/lit/ - Literature

>>4240994 cont
The idea is to meditate on one's morality. Through God we had a door to that, but of tricky interpretation and sometimes corrupted ones along with the tough ruling of an institution. Without it, we don't even have a door, much less interpretation and thought. Or rather, we have many doors, enough to make any anxious teenager depressed. The instinct here is to erase all others. But in times of gregarious global exchange, that converges into me ignoring you, on moral terms. Afterall, we can do business and talk about bands and videogames without touching our religion or morality, you see?

In this scenario, you are either numb enough to go on without ever questioning any of this, or go depressed by the lack of prospects, or embrace something else, as mentioned before, to guide your moral and aesthetic judgement. Except it was not meant to guide you (contrary to religion), and so it may be a frustrating teacher. You'd lack faith in it, because, instead, you'd have faith in that faith is a worthless thing. You see where I'm getting at?

>Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
Chesterton

>Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! — incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.
Twain

What do you have for me on courage, /lit/?

What would you die for?

That's a hard call. Imagine someone asking "I'd like to know what science has of good to me, reccomend me a book", the guy would get some pop-sci that could embrace it all, Carl Sagan would be a great recomendation, agreed? So, with philosophy it would be like that too, but even harder.

Philosophy is not as linear, the ancients and the contemporaries will have things to tell you, but some modern philosophers will require you to read older ones, while others will show you things through straight forward fiction, for example. Some work on aphorisms and are hard to follow, others.

Philosophy will blend science, religion, fiction and all of that into thoughtful conclusions and, perhaps most of all, questions. So what is that that you are asking yourself?

You have the triad Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which can be known by Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's poetics and so on. You have Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, all of them were incredibly important. Eastern religions are also pretty open to one looking for philosophy, mahayana, tao, etc.

But they are not all easy to get into it and I wouldn't recommend you to go jumping into Wittgenstein. I say keep it varied at all times, reading one and then the other and then learning more about their time. Understanding them will need that context, not just reading them "hard".