I am
having a brilliant train journey today, from Gulbarga to Chennai. Kurt Cobain
songs are a wonderful company (miss you kurt) and Ayn Rand kept my mind working most of the
time. I felt that this particular paragraph from her book 'For the New
Intellectual' has to be put up on my blog. The logic seems just perfect. Though
I tried to come up with arguments against the logic and reason that she gives
in the paragraph, I couldn’t really help but get convinced by her thoughts.
''Man's
consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development;
sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, conceptions, that
makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the
brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions
by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform
- and he has to perform it by choice. The process of abstraction, and of
concept-formation is a process of reason, of thought; it is not
automatic nor instinctive nor involuntary nor infallible. Man has to initiate
it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. The pre-conceptual
level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first
syllogism. Man has the choice to think or to evade - to maintain a state of
full awareness or to drift from moment to moment, in a semi-conscious daze, at
the mercy of whatever associational whims the unfocused mechanism of his
consciousness produces. ''
P.S: I am an animal. I will, very soon, be a man
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