/lit/ - Literature

Are you being honest? Will you really kill yourself? If so, I wish more of the anonymous posters here shared your decency.

Is /lit/ being invaded by retards or is this normal now?

Neither irony nor negativity have anything to do with apathy, loneliness, fear, and sadness. If anything, society needs more of those four things. There are too many narcissistic fat girls intoxicated on euphoria-inducing drugs viewing themselves at top-tilt angles filtered through Instagram. The monomaniacal attempt to reduce all moods and emotions to happy (permit) not-happy (evade) is another wing of the drive to reduce experiential complexity to experiential simplicity. It is a means to falsify reality for easy-consumption by the dumb, lifeless majority. The commercialization and cheapening of inner experience, the contentment in the artificial flower in place of pricking your finger in the thorny rose bush.

Nearly 50 years after Wittgenstein's death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.

Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.

There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music-all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better.

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/regulars/ray-monk-wittgenstein

The lever was constructed by a demon. It is not connected to the trolley or the rails. It is a trick. Pulling the lever annihilates the world.

Louis C.K. is a stupid dumbass and the way he treated Donald Rumsfeld was cringeworthy.

>>6380836
You're gay.

>Schopenhauer was completely and unambiguously in favor of clarity. He believed in writing so that your words would be understood, and he fought violently against people who thought otherwise.

Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Montaigne, and plenty of other philosophers wrote even clearer than Schopenhauer. Kant's writing is difficult to understand but Schopenhauer saw its merit. Some philosophers just have different styles of writing. Some philosophers deal with subjects that are more difficult to write about than what Schopenhauer wrote about. Some philosophers introduce new vocabularies than overthrow the old language game and help us see everything in a new light.

Also, just because Schopenhauer wrote in an easy-to-understand form, it doesn't mean he wasn't a charlatan. You can write clearly and still be a charlatan, especially if your system is full of holes and you are conscious of the fact. For example, try to find in Schopenhauer an explanation of the origin of intellect. How does he deal with the obvious fact that before the appearance of the intellect, the law of causality was already in motion, creating the organisms we evolved from? He will not touch that topic because, if he did, it would put his whole system into question. With the way he attacks Hegel on one hand and brags about his "prize essays" on the other, it seems like Schopenhauer was more concerned with fame and recognition than he was in "seeking the truth."

>>6347652
Nietzsche > Marx

the gay science, the old testament

lima beans, field peas, brown rice

water

joyously pining

Being and Time, and everything else by Martin Heidegger.

Cloud Cuckoo-land. Empty, covered dishes served with raised eyebrows.

>>5873641
Don't listen to this philistine, OP. Never expand your interests into childlike activities to fit in with other people. Silence and a sense of humor are the tools you need to use in dealing with the ordinary person.

>>5873710
> a social tool to start a conversation and have something to relate over
The personal-cultural lives of the majority of people are dominated by shallow entertainment and cliché ideas. It actually is all they're thinking about.

>>5842334
It isn't the Middle Ages anymore. Before you send her a poem, you have to make her fall in love with you using modern techniques. Popular culture has infected the minds of everyone. Use it to your advantage. Slowly draw her away from the masses. Mould her into the person you need her to be.