Concept Formation By Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand is a fascinating person and an inspiring advocate of freedom. Rand’s passionate and moralistic tone is probably a real part of her appeal and is no less than an equal and opposite reaction to the self- righteousness that is still characteristic of the leftist rhetoric. Rand’s writing emphasizes the philosophic concepts of objective reality in metaphysics, reason in epistemology and rational egoism in ethics. In politics she was a proponent of laissez – faire capitalism and a staunch defender of individual rights, believing that the sole function of a proper government is protect ion of individual rights. She believed that individuals must choose their values and actions solely by reason, and that “Man-every man– is an end in himself,
Indeed, her ideal was Aristotle whose views of substance steered Rand away from a reductionist materialism. Her concepts refer to every characteristic contained in every individual of their kind. This was not the view of Aristotle who realized that if there are natural kinds, they are both essential and accidental characteristics of those kinds. The meaning of concepts would be about essential characteristics. One suspects that Rand was not one to let God claim some superior status to human comprehension and knowledge. Rand’s description of “concept formation” seems more sensible. Qualities are abstracted from experience and formulated into concepts.
Evidently aware of that tension, there is the motivation for Rand’s idea that concepts refer to everything in the objects. That preserves the objectivism of her theory, and so the appropriateness of “objectivism” as the name of it leads down to the paradoxical road of a Leibnizian theory of concepts.

Ayn Rand was once asked if she could present the essence of objectivism while standing on one foot. Her answer
(Rand: 20)
The principle of collectivism is revealed in the beginning of the novel thus:
“It is a fearful word, alone the laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression, the root of all evils....” (Rand: 17)
Equality 7 – 2521, the protagonist, is a freethinker, living in a slave state. The state requires blind obedience to its decrees, which he refuses to render. The collectivism of this society explains why Equality 7–2521 is not permitted to think. If an individual must serve an all-powerful state, it requires obedience from him. Collectivism values a blind, unquestioning allegiance–a willingness to follow orders unthinkingly. The Councils are in no danger from the mindless brutes of a society, whose backs are harnessed for manual labour. The Councils must fear only one for the freethinking mind.
In Anthem, over the Portals of the Palace of the World Council, there were words on marble:
We are one in all and all in one. There are no men but only the great WE, one, indivisible and forever”. (Rand: