/lit/ - Literature

philosophy has taught me to become active. which, in essence, includes gaining everything from incredibly little. the tiniest things give me the greatest bliss imaginable, a sense of wonder follows me wherever I go. transcendent criteria is always rejected in favour of immanent modes of existence, and only joy, power, strength, and life matters.

>>14288728
im not the guy you're replying to but I think its a mistake to think of philosophy/metaphysics as abstract thinking. as marx notes, the internal logic of a system can be much different to its conscious presentation, especially in written language (philosophy started off as an oral discipline, after all). spinoza wields this hugely systematic abstract system of thought with these strange concepts... eternity of the mind? distinguishing bodies by motion and rest? but this is not a matter of abstraction, its extremely concrete, you have to understand that these philosophers lived their philosophy, perhaps not always in practice, but they saw everything in their own conceptual ways. when kant sees an object, he does not see a modification of substance with an infinite set of bodies put under a specific relation of motion and rest like spinoza does, he sees perhaps a phenomenon discursively organized by our transcendental forms of intuition and pure categories of understanding, mediated by the imagination. of course, this may all seem abstract to someone who is viewing this out of context, but as hegel notes, philosophy does not deal with finished results, but a self-positing movement, such that you can only understand one aspect with respect to its previous moments and also to the whole in which it is a part. once you realise this, you realise that this is all very concrete, it does not lie in abstract thought but in concrete variations of perception. when you read philosophy you need to meditate on how this affects your perception, and how it affects how you might live your life. then you see the concrete differences between how aristotle uses substance and how spinoza uses substance