/lit/ - Literature

>>19163938
I've already read the Summa, and it suffers from the same flaw that pretty much any text of Christian apologetics suffers from, namely that it asserts what needs to be demonstrated. We can see this as well in the Five Ways, where starting from the end of them, Aquinas never explains why we should call the unmoved mover 'God', much less his specific interpretation of a specific denomination of a specific religion you need to subscribe to in order to worship him properly. Mind you this is just the last step of tge Five Ways, I don't even need to adress the teleology that it's entirely based on, which is little more than the survivorship bias in action

>>19103803
Is this real? I haven't read any of Gardner's stuff but I'm gonna start call of the arcade right now.
>Why not start with call of the crocodile?
I know from the countless shitposts that they can be read in any order.

>>19106381
Common confessions and creeds, most protestants accept the apostles creed and nicene creed for instance even if they don't explicitly say so if you spell it out for them they'll agree, and fundamental beliefs like the solas. Many protestant churches are in open communion with each other, others are not but still affirm other church bodies as legitimate. Different church bodies frequently butt heads and even splinter off but do not go so far as to say everyone belonging to x body is damned, that really only happens with independents and very conservative offshoots.

>>19106532
KJV-onlyism is an English language baptist/fundamentalist belief, it doesn't represent most protestants.
>t seems like in order to accept any sort of biblical canon, they would have to accept the holy spirit was guiding the church
I believe the holy spirit was guiding the church and has never abandoned the church. The question coming into play really is what is fundamental to the church and what is not. I do not believe a specific passing of hands from one figure to another is the only legitimate way for sacraments to be performed, and I do not believe that the call for unity in the church as expressed in the Bible is the same as the belief that the church must follow a stratified hierarchy with spiritual privileges.
I would read this to get an idea of the different views and where they came from because it's a big question and this board doesn't have room for essays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priesthood_of_all_believers

>>19104594
If you decide to read Beyond and Genealogy first, then I'd recommend this reading order for what you posted:

>Twilight of the Idols
>The Antichrist
>The Gay Science
>The Birth of Tragedy
>Human, All Too Human
>Ecce Homo
>Thus Spoke Zarathustra

I wouldn't read The Antichrist before reading Twilight of the Idols, so that should be on the list too. Also, you can actually read The Birth of Tragedy at any point, not just where I placed it; it was Nietzsche's first book, and the only one where he talks at length about the myths of Dionysus, so it's pretty foundational in a sense, but he also criticized the book later on, saying that it was full of the errors of youth, or something to that effect (what he meant was that it was written before he found his "voice," as he was mostly paying his debt to Wagner with this book).

Human, All Too Human is a hard call for me, because I haven't actually read that one in full. I've only read maybe 15% of it. Some might say that you can skip Human altogether because it's the most "awkward" of his books. Either way, I'd read The Birth of Tragedy before that one.

I also added Ecce Homo and Thus Spoke Zarathustra at the end. Ecce Homo is his semi-autobiographical work and the last book he wrote. He gives a general survey of his previous works in that one. It's good to read it at the end rather than at the start because, and this is really Kaufmann's interpretation, the book is partially satirical, a pretty high-level book among his works that can be misunderstood if you're unfamiliar with him (not to say that he is lying in it, but he is being hyperbolic for effect). Zarathustra I place at the end because it's basically the end of his philosophy and companion / guide book for his works, something you can take with you anywhere and refer to at any time because it's all in verse.

>We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new...
>Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius… not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things...
>Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives…there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.
>There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered. He may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
>To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer.... We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts.
>Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.
Can we have a serious discussion about Nabokov's views on literature without resorting to REEEEEEing and shitposting? Yes, Nabokov had some pants-on-head retarded views, specifically about other writers, but can we evaluate his thoughts and ideas about literature regardless of what he himself did/said? What about his idea that truly great fiction appears first and foremost to the mind, and that we should not read for emotional participation but for structure and style (the "precision of poetry" and the "intuition of science")? And specifically, why would this not apply to writers like Faulkner or Dostoevsky or Hemingway?

