/lit/ - Literature

>>9677641
Thanks also for a really on-point recommendation anon. The Hegelpill is *strong* medicine. PoS is so ridiculously dense that it's nice to be pointed directly to a relevant section when it matters.

>The Vanity of Culture

>In respect of that return into self the vanity of all things is its own peculiar vanity, it is itself vain. It is self existing for its own sake, a self that knows not only how to sum up and chatter about everything, but cleverly to state the contradiction that lies in the heart of the solid elements of reality, and in the fixed determinations which judgment sets up; and this contradiction is their real truth. Looked at formally it knows everything to be estranged from itself; self-existence is cut off from essential being (Ansich), what is intended and the purpose are separated from real truth, and from both again existence for another, what is ostensibly put forward is cut off from the proper meaning, the real fact, the true intention.

>It thus knows exactly how to put each moment in antithesis to every other, knows in short how to express correctly the perversion that dominates all of them: it knows better than each what each is, no matter how it is constituted. Since it apprehends what is substantial from the side of that disunion and contradiction of elements combined within its nature, but not from the side of this union itself, it understands very well how to pass judgment on this substantial reality, but has lost the capacity of truly grasping it.

>This vanity needs at the same time the vanity of all things, in order to get from them consciousness of itself it therefore itself creates this vanity, and is the soul that supports it. State-power and wealth are the supreme purposes of its strenuous exertion, it is aware that through renunciation and sacrifice it is moulded into universal shape, that it attains universality, and in possessing universality finds general recognition and acceptance: state-power and wealth are the real and actually acknowledged forms of power. But its gaining acceptance thus is itself vain, and just by the fact that it gets the mastery over them it knows them to be not real by themselves, knows rather itself to be the power within them, and them to be vain and empty. That in possessing them it thus itself is able to stand apart from and outside them — this is what it expresses in witty phrases; and to express this is, therefore, its supreme interest, and the true meaning of the whole process.

All Is Vanity, says the nihilist. Memento Mori. O that German sincerity and longing for poetic unio mystica. O that Gallic inability to stop being flirty and seductiveness. O the mimesis. At least there were some things they could agree on.

Some Heidegger (existential-alienated/tech-haunted Hegel?) going the other way.
http://uncw.edu/csurf/Explorations/documents/HannahCloninger.pdf