Greetings!
I am VERY pleased to be on this board. I do believe that there is no nasty aggregate of people here to thwart me! I use the term "nasty" because that is the word Diana Hsieh employed with respect to this forum. I was amazed at such a strong term. Well, I am in my early thirties. I have been reading or studying Ayn Rand and her post-contemporaneous followers for 15 years. As of a couple of years ago, I took upon myself the task of learning the details of the Objectivist view of man, and just how it logically leads to to self-sustaining virtues (i.e.rationality). I have done this through hours of studying Chapters 6 and 7 of Leonard Peikoff's book. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand .
Now, in the past couple of months, I have become spontaneously interested in Jean-Paul Sartre in particular and existentialism in general. When I was reading The Age of Reason , a novel by Sartre, I can't tell you how much I loved going to cafes and reading it after work. I would call that a Romantic book because its hero is constantly making choices in order to preserve his primary value, which is freedom. I plan on reading the novel The Reprieve, which is the second book in Sartre's "Roads to Freedom" series (The Age of Reason is the first book in that series). But now I am reading The Stranger by Albert Camus and after that I will probably want to read Camus' The Plague.
My impression is that Objectivists do not think that existentialism is a worthwile philosophy. Ayn Rand certainly portrayed it in an unflattering light. Guess what: I don't care! From what I have read, it is composed of valorous attempts at arriving at truthful philosophical points; it is also composed of actual truths. By the way, in a book about the history of philosophy, after reading passsages about Sartre I wrote in the margin: "Is existentialism the sick man's Objectivism"?
Anyway, this is the first Objectivist board I have been on. I am a poet but am not a widely published one. I look forward to sharing my art here with you.
Sincerely.
ValueChaser