To be clear, I am not defending Nabokov and I am not attacking him; I just want to have a serious discussion about his ideas on what makes literature great.

> >There are certain states in ordinary sleep in which a man wants to awaken but cannot. He tells himself that he is awake but, in reality, he continues to sleep – and this can happen several times before he finally awakes. But in ordinary sleep, once he is awake, he is in a different state; in hypnotic sleep the case is otherwise; there are no objective characteristics, at any rate not at the beginning of awakening; a man cannot pinch himself in order to make sure that he is not asleep. And if, which God forbid, a man has heard anything about objective characteristics, Kundalini at once transforms it all into imagination and dreams.

This sounds like Gurdjieff is bullshitting or talking out of his ass, right? Like he doesn’t know anything about Kundalini Yoga and Hindu and Tantric teachings about awakening the kundalini shakti from the root chakra at the base of the spine, and/or the genitals, up through the spine until it reaches the sahsrara, crown chakra, thereby reaching enlightenment?

In Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, at some point late into it’s 1,100 pages — I actually read the book three or four times, many years ago — writing this whole thread makes me want to read it again — he has this extremely strange headache passage which sounds bizarre, of course, out of context, but is a nice sample for anyone who wants to see what all this fuss and confusion of the OP is about:

>Just these same substances in beings, according to the fifth deflection of the Sacred Heptaparaparshinokh, have the free possibility of giving, in the manifestations of the common presences of three-brained beings, results not similar but ‘opposite to each other.’ “That is why, in respect of these being-substances, the beings themselves must always be very, very much on their guard in order to avoid undesirable consequences for their entire whole. From the cerebrum of beings a part of these definite substances also goes to serve the planetary body itself, but the other part, passing in a particular way through the ’nerve nodes’ of the spine and the breast, is concentrated in the beings of the male sex, in what are called ‘testicles’ and in the beings of the female sex in what most of your favorites call ‘ovaries,’ which are the place of concentration in the common presences of beings of the ‘being- Exioehary,’ which is for the beings themselves their most sacred possession. You should know that this particular way mentioned is called ‘Trnlva.’"

This is the sex energy going up through the spine to the back then top of the head, leading to ecstatic experiences and enlightenment. Gurdjieff here also makes the warning about how one has to be particularly careful about derangement arising from these experiences and messing around with this stuff without knowing what you’re doing.

>>18956158
OK, everyone else in this thread is wrong so far so here is my approach. I call it “extraordinary language philosophy” in contrast to ordinary language philosophy (OLP, XLP). The “philosophy” part is a misnomer of course.

The first step to curing philosophy is to recognize that it is indeed a specific way of thinking, no more privileged than any other, and that it amounts to a genre of literature with certain conventions and styles. There seems to be no reliable means of making people realize this fact, but here are a few pointers:

Most philosophy defenses tend to revolve around “The Philosophy Shuffle.” Critics will first say that to deny philosophy is itself philosophy. This criticism is dumb because it just expands philosophy to something trivial like “any thought whatsoever.” Philosophers don’t mean this, they have a specific DISCIPLINE.
If this criticism fails, philosophers will turn to saying philosophy is justified in terms of its pragmatic value. It is very difficult to prove that philosophy has anything other than incidental value. The final defense is to say you were only pretending to be retarded and that philosophy is somehow intrinsically valuable, or that it is akin to poetry, but i would just say that it is bad poetry then and keats or marlowe are better than the best philosophical writers.

If we recognize that philosophy IS a specific genre then we need to recognize what the features of it are and how it arises in order to free ourselves from the illusions. Here is a list of texts that are useful in this regard:

1) Cosmopolis - Stephen Toulmin. This talks about how the modern notion of philosophy emerged and the pre-enlightenment, mindset of the renaissance humanists. It fits what you are talking about with a return to earlier, more naive and mystical ways of thought.

2) Must Philosophers rely on Intuitions, by Avner Baz. It details exactly how philosophy is NOT Congruous with ordinary reasoning, and is rather a specific, degenerate genre of thought no more justifiable than any other.
3) The Outlines of Pyrrhonism - The final boss. If you properly read this text you will be free not merely of philosophy but all modes of bad thinking.

