March 12, 2002

March 12, 2002

Object of Desire (Correspondance with DA)

I had a brain fart about Ayn Rand the other day while I was snowboarding...made a mental note to bounce it off of you so here goes.

I was talking to some women the other day trying to explain to them how they can objectify men in the same way that men can objectify women. True, the traditional system of values used by your average American man to objectify women is pretty superficial (unrealistic/narrow-minded physical expectations, paradoxical desire to have women appear to be intelligent and confident, yet at the same time helpless
and uncertain of themselves, her willingness to be submissive or respond to authority). But I remarked to the women that they too have their own system of values that are just as superficial (maybe not in society's eyes) if you define superficiality as something that is "on the surface" and easily observed, but yet has nothing to do with how that person relates to them. Women also value certain physical qualities. I once heard a woman say that a man that isn't taller then her (5'5'' in my estimate) in heels is not a man at all. Women value confidence, self reliance, and they too have a paradoxical desire to have a man be sensitive and empathic but still demonstrate some kind of emotional control or even worse demonstrate a limited emotional range personally.

I remarked to the women that men are no more comfortable with being objectified then women are. We accept the rules of the game and although some of us play harder then
others, few can say that they act completely obliviously to the rules. I know few men or women (none who aren't rather old) who don't allow what the opposite sex finds valuable to influence our own values and actions. We live in an objectifying culture.

I looked up the word objectify and this is what I found:

1 : to treat as an object or cause to have objective reality 2: to give expression to (as an abstract notion, feeling, or ideal) in a form that can be experienced by others - it is the essence of the fairy tale to objectify differing facets of the child's emotional experience

To 'cause to have an objective reality' is to give something a reality independently of individual thought, independent of the mind. The whole ideal of objective reality was really popular in medieval philosophies, but its kind of like a religion in that you just have to have faith that there is a reality outside of the mind. So to objectify something is to really take it from the realm of personal experience to the world of symbols and ideas. Symbols and ideas are good for communication, but I think they fail to produce the truth that human experience does. When we objectify someone we no longer are concerned with our relationship to that person and the nature of that relationship...we are no longer concerned about what we are experiencing or capable of experiencing through them, we have created a system of symbols to communicate what they are to ourselves and to others. So strong can these symbols be, that we give them more merit then what we do experience in regards to that person and we begin to trust the objective reality more then we trust our own human reactions and responses.

Whether the objective reality exists or not is a moot philosophical debate though. The truth of the matter is that almost everyone behaves as if there is an objective reality so we might as well acknowledge that fact. This reality of the collective is so powerful and ubiquitous that most of us (except for babies who have yet to learn to communicate on a sophisticated level and who aren't even aware of their own boundaries yet) are hard pressed to determine what is a part of our own reality and part of the objective reality. The two are intertwined and fused to the point that the individuality of either is impossible to determine. My problem with objective reality is that it supercedes the realm of human experience, yet I am only concerned with my experience as a human. I care not to discover the truth but simply to experience a truth, a personal truth, and although my more romantic self likes the idea of sharing that truth with the world...sharing it is a far cry from enforcing it or being arrogant enough to believe that my personal experiences have somehow come closer to the objective reality then anyone else. The objective reality doesn't serve me...I can only serve it, and somehow my experiences have led me to submit to this objective reality (even if it doesn't exist) in order to get some feeling be it happiness, pleasure, content, peace or whatever.

So anyway, all this thought about objectifying and objective reality got me to thinking about Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand called her system of philosophy Objectivism. She based her philosophy on rational thought (which is one of the sturdiest objects in our objective reality). It appears to me that Ayn Rand was trying to unify human minds so that it would become congruent with the objective reality. Of course this is like trying to shape the land around a bridge rather then build the bridge so that it spans the intended gap. Let me say that Ayn believed the objective reality was static and unchanging and for us to discover through honest, fearless, rational thought. I think that Ayn believed that the measure of a man was their ability to be truthful to this objective reality. If they were truthful enough to the objective reality then all of their experiences would become unified with the value system of the objective reality. Its kind of paradoxical that Ayn believed that it was the clear and unfettered mind that was most useful in discovering the objective reality, the same objective reality that denied the omnipotence of the mind.

What do you think?

-dred