popular among many educated people (though less so among academics and art professionals). One cannot escape the feeling, when reading Leonard Peikoff’s introduction to the subject, that one is being confronted with plain common sense and it is this sensation that no doubt endears Objectivism to its followers. It is a feeling one does not experience reading, for instance, Heidigger.
For those who do not know, Objectivism is a philosophical system created by Russian refugee Ayn Rand and expressed most famously in her novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged”. Objectivism is a highly systemised theory that begins from the premise that “existence exists” and proceeds to a defence of laissez-faire capitalism. Objectivism is not taken seriously by the academy. Perhaps this is because Rand does not enter into meaningful dialogue with other philosophers. Nevertheless, Objectivism has a strong following among laypeople who share her political convictions, including my father: I have wasted many a boozy lunch trying to persuade him that Objectivism is incorrect. Perhaps the only way one to argue against Objectivism is to apply un-common sense. Certainly, I believe Rand is wrong and that the reasons why she is wrong are as interesting as the theory itself.
To summarise Objectivist aesthetics, we need to start with Rand’s “psycho-epistemology”. Rand argues that people form concepts by integrating a number of different perceptions (called “percepts”); the philosophy of life created by integrating concepts is then embodied concretely in an artwork that is a new percept. Although the real world is highly complex and disorganised, the artist imposes order on this world by selecting those aspects of reality that she considers important. Art is “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgements”. Consequently we can speak of the metaphysics of an artwork (its subject) and of its “psycho-epistemology”, given by its style. The fullest form of aesthetic appreciation occurs when the viewer (or reader or listener) finds his own beliefs, his “sense if life” (a kind of pre-philosophical perspective held by those who have not yet bothered to develop an explicit, coherent philosophy) reflected in the artwork. If a person has a muddled sense of life, then he or she will respond most fully to a muddled artwork. Rand’s often implies that if a person is fully rational then they will naturally accept her conclusions and that anyone who does not is irrational and, at least to some extent, muddled.
However, Rand does not go so far as to say that only those artworks that present an Objectivist perspective are ‘good’. The theory treats aesthetic value and aesthetic appreciation as separate categories. Value is determined ‘objectively’, by estimating the artist’s success in communicating her chosen theme. Aesthetic value does not depend on one’s enjoyment of an artwork. It is in fact perfectly possible to say simultaneously of a painting, for instance, that it is a masterpiece and that one does not like it.
There are various reasons why Objectivist aesthetics is wrong. Rand’s empiricist theory of concept-formation, a kind of hard-cored empiricism, overlooks the fact that most of our knowledge is derived from hearsay (I have argued this before in the instalment “The World”). Her theory furthermore makes no allowance for the role metaphors play in the way we perceive the world. The concept of God, for instance, which even atheists possess, has no foundation in empirical experience and so must be seen as, if anything, a metaphor,
A second reason why Objectivist aesthetics is wrong is that it puts the cart before the horse. The theory suggests that, if our judgment of value is to be founded on an estimate of the artist’s success in communicating her theme, we must know the content of an artwork first. But this ignores the fact that our understanding of the artist’s intent is based on an appraisal of the work itself. We (usually) have no other access to the artist’s intentions. In reality, when we look at a painting, we do not compare the finished work to what we conjecture to be the artist’s intentions; we either find it meaningful or not. And furthermore, we have to put some effort into making sense of the work. Objectivist aesthetics does not take into account the pleasure derived from interpretation.
I admit this is a highly condensed rebuttal of Objectivist aesthetics but I am trying to keep these instalments relatively short.
To sum up, it seems to me that Objectivism provides a great aesthetic theory for people who do not particularly like art. Ayn Rand’s novels are simply well executed melodramas with an extremely narrow moral compass. In this respect, Objectivism is very like Marxism (and Fundamentalist religion): it provides simple answers to the questions posed by a complex world. Perhaps the attraction of Objectivism is based partly on the distance between it and the real world. Ayn Rand in fact frowned on ambiguity and Modernist art and literature generally. However the bulk of the art-world is made up of those soft Lefties who value empathy and pluralism and presumably this counts for something. Perhaps it is the muddled who have the clearest view of reality.