>>18950900
>lmao you think communism will abolish what we now call mental illness?
lmao you think mental well-being has nothing to do with living under capitalism? because if it does, then transporting yourself as you are to a communist society, keeping your mental state constant, is a worthless thought experiment.
>you didn't understand my argument. but regardless if you were as serious a reader of marx as you claim you would know of arbeit/tatigkeit distinction
was your argument based solely on the fact that the word "work" implies a division of labour, and you were so kind as to ignore all context and assume that I was actually using it in this way? if so, then you're trying to score cheap points on autistic academic minutiae, because you have no actual arguments to make.
a serious reader of Marx cares about the broad argument and about communism, not about exploiting terminological pedantry in order to undermine Marx's work and turn communism into its opposite.
>why do you think i use the internet more than you?
because I read your posts
>this actually shows you haven't talked to many working class people because in my experience (since i am working class) they seek out liesure time like crazy
how does that contradict me? obviously they want to work as little as necessary like everyone, but they would also immediately understand that the best way to do that is by eliminating useless labour and by having everyone do their fair share of the remaining work. just like Marx said. and this has nothing to do with any regard for NEETs or with pb fantasies about fully-automated space communism.
>they are not excuses. do you think working class people don't have (what we now call) mental illness?
99.9% of young people on social networks who talk like this are pb kids that never had a job and are looking for excuses. so I'll take my chances on this one
working class people don't have the luxury to not work in the first place. they work even when they have "low energy" all the time. if you really want to know, hearing about people like you probably makes their blood boil.
>no idea why students would have some special disposition.
people who tend to become NEETs will always choose to go to university instead of going directly to work, because that lets them extend the idle school life for a couple of years.
>communism is from each according to his abilities, hence what we now call disabled people... will not work as much
no fucking shit dude. the initial quote that got you triggered already said: "no ABLE-BODIED adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz.: to work in order to be able to eat". does your mental disability include being illiterate? I can tell you're a pb loser just from the fact of how hard you ignored that just to find something to feel victimized and have a waste of time of a discussion about. ridiculous.

>>18951553
that's fantastic. remember your own words and stay away from communism.

>>18861534
Oh fuck off liar. Your post is full of LIES again. You also act like a sociopath: I mean, first you lie that someone who is not retarded is retarded, for a reason or another, and then when someone calls you retarded for you presenting some retarded lies to prove that the person you called a retard is a retard, you call them retards back. Now let me dive into pointing out your lies:

>I'll deign to reply to your post
There is NOTHING in my post to make anyone having to DEIGN to reply to it.
>because I'm bored and killing time before the end of the work day
You can not be bored to the point of having to post here, while working.
>This will likely be the only time you ever talk to someone who was there that day
If you had been there, your style of posting would be totally different, you might even not be able to reply to my post out of being upset.
>I'll even ignore that you write like a schizo.
You know as well as anyone that if someone uses capitals here it is to underline the most crucial concepts of the text in getting the message.
>A rifle wouldn't have been too heavy for him to carry
Well thanks for noting but I did not say it was. I said that it was too heavy for him to carry it (as in holding it up) long enough, to carry out a successful mass shooting.
>I don't really see the point in commenting on "muh social IQ."
Yes you see. You called him a "retard", because he could not talk women into sleeping with him. His inability to do it was most likely caused by his low social IQ and he had it low because he was mildly autistic.
>I do know that dumb people love bitching about how having low social/emotional/whatever intelligence doesn't necessarily mean that they (or people like them) are stupid
This one has to be the stupidest lie you put up in your post, representing almost the troll level of stupidity. You know it as well as everybody else, that human intelligence is consisting of different types of intelligence such as social, verbal, mathematical-logical or spatial intelligence.
>but those of us who aren't actually idiots see this for what it is: intellectual cope of the highest order.
Just a cherry on a cake lie to decorate your post consisting of pile of lies.

