/lit/ - Literature

Next on our "halt the decay of our society" reading list.

There is a problem when young men are led to Nietzsche before Boethius.

>>23112743
You are starting from a place packed with modernist and individualist presuppositions. I would try identifying and questioning those, and Nietzsche, Hume, Marx, Freud, etc. aren't going to help you do this.

The big reads on ethics to understand what the term meant in the West for most of the past millennia would be Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, at least Books I, II and X, Plato's Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Republic (in that order), and Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy (which hews close to Saint Augustine but is far more concise.) These are not that long and present a very different view of ethics. If you want another perspective which nonetheless is similar to these in many respects, check out the Analects of Confucius.

But more than this, consider reading the Iliad and the older books of the Bible such as Judges and Samuel. Ask yourself, "is the author confused about what it is to be a good man? Do people in this society have an objective standard all can agree to about righteousness?"

The idea that morality is free floating, or the result of "conspiracies," that people just weren't smart enough to figure out until the 19th century is, of course, modern. The ancients and medievals grounded what it meant to be a good man in social structures. The Polis comes before the individual and makes them who they are. Odysseus' great sin against Philoctetes is to leave him "without polis," in Sophocles own words. What it meant to be a good farmer versus a good craftsman, versus a good knight, versus a good friar was different, but everyone has their own role. Standards for what conforms to the various practices in social life aren't mysterious to people, nor do they exist at the individual level. The obsession with individual acts being good or bad and moral rules is a modern one. The ancients and medievals thought in terms of virtue, which was cultivated across an entire life. "Count no man happy/flourishing until he is dead," as Solon says, or "judge no man wise until his departure," the Book of Sirach.

People took these virtues extremely seriously. Socrates died for them. Polycarp met a brutal end on similar principles. Boethius and Origen were tortured to death but did not break, led to this path by their ideas. It was not "idle talk and conspiracies," for them.

Consider also how Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, and Freud can't all be right about "the real reasons," for religion. They each advance implausible reductions of it to "just one thing." This is the hallmark of modernity, the need for reduction, and particularly for "unmasking simplification " when it comes to society.

>>23084050
This. It's as Nietzsche says, the shadow cast by the Buddha might linger for centuries after the Buddha has vanished, but it remains a mere shadow, fading away.

For decades, Western thought has been investing in premises that lead to moral and epistemic nihilism. We have not embraced radical skepticism and relativism, but we have begun embracing that premises from which these follow. It is the morale sphere in particular where the rot is most evident, although it is coming for epistemology fast and furious.

Pic related as a decent diagnosis.

Digital balkanization, the embrace of post-modern relativism by radicals on the left and right, and technological progress point towards a communication breakdown.

>>23056872
For recognizing that the reduction of ethics to mere emotion and nihilism is a fault of Enlightenment ethics, not of all prior ethics.

Also good, though more dry, is Sokolowski's The Phenomenology of the Human Person.

>>23054378
Liberalism is indeed the way to go, in at least key aspects, but it's important to note that it is contradictory and so undermines itself. The "over production," of people with advanced degrees, the inability to deal with global issues due to a focus on the "sovereignty of nations and peoples," mass migration and the global inequality that drives it, the focus on consumption over human flourishing, the valuation of income over all else, etc. all flow from the traits of modern liberalism. The greatest threats to liberalism are manufactured by it. It is an organism whose metabolic processes are making its environment unliveable; it must evolve or die. It must sublate.

At the intellectual/cultural level this is true as well. The post-modernist attacks on truth, the materialism that leads to the denial of the existence of the human person in striving to reduce all reality to mathematical physics, the denial of virtue as a meaningful concept, and the reduction of ethics to emotivism all flow from liberalism.

Liberalism needs on the one hand to radically progress in terms of economic and political organization, and on the other hand to turn back to the sounder intellectual grounding of the medievals and ancients as respects many aspects of philosophy.

>>22961364
in other words YOU don't want to admit that you are morally responsible for anything. You hide behind the cope that "everything is subjective" so that you can deal with the fact that you are craven, dishonorable, and a slave to desire and circumstance. Of course you cling to these ideas, because you've evolved to need them. You never developed the virtues and became truly self-determining, so you have no other copes for indulging lust, gluttony, sloth, and wrath. As soon as you realize you are a hollow solipsist who stands on nothing, who only accepts arguments that gratify the very desires he is a slave to and determined by, you will lose your will. Well, this is not the type of organism who will be able to master the passions and circumstance or know itself and thus become self-moving. We must go higher.

>why hasn't anyone written a book diagnosing the collapse of values in the modern world and what might be done to stem the tide of nihilism?
>all we get is garbage like BAP, more liberalism, manichean propaganda that tries to turn politics into a new religion (the left and right both do this).

And then I come to find out this book has already been written. You failed my /lit/. Sure, it's a little dry, but surely it would have been better to slog through this than spend all that time on BAP, Rand, and Evola?