/lit/ - Literature

In other words, what makes our survival more important than another species' survival? Why is it more important that we survive this catastrophe than the ants or the goldfish?

>>5357854
Modern medicine is engineering. Old medicine is more philosophical.

>>5357828
> the conversion of traditional mass into a more entropic energy

What does this look like in your mind? Something that a pill dissolving in water?

>>5357849
And what is the point of surviving? For what reason are we living?

>>5357828
Ask your teacher to describe what a field is for you.

>>5357833
That's medicine, not science.

If you think spacetravel is the ultimate goal of humanity you need to ask what we are going to do when we get there. Plant a flag in the ground and say "we made it"? People have been planting flags in the ground for centuries. It doesn't matter where humanity travels to, it will still have the same corruptions. Men have done more to fight corruption sitting in their rooms meditating than travelling somewhere. I don't see how you can think that moving us from one place to another will make us any better.

>>5357808
Science is a hoax mate, I wouldn't be too bothered with what scientists think. Engineering is legitimate. Modern science is amateur metaphysicians with a fetish for mathematics.

>>5357799
Space travel is no more impressive than travel by donkey. They are both forms of travel. Spaceships are an impressive feat of engineering, but engineering is not the highest of pursuits any more than travelling is.


If travelling is the highest of pursuits, then it doesn't matter where you travel as long as you do travel, when reason tells us that the purpose of travel is to get somewhere (the destination is a higher goal than travelling for its own sake, which proves that travel is not the highest pursuit). Nor is the destination the highest of goals, because reason again tells us that we go from one destination to another to fulfil a certain purpose, otherwise we would stay where we are.
Engineering isn't the highest of pursuits because we engineer machines in order to serve a purpose. If engineering were the highest goal then the robot apocalypse you see in the Terminator films would be considered good due to its expressiveness in engineering.

>>5357787
Aristotle disproved it. If there were such a thing as empty space it would immediately be filled by surrounding matter, because it would offer no resistance.

>>5357773
You do believe in a god. You call it "humanity". For some reason you think that spreading ourselves across the galaxy is somehow meritorious when any number of ancient philosophers could have told you that the quality of life is more important that quantity. What do you think would be better m8, a small community on earth where everyone is happy and wise, or an intergalactic federation ruled by a cruel tyrant where 99% of humanity are benighted slaves and the other 1% are indifferent slavemasters?

>>5357753
There is no such thing as "empty space".

Atoms don't exist. Aristotle proved this already. The things that modern scientists call atoms aren't atoms, they are just small bits of matter. The proof of this is that they divide their "atoms" into "subatomic" (lol) particles, when the whole point of the word atom is that it cannot be divided into further parts.

>>5357757
I'm not better than anyone outside this place but while I'm here I am certainly better than every single anonpleb.

ITT: teenagers give advice.

>>5357557
God never died. The only "God" that died was the sociological God, which was never a god in the first place. In the middle ages you had St. Francis being laughed at for wanting to be poor in following Christ, and that was the time when your precious intellectuals thought that "God" was alive. The world has been dead to God since Adam & Eve and it's only ever been a tiny minority who have seen him since.

>"society" no longer worships God
>therefore God is dead and I no longer have to recognize my Creator

This is how deranged these modernists are. The same dry Humanist heresy from the Renaissance which puts "society" at the peak of existence. If "God" was alive you'd be the kind of double-minded and lukewarm man that thinks showing up on Sundays is enough to merit salvation.

>Personally i think the greatest thing we can do as a species is get off this rock and populate others.

This is extremely foolish. If our greatest aim is to populate "other rocks" then what will be our aim once we have accomplished that? To populate even more rocks?
Also, it's evil to think in terms of "we", "the species", "humanity", "mankind". You don't speak for every single human being. Most of them want nothing to do with your false idea of "the species" or "humanity". To a lot of people populating Mars would be no more of an achievement than populating the valley across the river.

>The thing people miss in the search for meaning is that personal satisfaction or acheivement means little after you're gone, it's making way for those that come that matter.

The problem is that you have no idea what goodness is so you don't know what it is the people that come after us really need. A lot of people that have been convinced that they were working "on behalf of humanity" have done enormous evil.

>>5349028
>doesn't it say somewhere that lucifer himself is of stunning beauty? isn't beauty one of the things evil can use to seduce us? and for this to work, doesn't the beauty have to be real?

It's not that the beauty is real, it's that it appears to us as real and we are apt to be deceived.