Now to ponder what you are. Are you just a troll putting up stupid lies or are you actually some kind of a glowie. I mean, what kind of a person posts on /lit/ and knows about guns? It can not be any kind of intellectual or literature lover only. There's a lot right-wingers here who are well read and might be gun lovers too because of their political inclination, but that type of right-wingers do not usually read books. So glowie of some sort it must be. Now have a nice day at work if you're still there, I do not bother to check the timestamp of your post. I have other things to do, some chores and studying a bit and oh, reading that handwritten diary. I'm in the middle of reading it as I want to consume it as slow as possible for it to last as long as possible.

>>18654108
one more I read on my lunch break, this one from A History of the French Revolution
>How true that there is nothing dead in this Universe; that what we call dead is only changed, its forces working in inverse order! “The leaf that lies rotting in moist winds,” says one, “has still force; else how could it rot?” Our whole Universe is but an infinite Complex of Forces; thousandfold, from Gravitation up to Thought and Will; man’s Freedom environed with Necessity of Nature: in all which nothing at any moment slumbers, but all is for ever awake and busy. The thing that lies isolated inactive thou shalt nowhere discover; seek every where from the granite mountain, slow-mouldering since Creation, to the passing cloud-vapour, to the living man; to the action, to the spoken word of man. The word that is spoken, as we know, flies-irrevocable: not less, but more, the action that is done. “The gods themselves,” sings Pindar, “cannot annihilate the action that is done.” No: this, once done, is done always; cast forth into endless Time; and, long conspicuous or soon hidden, must verily work and grow for ever there, an indestructible new element in the Infinite of Things. Or, indeed, what is this Infinite of Things itself, which men name Universe, but an action, a sum-total of Actions and Activities? The living ready-made sum-total of these three,—which Calculation cannot add, cannot bring on its tablets; yet the sum, we say, is written visible: All that has been done, All that is doing, All that will be done! Understand it well, the Thing thou beholdest, that Thing is an Action, the product and expression of exerted Force: the All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To do. Shoreless Fountain-Ocean of Force, of power to do; wherein Force rolls and circles, billowing, many-streamed, harmonious; wide as Immensity, deep as Eternity; beautiful and terrible, not to be comprehended: this is what man names Existence and Universe; this thousand-tinted Flame-image, at once veil and revelation, reflex such as he, in his poor brain and heart, can paint, of One Unnameable dwelling in inaccessible light! From beyond the Star-galaxies, from before the Beginning of Days, it billows and rolls,—round thee, nay thyself art of it, in this point of Space where thou now standest, in this moment which thy clock measures.

I would suggest the brainlets in this thread actually read Marx before voicing their stupid opinions about his work

>>18651835
>le mudpie argument
literally addressed on page 3 of Capital

>>18651854
>Wage labor isn't exploitation because you need a profit in order to pay wages, and because wages are determined by contracts and competition between producers
contracts and competition don't magically make wage labour not exploitation. we can quantify the rate of exploitation. profit literally can't happen without it

>>18651864
and yet marginalism still can't explain where prices come from

>>18651998
>maybe if I call my interlocutors uneducated NEETs then I'll suddenly be right!
pathetic
also I run my own business. what now, dum-dum?

>>18651949
>Apparently, the reasons why COVID crash happened are the same reasons why the fuck Great Depression happened according to you fucking retards.
it's almost as if capitalism is inherently unstable or something. I wonder if anyone's written any books about this

>>18652080
>Having a higher supply of goods isn't a crisis unless its socialism.
>Imagine being such a fucking retard you think the world is just some static bubble where stability is where, and there's no intrinsic chaos to the world
imagine being this market cucked. porky has taught you well, anon

>>18618263
I think women are stupid as fuck and I hate them because feminism and capitalism has completely obliterated culture and here is why.
Women are brainwashed with the feminist ideal that they are just as good as men and deserve to be in the work place and have a voice. The problem is that in order for this to happen effectively men en masse are basically castrated by society as schools favour female centric learning structure then put men on ADHD meds or blame them for failing. Work places are toxic because women cause all sorts of drama and are generally not as effective as men but because of quotas many work places are forced to hire women and minorities regardless of their competancy. This then leads women to become arrogant because they believe they are now better than some men because of their make work career.

