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Andrew Joseph Sandberg

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Everything posted by Andrew Joseph Sandberg

  1. I have yet to meet an honest Objectivist on this forum, so I will not be visiting again. If you take offense at my accusation, feel free to refute it, but I will not be reading it. I would say "may God have mercy on your souls," but since God is a fiction, I suppose you're doomed.
  2. Alan Watts claimed that reality is a manifestation of vibrating nothingness (his words; not mine). He is a supernaturalist through and through.
  3. This is a dishonest representation of Alan Watts. What Watts was actually advocating was viewing the world without concepts. His primary argument was formatted as such: He would begin by discussing the dichotomy between spiratualists and materialists and then claiming that niether is correct because they rely on the concepts of a "material world" and a "spiritual world", while reality, he claimed, is not a concept and therefore cannot be labeled "spiritual" or "material"- these terms bieng conceptual in nature. The basis of his teachings in meditation were experiencing life without using concepts because these are a barrier between your mind and reality. What he evaded in this argument is that man is a conceptual animal- that concepts are man's means of experiencing reality, and that a life lived without concepts is not a human life at all. The Objectivist interpretation of Zen Buddhism was given by Ayn Rand herself in her brief mentions of Existentialism, and implicitly in the character of Ivy starnes in Atlas Shrugged. The term Ayn Rand coined (in a related, but much broader context) for the mentality that Buddhism treats as ideal is the "anti-conceptual mentality". p.s. What "box"? Blank out. What "preconceived notions"? Blank out. Who's "we"? Blank out.
  4. Today on MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) Garrison Keillor paid a brief tribute to Ayn Rand, it being her birthday. His description of her philosophy was not entirely clear, but I was immensely excited to here her name on the radio by chance, and equally shocked by it, Garrison Keillor being an ardent Liberal. I find it encouraging that she is now respected enough that her name can be mentioned without inciting a torch and pitchfork yeilding mob. ...Which reminds me of a video I recently watched. It is a panel discussion with four Objectivist intellectuals discussing the Fountainhead's influence on today's culture. The panel includes Harry Binswanger, Edwin Locke, and Yaron Brook. It can be found here <http://www.americanwriters.org/archives/player/rand.asp>
  5. I'll do it. I take the position that Ayn Rand's views on sex are completely in accordance with man's nature. Specify how you would like to start.
  6. By William Blake Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare sieze the fire? And what shoulder, & what art. Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
  7. A beautiful woman as such is of the same value as a flower or sunset. You ask what value it adds to a life. Beauty is the value.
  8. I am aware of the difficulty of creating art, but I don't judge works in relation to the artist or his longterm ambitions. I merely judge the work as an end in itself.
  9. You do not exist independently from existence. You are a consciousness- therefore conscious of reality. Your consciousness depends on something to be conscious of. Not to mention the fact that you exist. Something which exists cannot exist independently from existence.
  10. Joy is the feeling associated with successful action. Pain is the feeling associated with failure. Since all objective evaluations of success and failure must be subordinated to life as the standard of value, then fundamentally speaking joy is the feeling of life, pain the feeling of death. Orgasm being the most intense of all physical pleasures, Ayn rand deemed it a profound state of "metaphysical joy," or in other words- a heightened state of experiencing one's own existence, a state of consciousness where one's ephemeral emotional experience touches the core of its own standard. This is poorly phrased question, but I imagine that you are asking why one would attach psychological importance to the act of sex. The answer, as I have said above, is that pleasure serves a specific objective purpose in the life of a conscious entity. If you divorce psychological value from the act of sex, what value is left. To quote John Galt "...man is indivisible entity, an integrated unit of two attributes: of matter and consciousness..." A rational man does not divorce experience from value. Any man who does, succeeds only in divorcing himself from existence.
  11. A chair in a room would be the object of one's consciousness, and one must be conscious of it in some form. One cannot be conscious of something without being conscious of it in a certain way. You are making the Kantian mistake of calling a man blind for having eyes. Consciousness does not "subject" objects; it identifies them.
  12. I think it is important to discern the fact that although Vermeer may have intended "The Last Judgement" to be of conceptual importance, it does not act that way on a universal level. To understand such symbolism one needs a specialized knowledge of christianity and art. Art is for man- not man the scientist, or man the theologian, or even man the artist, but man as such. The theme of a painting must be available to the viewer by a process of induction from the content provided. Their is no specific content in this painting that connotes an allegorical theme. Like all of Vermeer's paintings, the theme of "Woman Holding a Balance" is epistemological- the objectivity of human consciousness in regard to perception, or as Ayn Rand stated "the contextual nature of our perception of light"(RM). I would like to say, personally that I love this painting- the deep shadows, the lustrous textures, the brilliant exchange of light and dark, the directed rythms of orange and blue, and the wonderful twinkling display of fine jewels. It is among what I would name Vermeer's greatest works, and it gives me a pleasure in contemplation rivaled by few other works of art.
  13. feminine romantic and and Besides the David I know of no sufficient examples of masculinity as sole theme
  14. These are just delightful. I am so grateful to have seen them. The cigarette add made me proud to be a smoker.
  15. I want to retract my statement about that painting at top of the boy in blue. Comparing it to Vermeer was impetuous of me. I suppose I was excited to finally see a modern work, besides Dali and Capuletti which actually brings light to an abstract level.
  16. I agree with JASKN if I understand him correctly. Larson's figures do not connote a clear enough context of the presuppositions necessary in the presentation of an ideal- i.e. the actions of a living consciousness. They bare no justice to what the ideal of our philosophy has the capacity to look like. Real Objectivists are incredible looking, and art should bring them to an even higher level of perfection. The woman in Winter Evening is just a normal unextraordinary woman. On more esthetic grounds, his colors are flat, patchy and comicbook-like, he has childish sense of foreshortening, and he degrades the potential of oil by using acrylic techniques. I don't want to completely disregard Mr. Larsen. Some of his paintings show great potential- in thematic subject alone- mainly his skyscraper in the clouds paintings, but even these wreak of desperation in their explicitness.
  17. I find this painting, like most of Bryan Larson's work to be lacking in vision and ambition. The style does not speak of a glorious sense of life, but of a consciousness trying to prove that it has one. The major fault lies in technique. It is stiflingly naturalistic. What I see, when looking at his work is not theme and subject filtered through a rigidly exacting standard of judgment, but rather a conformist lost in a philosophy (and/or career) he has not understood or does not truly love. On a personal level I find his themes too vague and implicit (those which are not imitations of greater artists' work). I really enjoy the painting you posted of the young man in a blue shirt. Not so much his face, but the shirt is so absracted. It approaches the quality of the tablecloth in Vermeer's "Mistress and Maid".
  18. Joy is the feeling of being alive. The rational man knows that his mind(soul) is a tool for survival, and therefore so long as he lives he will not allow pain to be an embedded part of his soul. The man who identifies life with suffering has made a compromise between life and death, between self and non-self.
  19. You actually listen to a band called Collective Soul(not to mention those other tribal disintegraters), and dare call yourself an Objectivist?
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