>You can't in all seriousness deny that a face masking an ugly personality can still be beautiful

I am not denying that. In fact, that is exactly what I said: a good face face is still a good, or beautiful, face, even if the man within is bad, or ugly.

>>5349014
This isn't a troll thread mate. Because if I'm right and to be a good artist you must also be a good man, then all artists ought to first of all be occupied with seeking goodness, which we know is not the case. So it is a serious matter that concerns the lives of many people. Think of recent examples like Hemingway and Joyce, reputed to be good artists but the first was a suicide and the second a wretched pervert. Now let me ask: do you think these men would have been better off taking care of their heart and mind than in pursuing the ghost of "literary fame"? If they would have been better off taking care of themselves, then we need to inform the many people around the world that are neglecting themselves and torturing themselves in trying to reach that phantom.

>>5348956
>Aesthetics and morality are different things.

I would say that they aren't. The reason people separate aesthetics and morality is because they are disordered and take what they know to be morally bad as beautiful, but if they reflected on this they would discover that what they are doing is treating what is ugly as beautiful.
See, we must be careful not to be misled into taking what is ugly as beautiful, like Titian's Venus.

>>5348956
>Good art is not defined by representing the good, but by being beautiful/aeshetically intriguing.

What is the difference between the good and the beautiful? Surely everything good is beautiful, and everything beautiful is good. I mean, we say that there is such a thing as a beautiful woman or a handsome man that is bad, but what we really mean to say is that there is such a thing as a bad woman or handsome man that has a good face, in the same way that you can have a bad man with a good coat or a good man with a bad coat. The ugliness or badness of a man's soul (or personality, if you want to be modern) does not detract from the beauty or goodness of his face.

What you are saying, anon, is that ugliness can be beautiful, a clear contradiction. By aesthetically intriguing I believe you mean making what is ugly appear to be beautiful.
I would say that good art IS defined by representing the good, because what else would it represent? The bad? I'm not saying that an artist can't represent, for example, a bad character in his work, it's just that he has to somehow make this bad character resolve into a harmonious whole that is itself good, in the same way that a musician resolves a dissonance, or a painter balances contradictory colours, and in the same way the theologians day that God bring good out of the evil in the world so that the world is still essentially good when viewed as a whole. However, I do not think art can be good when as a whole it represents what is bad. There might be art that is made up of ugliness that somehow resolves into the good. For example, Van Gogh's Potato Eaters is ugly in all its details but you could argue that this visual ugliness causes us to reflect on the squalid life of the poor, and this reflection is good. In the same way, you might take Titian's Venus which is beautiful in all its details, but as a whole Mark Twain condemned it as offensive pornography.

>>5348950
Wagner is an example of art that I would call sick, or bad, and that is adored by people who are themselves sick, or bad. I won't substantiate this myself, I'll just point you to Nietzsche's Contra Wagner, because he knew this better than I.

>>5348945
Well if we take the most commonplace definition of those terms and say that a bad man is one who murders, or steals, or cheats, or lies, or drinks too much, and good art is whatever appeals in a gallery or is praised by the critics, then clearly bad men can make good art. But we have to ask whether these definitions are correct, especially the one concerning good art because it seems to be the more offensive. To judge whether a work of art is good we have either to examine the art itself and discover in it the quality of goodness, or we have to look at the effects that the art has on people and discover in these effects the quality of goodness. Immediately one might say that there is no such thing as good or bad art, but this is obviously a sophistry that we will disregard as everybody distinguishes between good art and bad art, and if there were no such thing as good art there would be no need for galleries, literary canons, universities teaching people the merits of good art and how to create it themselves, etc. One contradiction we find is that a lot of art that we call good, or that is commonly praised as good, has had bad effects on people. A notable example would be Goethe's Werther which influenced young men to commit suicide in imitation of the work's romanticized protagonist who himself commits suicide. Now, the work isn't Goethe's best, but it displays what we usually refer to as literary talent (mastery of language, exactness in characterization, distinctiveness in tone/mood, etc.). Goethe himself, however, later said that the book was "everything that is sick". So we must ask ourselves if there is art like Goethe's which is sick, but which is also adored by critics and falsely called good (because what is sick is not good).

>>5348935
I don't think so. A man can only make a representation of what he knows in art, and seeing as a bad man does not know what is good he can't possibly create a representation of the good in art, I.e. make good art, can he?

Can a bad man make good art?

The Iliad.