I even believe that women are largely worthless for socializing children because i experienced the exact opposite at my school where I found male teachers and principles much more effective and fair and intelligent in instilling balance. I mean maybe 4 year olds at maximum but I think afterwards women are trash. Women shouldnt have a voice in anything because they are wrong about everything and overwhelmingly take leftist viewpoints and are overall very selfish and avoidant from taking any sort of responsibility.

My general position is that if we are to have a modern civilization my dream utopia would be one with artificial wombs and genetically engineered population that is entirely gay men of the masculine orient and feminine orient.
I honestly think that femmy gay men are better at being women than women because they are raised as men and have male psychology without the whole entitlement or lack of responsibilty ethos build in. In fact many feminine gay men look to prove their masculinity.
Yes I think its perfectly fine to call something stupid as I have read about women and everywhere from Rome to 12th century Zen Bhuddists have complained about the nature of women.
I dislike women immensely and I hate the 21st century socio-political climate. Women are a weakness we cannot aford as they are the biggest bunch of consoomer blue pillers on the planet who protect the Khazars.
I'm honestly amazed that men and women are the same species.
I mean a simple social experiment would be what if we banned women from driving how would society improve or implemented Islams rules for controlling female behaviour?

The problem of saying dont hate women is that we no longer live in a Traditionalist or Chauvinist society where mens roles and womens roles are respected instead we live in a society where men are abused by the system and women are given intense privledges to be fuck ups because the system profits off them immensely. This then has a demoralzing effect on men where we have to work at least twice as hard to see the same recognition or rewards as women while also experiencing more social woes and scapegoated.

>>18591784
>I hate to sound cliché but my professors, even the women, placed us deep into the Latin and Greek tradition and made us formulate the literary and rhetorical reasons with which the classical authors produced their messages.

That's my dream scenario. God willing, it will be the same for me, too. I certainly hope so.

>Of course there were a few young woman who had their heads shaved on the sides and men who agreed with anything a woman said in order to be laid

That I can manage, I think. It's significantly less predominant here, though it's still somewhat present, especially in the humanities, of course. I know better than to not let sleeping dogs lie, in any case.

>I find it fascinating that you point out the Prussian influence on the Grammar Translation method. I suppose you have been studying and reading outside of you courses reading list?

I've been dabbling in it alongside my more plebeian backlog of reading material, so yes, and I'm having a blast with it.

I feel like it would be irresponsible to come in completely green when the semester kicks off in September. Even if it might be overkill, one can never be too prepared - I want to make a good impression (or should I say that I don't want to come off as a slacker) and I also want to ensure that I won't fall behind like I did when I studied biology (my original major before I dropped out - long story).

>>18591800
Oh, I see what you mean now. That can certainly be the case but from the online introduction the department had on facebook (due to the virus, the "open days" meant for people considering the major were held online) it seemed like the teachers had a good all-around knowledge of linguistics and history. They aren't super experts with worldwide fame but they did not come off as a department kept around solely for vanity.

>You'll have a few peers who match your intensity and make the experience enjoyable, but if what you want is a thorough understanding of the Classics, you could spend a year or two reading primary sources yourself and then skim secondary sources. If what you're looking for is wisdom, this is my recommendation.

Call me autistic, but I already have a massive backlog of Classics-related material that includes almost every author and the best editions of their works and history books that contextualize them, the best secondary literature concerning them (for the most part stuff that other anons recommended and what seemed to be popular and "standard reading" according to amazon), and just a lot of material that seemed as if it was too important to ignore or not read up on. Were it not for this board I wouldn't have heard about Werner Jaeger, for example, or Giovanni Reale. Thank god I have a kindle and can get most of it for free.

>That said, I imagine being a uni professor is a comfy job. There are worse ways to make a living and pass the time.

Certainly lol.

