/lit/ - Literature

Hey fellas, I'm looking for critiques of pragmatism, from whatever view point available.
I only have one thing which was posted yesterday in this https://boards.4channel.org/lit/thread/18957252/ thread:
>In Guénon’s view, however, as he expresses it in his keynote Crisis of the Modern World (1927) Jamesian pragmatism merely exemplifies the modern tendency to emphasize action over contemplation and instrumentality over knowledge. Guenon remarks how under the Protestant dispensation religion descends towards two privative states, “moralism” and “sentimentality,” until it dwindles down to jejune “religiosity.” Guénon writes: “To this final stage [of dispirited religion] correspond theories such as that of the ‘religious experience’ of William James, which goes to the point of finding in the ‘subconscious’ man’s means of entering into communication with the divine”; thus “a limited God [of subjective rather than transcendental experience] is stipulated as being more ‘advantageous’ than an infinite God.

>>18064865
Oh ok, my mistake
>>18064870
>All oppressive auth-right autocracies have met the same end
le political compass... ffs
Also no, I guess everything that isn't a democracy or doesn't self-proclaim itself communist, must be "auth-right" (whatever that means). There are many authoritarian states (China being the biggest right now) who'll run over our petty democracies.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_eugenics#Nazi_eugenics_program
it wasn't enough
>Projection
not an argument. I'm /fit/
>>18064872
>What will the superior people do when the aquifer is depleted and the well is dry?
Could you reformulate? English isn't my first language.

This is the only book I've been able to find that has a substantial collection of all of Johnson's periodical essays. I've looked high and low for a book that has every single issue of the Rambler in it, along with everything Johnson wrote for the Idler and the Adventurer. I can't find anything like that, though, at least not on Amazon.

Anyway, OP, you're in for some good shit. Johnson is awesome. He has a lot of practical wisdom on the subject of avoiding despair.

>>12868629
>doesn't know about Samuel Johnson, one of the most based men ever to live

Start with The Rambler, his twice-weekly essay series. Then you can move on to some of his other stuff, like Rasselas or the Lives of the Poets.

>>12408227
>invent new, rational values that celebrate life and the human experience

What nonsense. What absolute gobbledygook. What does "rational" mean in this case? What does it mean to "celebrate life and the human experience"? How is Nietzsche so sure that the Christian system isn't perfectly capable of doing that? Maybe Nietzsche should have read more Aristotle, that way he'd know how to define the terms of his arguments.

I haven't read much of Pope himself, but I have read Johnson's Life of Pope, and it gave me a strong appreciation of him.

Johnson's Dictionary had an immense influence on the shape of English in the aftermath of its publication.

I plowed through The Life of Samuel Johnson over the last six months. It was over 1000 pages long, so I kind of count it as multiple books.

Right now I'm knuckling down on teaching myself Latin, so my reading's kind of been put on hold at the moment.

It sounds like you need to read some Samuel Johnson, OP.

You don't. This is one of Nietzsche's stupider ideas. Nobody likes pain, nobody likes suffering, nobody enjoys being inconvenienced. We just put up with it because we have no other choice or because it may lead to some greater good that makes it worthwhile.

Read Samuel Johnson.

I took a Samuel Johnson course this past semester, and I read so much fucking Johnson that all my reports for the class were written in his style.

What's funny about Hitchens is that he is merely the latest incarnation of the trope of the "curmudgeonly English man of letters." Depending on how you start things off, the archetype began either with Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson. Regardless, Johnson was certainly one of them. And then we had G.K. Chesterton, who came along at the end if the 19th/beginning of the 20th century. And now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have Peter Hitchens.

So we seem to get one of these guys once every hundred years or so.

Reading Boswell's Life of Johnson is like wading through mud. It's really not bad, and I do enjoy reading the stuff Johnson actually says; he was very good at conversation. But it's a slog.

>>10746736
>tfw that last paragraph

>stoicism

http://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/stoicism-necessity-patience/

>>10624380
The Rambler
Rasselas
The Vanity of Human Wishes
The Lives of the Poets
Tons of literary criticism

Maybe you should read more.

http://www.johnsonessays.com/the-rambler/no-23-the-contrariety-of-criticism-the-vanity-of-objection-an-author-obliged-to-depend-upon-his-own-judgment/

Is Samuel Johnson right, /lit/? Is listening to critics of your writing a waste of time?

>>10521302
>“Like most gunters, I voted to reelect Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton (again). There were no term limits, and those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade.”

>>10470310
>Catcher in the Rye incest subplot is 3 levels down
also
>All mountains are giant trees
kek

at least out of context
with context it's sad :c

>>10404373
>they're all women
I knew the SMBC guy was a hardcore atheist, did he upgrade to SJW feminist too?

"You and the other Sux0rz can all go fuck a duck."

>tfw going to get to study this meme master next semester

I'm excited, /lit/.