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Why follow reason?

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On 5/15/2018 at 6:14 PM, EC said:

it's just that person's opinion.....can only be answered correctly via quote.

"You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. "-Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual

A living person is to parrot someone who has died... for a philosophy of life?  I don't believe any living Objectivist claims to be Ayn Rand.  Only you can direct the action you take to quote her.  If it were all quotes it would be like she was just here talking to herself... 

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Definitely. The means exist - the O'ist epistemology - the (rewarding)work needs to follow. When one succeeds in creating concepts "from scratch" from one's senses, after to become comfortable applying/implementing the resulting principles back to real things, then one fully owns them and has earned them. This is not a philosophy to learn by rote, nor exclusively by theory, I think.

Edited by whYNOT
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On 5/18/2018 at 5:12 AM, Tenderlysharp said:

"You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. "-Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual

 

 

To "have no sense of reality" ... not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another" - might be taken metaphorically, until one finds that such people actually exist. I've had the feeling of someone who is 'there', but not "there", who functions superficially as, and says and does all the normal, human things, but displays a hollowness, I take as a lack of self.

This is the person I think who is often a-conceptual ("anti-conceptual"). What Rand doesn't indicate here about second-handers, is their absence of "self-value", which he has dissipated into others, along with reality.  The (volitional conceptual/reasoning consciousness, then, evidently from Rand, is the absolute prerequisite for rational selfishness.

One is "centred" by one's conceptual formation, while equally being "grounded" in reality (when one's concepts are).

In short, the second-hander hasn't a "sense of reality", by his failure to conceptualize reality, and he hasn't a valued 'centre', as result. There is also the second-hander's link to altruism.

"Somewhere in that space between..." could be prescient about cyberspace, concerning internet communication and information - 'reality', being 'out there', in amongst 'the mass consciousness', or "collective mind". An absorbing question for me, is if the power of Internet, requiring people's integration, evaluation and conceptualism more than ever before - is also furthering second-handers/altruists/collectivists at a higher rate?

 

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