>>18535023
>reading Call of the Crocodile before Call of the Arcade
But it says you can read in any order

Nice, I will start to read some of the works suggested here, mainly the primary works.
I forgot to mention that ideally it would be representative of all of the medieval period, with dates from around 500 (I would call P-D and Augustine late Antiquity, though that's debatable) up to late 1400s early 1500s.

The main geographical locations I would want to cover would be three, so I would like to have representation of at least one book per category for each of them. Those would be Christian/Western Europe, Islamic Golden Age and Bizantine Empire.
I believe in order to truly understand the Middle Aes one has to read at least some seminal works of Islamic lit, so I have decided to include them.

Also, it's true that I'm missing a history section. I will put contemporary medieval history books on the introduction and general reading as a way to get into the context and do a complete section for primary sources.

Lastly, I won't include any sagas, since there is not a single one that would be clearly above the others, and putting too many of them would divert the chart's purpose. I will mention them in a final note at the bottom.

By the way, Chaucer and Boccaccio will be in there too. A section of stories and tales could include texts like the Kalevala and the Mabinogion too, so tell me what you think about those.

>>18465850
Well the model rests on something Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, that a novel's success or failure depends on whether or not it makes the reader want to keep reading. John Gardner calls this "profluence". To that I add: the degree to which a work has profluence depends on the reader as much as (maybe more than) the writer. A person looking to read YA or pulp novels isn't going to experience much profluence from Finnegans Wake, and the population that would is quite limited. If you want to reach a broad audience, first figure out whether the audience you're writing for is broad.

In my model, profluence comes from four categories (in order of universality):
1. Contrast
2. Anticipation
3. Identification
4. Aesthetics

From these categories (or we might call them "principles") all literary techniques are derived. As I mentioned in an above post, conflict and dramatic irony -- two of the most common techniques -- fall into the category of anticipation, though they may also help with identification, be handled aesthetically, and require contrast to have full effect. I could expound more on each one, and the techniques associated with them, but that could probably fill up an entire book. I've found that using this model I can understand why an author makes a certain choice (even if unconsciously) at a certain point in the fiction and that I can be conscious of the same choice (or its wrongful omission) when I revise my own work.

It also explains why "lesser" writers seem to be more popular with the masses. It's because, in part, their audience does not care as much about the fourth category, aesthetics -- with which "higher" literature is mostly concerned -- as the others.

If these categories seem too broad as to be useful, it's because they are categories and not techniques. To acquire technique, study the books written for the audiences you wish to write for (just make sure that audience still exists today) and take measure of which are the most important and which the least so that you can allocate your efforts appropriately. If you want to write fantasy, for example, the setting has special importance. Setting falls into both contrast ("how is this different from my world and the worlds I've seen in other fantasy?") and identification ("how is this the same as my world and the worlds I enjoyed in other fantasy?"). Take someone like Sanderson, his entire body of work is based on just two of the four principles: contrast and anticipation, yet that's precisely what the fantasy crowd likes most, so he'll never starve. Compare to the people on this site, or in this thread, who value identification and aesthetics -- any wonder why they hate Sanderson and his ilk?

If all this violates your artistic sensibilities, remember that you are always writing for an audience. An audience of one: yourself. The trick is to find that region of intersection with the broader world. To make the specific and intensely personal, universal.

“There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”

https://www.chimamanda.com/

>>18463898
But the rigor and exactitude applied to mathematics does not give sterile, boring nor pointless results. They are beautiful, elegant, and applicable. Why is the case different for analytic philosophy?

>>18464064
Perhaps, but I'm on the whole going into the idea of philosophy as seeking of truth. Maybe that's the wrong approach? If it is the correct one, then I feel like I would be as annoyed if not more if I read a philosopher who was less rigorous. You're correct in that I read literature because it's something more poetic and "emotional" than mathematics. However, exploring philosophy through emotion seems like a sure-fire way to get lost. I guess I'm struggling to strike some middle-ground between the poetic and the rigorous.

>>18464074
I wouldn't call mathematics "made up nonsense."

