Primacy of Consciousness

The primacy of consciousness is the Objectivist name for the premise that consciousness is metaphysically prior to reality — that existence depends on, is created by, or is shaped by some consciousness. Objectivism rejects it as the fundamental error underlying religion, subjectivism and modern philosophy alike, and treats it as the contradictory of the primacy of existence.

“A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Galt's Speech", Atlas Shrugged

The argument against it

The refutation is not empirical. It turns on what the word "consciousness" names.

Consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Awareness is awareness of something; that is not an incidental feature of the concept but the whole of it. A consciousness with no object would have no content, no function and no way to be identified as consciousness at all. Existence therefore has to be in place before awareness of it is possible.

Anyone asserting the primacy of consciousness has to use that faculty to make the assertion, and has to appeal to facts, evidence and logic to persuade anyone of it. He is thus relying on the relationship he is denying — an instance of the fallacy of the stolen concept.

Three forms

Objectivism identifies the same premise operating in three ways, distinguished by whose consciousness is taken to be primary.

The supernatural form. A cosmic consciousness created or sustains reality, and facts are ultimately expressions of its will. Miracles, revelation and the notion that morality is whatever God commands all follow from it. See Religion and Mysticism.
The social form. The group, the culture, the consensus or the collective determines what is true. This is the form Rand regarded as dominant in modern intellectual life, since it lets a person retain the feeling of objectivity — he is not merely making things up, others agree — while abandoning the object. See Collectivism and Subjectivism.
The personal form. The individual's own feelings, wishes or "perspective" determine reality for him. It is the least common as an explicit position and the most common as a practice, because it cannot survive being stated plainly.

The three are variants of one error, and Objectivism holds that the first two are not more respectable than the third, only more diffuse.

In the history of philosophy

Rand traced the premise from Plato's realm of Forms, where the world available to the senses is a degraded copy of something grasped by a faculty other than perception, through to its modern climax in Kant.

Kant's claim, on the Objectivist reading, is that the mind's own structure determines the form of everything it can experience, so that whatever is real independently of us is by definition unknowable. Rand's objection is not that this makes the mind active — all cognition is an activity — but that it treats the means of awareness as a barrier to its object, so that the more one knows about how knowing works, the less one is entitled to claim about what is known. See Skepticism and Realism.

The consequences she drew out are that the successors who dropped Kant's noumenal world kept the structure: if the mind constitutes the only reality available, the remaining question is which mind. Hegel's answer was history, the pragmatists' was what works for a community, and the later answer was the group, the class or the culture.

Common misunderstandings

That believing in God is the only version. The social form does the more practical damage. A person who has no religion but treats "everyone knows" as a standard of truth holds the same premise.
That it means consciousness has no effect on anything. Objectivism holds the opposite about action: a man's thinking directs his conduct, and his conduct remakes his surroundings. What consciousness cannot do is alter facts as such, without action and independently of the identities involved.
That the disagreement with Kant concerns whether perception has a form. It does not. Objectivism holds that all perception occurs in some form, determined by the nature of the object and of the perceiving apparatus, and that the form is how the object is grasped rather than a screen in front of it. See Senses and Perception.
That it is a harmless abstraction. Rand's claim was that it is the root of the arbitrary as an accepted mode of assertion, and so of the belief that questions between men are settled by authority, revelation or consensus rather than by evidence. See Faith.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Galt's Speech", Atlas Shrugged. Random House, 1957.
Rand, Ayn. "The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" and "For the New Intellectual", Philosophy: Who Needs It and For the New Intellectual.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 1.

External links

Primacy of Existence vs. Primacy of Consciousness at the Ayn Rand Lexicon

Metaphysics Topics
Axioms: Existence, Consciousness, Identity • Corollary: Causality, Primacy of Existence
Reality: Primacy of Existence, Existents, the Metaphysically Given versus the Man Made