/lit/ - Literature

newcomer to poetry, looking for recommendations on poetry collections for ebooks. just finished the seashell anthology of great poetry, loved it

>>3557643
I admire (your) pacifist philosophy, and agree to some extent. That said, I don't it think it can or should be applied universally. Like >>3557646 said, some people just don't give care if they kill someone, regardless of their victim's stoic demeanor.

In a way the great pacifists like Jesus or Gandhi were lucky. Their non-violence "worked" for them until they were famous for it, even though, granted, they died as a result later (but then they were martyrs!). Think of the hundreds, thousands perhaps, of those of similar persuasion who'd have died without any note or fanfare, now completely forgotten.

tl;dr There's a fine line between strict adherence to 'higher' principles and foolishness.

While we're on the topic of poetry, can anyone recommend some good German poetry (as in, written in German)? I've got the obligatory Schiller, Brecht and Goethe, want some more before I head to Berlin

Seneca said of Diogenes (which applies equally to the Stoics and many schools of Buddhism) : "...how much less painful it is not to something than to lose it...the poor have less to suffer the less they have to lose"

So yes OP, I agree, it's possible to reach that level of self-autonomy, but it takes many years of asceticism and practiced dis-attachment.

The more important question I think is whether most people are capable of the self-discipline required to reach such a state. After all, discipline is the key ingredient to any form of success..

Five

I read mainly for the ideas - to open my mind so to speak, and partly for enjoyment.

But people should do whatever they genuinely enjoy doing (isn't that common knowledge?), and more importantly, people like you should quit trying to push some 'normative' lifestyle onto them

Of all places, I am here

>>3053850
To be honest I don't even know what you're saying. My point was that the (central) existentialist claim made at the time - that "existence precedes essence" in man - ignored much of the innate human behaviour (/"essence") that was being discovered concurrently in cognitive psychology. Leaving the question of whether we can actually make "free" decisions aside, we are essentially more irrational than we like to believe.

Also, Skinner was a proponent of behaviourism the antithesis of cognitive psychology