>>18464516
I'm OK with some concepts remaining undefined. This is essentially a must for any proceeding. The problem I have is when the entire argument rests upon undefined concepts. Maybe this is a bit autistic but I'd prefer almost a sort of "Let object A have property P", in the style of first-order logic. As I mentioned above, I think I'm struggling to find that middle-ground between the "poetic" and the "sterile truth". I'm either all one way or all the other. All that being said, I wish there would be less sweeping statements. If you've ever read a mathematical theorem there's a dozen qualifiers before the statement. Now, I am sure that in philosophy these assumptions are implicit, rather than absent, but it still sets off my "sloppy" alarm when I see it.

>>18424503
>>18425185
Good post. As well as Findlay, there is exposition in this vein in Reale's History of Ancient Philosophy, vol 2. Part of the difficulty in understanding, or decoding, the esoteric is that the esoteric is not solely a textual puzzle as one would glance from Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing, or Melzer's Philosophy Between the Lines; as described in Shawn Eyers' paper, 'Defining Esotericism
from a Masonic Perspective', the esoteric is also 'private', as we were not there when these people met and discussed explicitly what they believed (obviously) - indeed the practical difficulty that relates to both textual and private esotericism is that we do not have access to what was only spoken of - even the written may contain no hints to what was unwritten and is totally lost. I agree with the point that it should be a matter of 'transformation' of the self, as the alchemists pursued, to be in the right frame of mind to discover such knowledge yourself - if it was accessible to Plato, then so might we have the opportunity.

Assuming they did not wish to lead readers astray, reading primary texts is key. The traditional curriculum began with, before studying philosophy, an ethical cleanser of the Pythagorean Golden Verses, speeches of Isocrates, and the Enchiridion of Epicetus. After that, the Isagoge of Porphyry and the works of Aristotle in the order logical to physical to metaphysical. And finally Plato, in the same order as Aristotle - the exact ordering can be found through research.

Ignore any and all suggestions, I would add, to read the 'reception of esoterica', as many are stupid, dogmatic, and may wish to use the esoteric to their own ends and not for enlightenment - if you could call it that. And avoid crazy weirdos like Larouche or whoever else is mentioned - 'wise-seeming' individuals generally. And avoid cultlike organisations of the same ilk. That is not to say that the Platonic path is the only path; c.f. Heiler's 'Prayer'.

>>18331752
Call of the Crocodile has the strangest twist out of all of them. Which Goosebumps book had the biggest and best twist? They all were good but it's been so since I've read any of them. I might order some online. Are they even still in print? I don't want to have to shell out a lot of dough if they're collectors items now.

>>18267259
There are a few like Dean. Also I just remembered that Chantal Mouffe wrote a book about Schmitt. And Slavoj Zizek has tapped into him. But these are all varieties of (post-)Marxist, and Dean is the only American. Mouffe is Belgian and she's into a radical democratic socialist left-populist thing and likes Melenchon.

But I can't think of any others. I'll note that I don't think most of the Western left is all that Marxist or communist even if they call themselves that. Anyways, part of Mouffe's critique of liberalism, drawing on Schmitt, is that it's basically apolitical. Politics for liberals is not about friends/enemies or any real antagonism but a set of ethical principles and "being a good person" or being "smarter," which also helps subjugate the political domain to economics and market logic. Like it stands for everything and nothing, simultaneously, which is how you can get a self-described "socialist" streamer building an audience telling people to vote for Biden "in order to push him left," who is also drawing on support from George W. Bush. Obviously, this seems like bizarre nonsense but the rationale is that "this is the worst system except for all the other ones."

This doesn't really work though. Schmitt pointed out its weaknesses during the Weimar Republic. Like, who was the bigger threat at the time? The social democrats or the communists? It was clearly the Communist Party. The social democrats had talked about socialism for 50 years, and when they lucked into power, they moved to create committees to investigate the possibility of building socialism sometime in the future. It's bogus.

But in our age, the antagonism has been reintroduced by the right, like Donald Trump, who is all antagonism all the time. But IMO that's kind of a fake, World Wrestling Entertainment antagonism, like an outlet where the masses are granted permission to express themselves in a controlled environment.

