/lit/ - Literature

>>14516615
hehe

>>8904023

I'm >>8900424 and others. I didn't even have to look that up to know that's a quote from pic related. It's a line I think of often.

>I like you and what you've written but i don't think there's any "going back"

In a mass-cultural sense there isn't. Individually, we can. But this is the problem: how to wrench your own sense of individuality back from mass reification and spectacle. Becoming a Taoist riverboat captain is one way. There are others.

But if we want to stay surfing the great waves of criticism and dialectic for a moment longer...you could also say that there may not be any "going forward" either. I think that is what makes the present age fascinating: I might even be tempted to call it axial on a planetary scale. I also think that it is a particular quirk of intellectual history that right when things cannot seem to go any further in one direction they tend to mysteriously spawn or engender their opposites. Socrates emerges out of a culture of sophistry; the scientific revolution and the renaissance begin from medieval monks going out to explore the world, trusting that all they are going to find is God; the crowned heads of Europe believed the First World War would be over by Christmas 1914. Paradigm shifts, in other words. Brought about by critical masses of common sense. We do these things time and again.

Now that is a highly hyperbolic and even gnostic remark, but I think it's interesting. Jaspers' axial age theory is to my mind pretty compelling: everyone moves from the country to the city, and it's the birth of great psychology and wisdom traditions. Maybe we're on the verge of repeating that now on a planetary scale. Capitalism puts us all in cities, and this is what bothers us: we're all smashed into this thing together, suddenly, and we need a new way of thinking.

It's a terrifying time, but it's also a tremendously interesting one. If we're prepared to jump through a few psychological/intellectual wormholes.

And the fact is that other people today are very smart and very sensitive. We are, increasingly, coming to think the same things about the same things. There is potential in that. Not revolutionary potential. Maybe just something like a common understanding. To me that would be all that is required. In the darkest depths of misery you find the weirdest moments of optimism, things you can't even explain. I've had experiences in my own life that verge on the supernatural, but you'd have to get me a little more drunk than I am now to share them on /lit/.

In the meantime, philosophizing hyperbolically (or is it just making shit up? hard to tell, sometimes) seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So thanks to you too, anon, for prompting some of this stuff. In the end the one thing that both vexes and relaxes is the sense that people really are all in this one big thing together. And that's good for my ulcer.

Let's not sleep lightly on paradigm shifts.

>>8903901
thank ye kindly gentle-anon