If Reality Exceeds Conceptualization, So Can Conceptualization Exceed Reality?

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Having hardened her philosophy in cement and achieved a cultlike Shoes Online following as the guru of the school of Objectivism, Rand vilified those who disagreed with her. Sometimes she even "excommunicated" close followers who deviated from her exact line without seriously considering what they were claiming.

In her need for certainty, Rand became as locked into her conceptual framework as one can be in any dogmatic discourse, denying the very independence of thinking to others that she claimed for herself (Walker). Her arrogance reminds us that human excess may lead to error and injustice on the part of an individual or a collective.

If reality exceeds conceptualization, so can conceptualization exceed reality? The human capacity for excess invades all Utopias, including Rand's and Marx's. This propensity Discount Shoes is exactly why humanity is capable of immorality, not simply amorality as the Social Darwinists would prefer to think.

In other species, killing, theft, and deception are ...
... justified and balanced ecologically by being limited to basic survival, but humans may destroy other people, other species, and they unjustifiably and thus, as a social species, require a moral social contract that is individually validated. That is why one must examine oneself first in order to deal with wrongs in the rest of society.

The main problem with locating rationality in the single mind alone is Rand's assumption that the objective world external to consciousness is accurately accessible to consciousness (Introduction 55).

Although she gives language and socialization a role in individual concept formation, she assumes that social influences contaminate more than assist that process, because groupthink enforces conformity— as if collective experience has little rational basis (Introduction 19-21). Crucially, she does not explain how one's process of interpreting sensory data as percepts and con-cepts through society's language can allow one to stand outside social influences.

Considering that even creatures in the wild find perceptions not only accurate but also deceptive—presumably interpreting sensory data only through collective evolutionary experience, i.e., instinct—how much more uncertain are human perceptions, additionally mediated by concepts Rand's mistake is not recognizing that one can accept as axiomatic the existence of the world and still realize that, in a sense, it is illusory because it is dependent on a sensory apparatus that is mediated.

Rand fears skepticism, which she primarily blames on Immanuel Kant, for abdicating all contact with reality in pure subjectivity. However, by accepting uncertainty and illu-soriness, one may be more motivated to test percepts and concepts rationally for greater accuracy, including consulting others' observations.

Self is the key concept that suffers from Rand's need for certainty. I agree with her that the human mind registers not only external phenomena, but also locates the center of observation, the actively conscious subject, in one's own individuality. But the crucial role of society in facilitating a child's cognitive awareness of self, by naming individuals and mirroring self-awareness, is not acknowledged by Rand.

In her theory, once the self signifies the child's individuality, it remains constant in that function as a conceptual "unit" of abstraction—an end-product of the cognitive process, not a unified ontological "essence" (Introduction 52, 56, 83).6 Assuming that the self is a constant unit of identity, operating almost independently of the social imagination, Rand disregards the variable contents of individual self-images.