Objectivism: Strategic Insights and Tactical Mastery in Modern Warfare

By Fouad Sabry

What is Objectivism

Objectivism is a philosophical system named and developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it 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, and reason as his only absolute".

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Objectivism

Chapter 2: Ayn Rand

Chapter 3: Leonard Peikoff

Chapter 4: Bibliography of Ayn Rand and Objectivism

Chapter 5: Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

Chapter 6: David Kelley

Chapter 7: Harry Binswanger

Chapter 8: Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

Chapter 9: The Romantic Manifesto

Chapter 10: Objectivist movement

(II) Answering the public top questions about objectivism.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Objectivism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 2, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Objectivism

Ayn Rand, a Russian-American author and philosopher, created the philosophical theory known as objectivism. She defined it as the view of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, constructive success as his finest activity, and reason as the ultimate absolute.

The central tenets of Objectivism are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that humans have direct contact with reality through sense perception (see direct and indirect realism), that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (see rational egoism), and that the only social system consistent with this morality is individualism.

Academic philosophers have generally paid Rand's philosophy little consideration or disregarded it, Rand's philosophical concepts were first articulated in her novels, particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In her journals The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter, as well as in non-fiction books such as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness, she built on them further.

The essence of my philosophy is the notion of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral end of his life, constructive success as his finest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Existence, consciousness, and identity are the first axioms of Rand's philosophy.

Rand argues that acquiring knowledge beyond what is supplied by perception requires both volition (or the exercise of free will) and a specific technique of validation involving observation, concept development, and the application of inductive and deductive reasoning. For instance, a serious believe in dragons does not imply that dragons exist in reality. It is important to establish the veracity of a claimed piece of knowledge by a process of proof that identifies its basis in reality.

Consciousness, according to Ayn Rand, has a specific and finite identity, just like everything else; consequently, it must work according to a specific way of validation. A piece of knowledge cannot be disqualified because it was obtained through a certain procedure and in a particular format. Thus, for Ayn Rand, the fact that awareness must contain its own identity implies the rejection of both universal skepticism based on the limits of consciousness and any claim to revelation, emotion, or faith-based belief.

All knowledge, according to the Objectivist epistemology, is ultimately founded on perception. The given, the obvious, are perceptions, not sensations. Therefore, Rand rejected Kant's distinction between things as we experience them and things as they are in actuality. Rand penned

The attack against man's consciousness and, more specifically, his conceptual faculty has depended on the uncontested premise that any information acquired through a conscious process is necessarily subjective and cannot conform to the objective facts of reality, since it is processed knowledge … [but] all knowledge is processed knowledge—whether on the sensory, level of perceptual or intellectual.

The term unprocessed refers to knowledge received without cognitive tools.

Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology devotes the most detail to the theory of concept generation, the part of epistemology to which she devotes the most attention. She argued that conceptions are produced through the exclusion of measurement. Peikoff explained it as follows::

To form a concept, one mentally isolates a group of concretes (of distinct perceptual units) on the basis of observed similarities that distinguish them from all other known concretes (similarity is the relationship between two or more existents that possess the same characteristic(s), but in different measure or degree); then, by omitting the particular measurements of these concretes, one integrates them into a single new mental unit: the concept (a potentially unlimited number). By choosing a perceptual symbol (a word) to label it, the integration is completed and maintained. A idea is the conceptual integration of two or more units with the same distinguishing feature(s), with their specific measures eliminated.

In accordance with Rand, In this context, measurements omitted" does not imply that measurements are considered nonexistent; rather, it indicates that measurements exist but are not specified. Measurements are a crucial component of the procedure.