/lit/ - Literature

>>12012667
>The sanitized and formal are the most fragile. Ya gotta get messy to survive, entertain contradictions and paradox. Shout out to my favorite based Phoenician Nassim Taleb.

this. and yet it is for precisely this reason that the contradiction and paradox kills the NPC, except when everything becomes ironic (and doesn't stay ironic for very long, but Humor Within the Appropriate Parameters). it's a neo-Victorian society of moral hypochondriacs. we neither laugh nor cry. we only feel anger. that's what happens when things near their endgames. this is what it is like to be a zombie, a drone, or a culture warrior.

Taleb is cool. loves the Stoics too. he triggers Harris but Triggered Sam Harris is absolute comedy gold also. this is not to shit on Harris, i just find it unendingly funny when guys like Trump or Taleb get under his skin, since clearly he can outsmart everybody else.

i haven't read this, but a three-volume series called The Tao of Seneca seems relevant to our interests here.

https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/

>>12012718
no diggity. and see above too, i guess.

people shit on Derrida because of this Now, The Ghost Is Me stuff but really, it comes down to what you are saying: we lost the feeling for death. here's a classic mic-drop from Uncle Nick on this theme, when the Enlightenment closed down once and forever the Medieval period:

>With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumspection of voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism beings its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, with with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

and we're *still* in that place, now on board the Wild Ride. in which there is *infinite terror* and yet none of the sense of mortality that was crucial to the Stoics. you are 100% right to bring this up. what are the Samurai without the feeling for death? what would the hoplites have been?

so valar morghulis i guess. but philosophy as Ars Moriendi, absolutely.