>>18267333
Well it's interesting because the Chinese saw the USSR and the U.S. as two sides of the same coin. And there were 60s/70s leftists who thought Chairman Mao was cool. Marcuse (who Xi Jinping is apparently a fan of) was one of the Frankfurt School guys who saw the U.S. and USSR as more or less the same. But the revolutionary currents in China at the time and the West were very different and in some ways opposites of each other. The Cultural Revolution was about sobriety, subordination to the collective, hard work, (individual) emotional repression. Whereas the 60s Western left was like the opposite of all of that: do drugs, express your individuality, slack off, let out your emotions, etc.

https://youtu.be/3U545tJMwoQ

But like I said about Schmitt, I think they see him over there as Western liberals would look at Kolakowski or something. He was a serious student and critic of Marxism from a communist country they could read to understand it, without the analysis of Marxism being offered also critiquing their own system.

>>18195621
>Do you consider the German aristos who tried to assassinate Hitler because he was fucking everything up to be "liberal democrats"?
What did they plan to replace Hitler with? The German Empire? Just call back Kaiser Willy home and have him crowned again at the end of the war? No? Then what were they planning to replace Hitler with? Is it a liberal democratic republic?
>Hitler was retarded and started wars he had no chance of winning, a more moderate nationalist could've ended Weimar democracy and made Germany strong again without fighting the whole world.
We could debate this, but this type of conversation belongs on /his/. Suffice it say that Hitler had no intention of ever fighting the Western allies.
>>18195641
>Didn't read
Based retard, you obviously don't realise this since you didn't read my post, but thanks for making my point.
>>pic of a single quote without any mention of liberalism or democracy starting mid-sentence without any context
Yeah, well, if you read the post maybe you'd see the context. That's okay though. You're doiing something more important, namely discrediting those who argue against my position.
>>18195653
>No, I don't want your juvenile interpretations of out of context half-sentences.
The context is right there you delusional clown. You have the book, right? You forced me to open my copy. Go do the same with yours. All the context you need.
>Cite a passage where he is clearly praising the characteristics of liberal democracy and expressing his desire for it.
Yeah, maybe go check if he's written any commentaries on John Locke and Adam Smith too, while I am at it? I can give you all the quotes you want, but I can't force you to use your eyes and your brain, which are obviously completely overwhelmed by your fanboyism.
>I cannot reiterate enough how much I do not care about your personal explanation of what The Peace meant, it has 0 bearing on your claim.
It's okay anon. Just say that you ignore the fact that The Peace exists. You don't have to do all these mental contortions - obviously, in order to make a point, I would have to explain it. It's a better look for you to just be delusional, rather than delusional and unfair at the same time, you know?

After spending some hours reading ONA literature, its confounding to me that the media seem to so easily call this a Nazi group.

You could be a miltant afro-centrist and not have any fundamential disagreements with the quite voluminous introductory literature.

The most common media strategy is to connect the order to a random statment made by Myatt...but one could just as logically connect the order to Islam in the same manner.

Certainly Nazis can follow OnA precepts, but so could tankies.

In parting:

"Most of the chatter on the Internet is worthless, ephemeral, the product of people with little esoteric knowledge and even less genuine practical esoteric and personal experience, with such people being led or controlled either by their own desires or by some unconscious impulse or by some causal abstract form or dogma they do not rationally comprehend, or by all of these things. Such chatter is almost always immediately reactive, never the product of a reflexion based on experience, and - when it is not simply inane - it is esoterically and/or intellectually shallow; worthless; pretentious."

I think this applies to both much of what I've read from O9A-adjacent folks, and all of the critisism I've read.

Why is it only the Crocodile book I ever hear about? I read this one and Crocodile and this was the way better book. Also Horror's Call General i guess. While I want to talk about these books this stuff seriously needs to start having containment threads.
Which should I read next?
>inb4 any order you want
No. I want to read the good ones first. If I'm in the mood to read the bad ones later I'll consider it then.