where Rand spins out incongruously into mysticism. That's news to me ... Details, please.
I would be intereted in this too. If there is one thing Rand cannot be accused of, it is mysticism.
Since mysticism is any supposed knowledge from any supposed source other than objective reason from objective evidence, that would make you a mystic. How do you make Rand a mystic, since objective reason is the only source for knwoledge she accepted?
Hank
Pardon my piquing phrase, "...Rand spins out incongruously into mysticism."
Rand spins out whenever she confronts the philosophically/personally "mystical" in life, i.e., wherever she find anything she cannot explain in dianoetic/practical ways. Effectively she states that any individual must deny anything outside of an experience of material cause and effect. She contradicts herself by saying that while her A=A, what another has found to be A does not equal her A, if he cannot present her its perfect set of natural evidences.
In doing so, she sets up self as her own mystical basis for "objective" truth. (Mystical, because she cannot through her own objectivism necessarily prove that her A is A for someone who is not aware of it, nor that another's A is anything she should believe, until all required natural evidence as been presented her.) Instead of humbly allowing for the possiblity that something not proven to her may yet exist and placing reasonable limits on herself, she sets her sentience up, unreasonably as her own god, her own source. In that way, her code of self-based objectivism becomes her own mystical source. Instead of allowing for what is mystical, she tries to deny anything mystical, but instead, her principle becomes that her own sentience is mystically/inexplicably, her basis for truth.
Concomitantly, she never finds a consistent basis for truth for all, despite propounding her objecivity.
One way of pointing out this absurdity, is to ask what happens to someone's truth, when he gets Alzheimers and forgets the natural evidence of it? (A ceases be A -- hate it when that happens.)
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39bd07f86cb4.htm