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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/09/18 in Posts

  1. Copied from the Ayn Rand lexicon, here is a relevant quote from Ayn RAnd. A given person’s sense of life is hard to identify conceptually, because it is hard to isolate: it is involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a “personality.” Introspectively, one’s own sense of life is experienced as an absolute and an irreducible primary—as that which one never questions, because the thought of questioning it never arises. Extrospectively, the sense of life of another person strikes one as an immediate, yet undefinable, impression—on very short acquaintance—an impression which often feels like certainty, yet is exasperatingly elusive, if one attempts to verify it. This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression—of oneself or of others—is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one’s mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience: it is the integration of mind and values. There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art. “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto, 31
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  2. . Early Responses to Korzybski Sidney Hook is in that survey of responders - The Nature of Discourse. Hook was Leonard Peikoff’s dissertation advisor. Peikoff has been asked about General Semantics, and he flatly rejected it. Peikoff has mentioned a conversation between Rand and someone who subscribed to GS (whomever it was, it was not Hook, who was a champion of John Dewey). My only exposure to GS was through a man who subscribed to it and who was a big poster on the site Objectivist Living.* Nathaniel Branden
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  3. For example, here Ellis speaks on behalf of Korzybski: First of all, Kozybski is also concealing an all-or-nothing outlook called Aristotelian vs. Non-aristotelian. You are either in the first or in the second system; there is nothing else, according to Korzybski. Such form of concealment is similar to the kind of pathological egoism that all collectivist/altruist tyrants deny and want us to believe they don't have. And second, considering especially that Ellis has written a book denying self-esteem, called The Myth of Self-esteem: How Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Can Change Your Life Forever, then he is on the side of quite a pathological 'altruism' of these collectivist folks we all know from the 20th century, although he would of course deny this, just as would Korzybski, by making us believe that their systems would lead us away from such atrocities, even by making them approach so much closer. That's the essence of the non-identity mentality.
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