/lit/ - Literature

I can’t make sense of reality. I don’t know how to behave moment to moment being aware of this. My anxiety is debilitating and I end up crying most days. I don’t like living like this. I can’t seem to like anything.

Must humans inherently contribute or participate in some form of community in order to feel fulfilled? Can fulfillment be found within the self?

>With Diogenes' masturbating in public another chapter of sexual history begins. In this first Happening of our civilization, ancient kynicism shows its sharpest claws. They are partly responsible for the fact that in Christian-idealist usage, the word "cynical" describes a person to whom nothing more is sacred, who declares himself to be no longer ashamed of anything, and who embodies "evil" with a scornful smile. Those who want to make a plea for sublime love, for the partnership of souls, etc., come up against a radical counterposition here. This position teaches sexual self-sufficiency as the original possibility for the individual. The officially sanctioned married couple is not the first to have a chance to satisfy sexual urges; the individual human being, the laughing masturbator in the marketplace of Athens, is already in a position to do so. Plebeian onanism is an affront to the aristocratic soul-to-soul game, as well as to love relationships in which individuals, for the sake of sexuality, subjugate themselves to the yoke of a relationship. The sexual kynic, from the start, counters this with a selfsatisfaction unburdened by scruples. As soon as the kynic meets someone who wants to impress upon him that he is not an animal, Diogenes pulls out his organ from underneath his toga: Now, is that animalistic or not? And anyway, what do you have against animals? When someone comes who wants to dissuade human beings from their animal foundations, the kynic must demonstrate to his opponent how short the way is from the hand to the organ. Did human beings not initally through their upright stature find themselves in the position where their hands were precisely level with their genitals? Is the human being —seen anthropologically — not the masturbating animal? Is it not possible that human consciousness of autarky —more than is generally surmised — comes from the consequence of the upright stature just mentioned? The quadrupeds, in any case, have been spared this anatomical-philosophical complication. Indeed, masturbation accompanies our civilization like an intimately philosophical as well as moral "problem." Masturbation is to the libidinous region what self-reflection is to the intellectual region.

When reading existential comics, i was amused by this Sarte guy and his radical freedom. Which book should i check to get idea of what he's talking about?

how did diogenes get cucked out cynicism becoming mainstream. why did stoicism make it big

>all the deep meaning the genius author decided to include in their book

>mfw I just lost my entire library containing more than 200,000 books

I am genuinely broken, I want to die. Hard drive malfunctioned.

>over 200,000 books
>complete with metadata
>organized perfectly
>I manually organized approx 100k of these myself (it took almost 2 years)
>mfw copies and extracts of books that aren't even available online gone forever
>mfw works that took me up to 6 months (some a year) to locate gone forever
>mfw rare and esoteric works that I hadn't got around to reading yet gone and will never be found again

What fucking do? I wasn't even this broken after my first heartbreak. Can I sue?

Hey /lit/, what is a good, safe-ish major that I should choose as my second major besides English? The dream is to become a fiction writer eventually, but I don't want to be financially fucked in the future, because I would feel bad since my family's not that well off and is barely able to pay for my tuition in the first place. English is my real passion, but I feel obligated to also study something "safer," hopefully without having it disrupt my literature pursuits too much. I've been thinking about Economics. Engineering, from what I've heard, has too ridiculous a workload, especially in my particular college, and would probably prevent me from pursuing literature with intensity. Medicine would make me obligated to go to Med School. Sorry for the self-centered question, but I was wondering if you guys had any similar sort of experience and any ideas to help to resolve this shit.

>When Plato gave Socrates's definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition

Why was he such a cutie?

Dog: Nothing
Old cloth: Nothing
Wine Jar: Nothing
Lamp: Stolen from Epictetus

Masturbating in public, insulting Alexander, and making a fool out of Plato in the Commons?
Priceless.

What are some red flags that someone would make a shitty philosopher or at least shouldn't enter formal philosophical education? I'm a neet, my days consist of contemplation and memes. Dipped my toes in most of the memes (besides the greeks lel), have lots of question, need formal basis.

Thing is I get the feeling that I wouldn't be able to keep up because I would overanalyze and waste time on all the wrong stuff plus I would have to act like I'm interested in debating anyone when really I'm not. My debating skills are 0/10, all I can do is ask questions that tend to shut people up.

Sorry for this cancer of a post but you are the only smart people I know so.. Any philo majors that mind rating my chances of success/survival or just share their personal experiences and thoughts?

Thanks friends

STEAL HIS LOOK

Nothing: Nothing
Wine Jar: Stolen
Lantern: Stolen from Epictetus
Dog: Followed him home (which is nowhere and everywhere)

Humiliating Plato in the Commons: Priceless

There is only one

>>6921431
see
>>6921451

Yeah I live in a small city with a little library and traveling to big city with big library will cost me one book.

No thrift shops here as well.

My library doesn t posses a lot of beletry, and when it does it is Harry Potter or some trash by John Green

>poetic meter
>Rhythm
>iambic feet
>stress vs unstress

These seem arbitrary and subjective as fuck.
Sorry I don't have a more nuanced argument, but I tried bringing this up in class and the only response I got was a shrug and 'it just sounds natural, you just hear it' which seemed pretty bullshit.

Well, I don't 'hear(though I'm reading it so, idk)' blank verse as being any different from standard prose. And if it's based on verbal recitation, isn't that irrelevant to the written word and just a subjective artifact of happenstance due to the way we're conditioned to speak?

Example from wikipedia
'So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see'

Allegedly this is 'unstressed stressed, unstressed stressed' but isn't that just saying the 'unimportant' words like 'so as can or' are unstressed because they'd be shorter when pronounced? If the oral language shifted so that we pronounced 'as' as 'ayyyyz' instead of 'ahz' would that also change meter?

'Long men breathe eyes see, so as can or can'

What's the verse on this? Is it stressedx5, unstressed x5? Is it still stressed/unstressedx5 if I read it aloud with the exact same cadence as I read the first one? Seems like I could read it 'naturally' in all manner of different ways, stressing different words to achieve different emphasis and meaning.

If it's subjective, that's fine. But the impression I got from class was like this 'meter' is some objective truth, a verifiable DNA code of poetry that I'm inexplicably blind towards, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills since I was the only one who seemed to have problems identifying this.

>>6319303
Did he look like this, ma'am?

>>5991543
I make 10 billion dollars using invisible sweatshops in Sri-Lanka; I give 5 billion to starving African Children; I save the rest and buy a private jet; and dumb consumerist neo-liberals label me as a living Saint.

Philanthropy is an attempt to justify the exploration inherent in the capitalist system

"Isn't wealth inequality great, look at all the money I'm giving away to poor people"

Reminder that materialism/skepticism/atheism/etc is against human nature

Although I call this the prime reason why I may be losing my eye for detail, I'm still not sure. The education system tells me that I'm top class since I'm in the top 5% in my class and I'm going to have 50 credit hours out of the way on my 120 hour degree, but still I feel empty. I don't feel ready to analyze any texts and I feel like life is going by so fast. I can't help but read fast on everything I see. What do I do /lit/? I want to appreciate everything that literature and writing has to offer but I've lost interest to process it. Everything else looks so much more appealing than reading a book but yet my mind knows that there is so much to learn from them.

On a board that is so often about our own work and beliefs, I think it would do well to have a thread about others.

When have you been humbled by someone's display of literary (or related) prowess?