/lit/ - Literature

>>18478115
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>>18478384
OP here. I'll tell you what I mean. But first, a premise: I prefer poetry over philosophy, and I'm a man of feeling rather than a man of reason. So I will speak as I can. Now, my indelible feeling is that modern philosophy does not talk about that which is essential. You will ask: what is essential? My answer is: I don't know. I only feel that modern philosophers completely miss the point of basically everything. This has to be true especially when referred to the *foundations* of their thought, to its causative background, to its motivations, to its a-priori primary cause. But I'm not sure, it's just a supposition. The fact is that everytime I read philosophy from ancient, medieval and renaissance times, the philosopher speaks to me, appeals to my heart, my consciousness, my experience, my whole being. Everytime I *know exactly* what they mean, I grasp them, I welcome them inside of me. Even with different philosophers, it's always like this. I have a warm predilection for Neoplatonists, but even if I read Aristotle or Seneca or Aquinas, they still talk to me. I read and I think "Yes, of course, sure, right, nice, agreed, great, true" whereas when I read moderns my only reaction is: "Meh". And it has nothing to do with understanding them. I understand the direction that philosophy took after the Enlightenment, I understand Kant and Hegel, but that's not the issue: they simply leave me cold. I know this board has a tendency to approach philosophy as a boxing ring where authors compete and where someone wins for "being right" and another loses for "being wrong", but that's not what interests me: I only want to see who came closer to expressing the truth, and truth is multiform and many-sided. Thus it just so happens that the fine, sophisticated games that modern philosophers play with words and concepts, with logic and language, do not seem – they alone – to guarantee the approximation to the truth. I know that the dialogical use of reason to investigate things was not only a characteristic feature of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but even an invention (the major invention, actually) of the Greeks – but what I mean is that such use of reason is dry, empty, in modern philosophers. It lacks something. Perhaps it's because it's conducted as an end in itself (as is evident and even declared in Kant). Or perhaps it's the opposite, it's because it's conducted to achieve earthly goals (many such cases!). Or, more subtly, it may be because modernity refuted the role of the intellect as it was conceived by Neoplatonists and Christian thinkers, i.e. superior to the faculty of reason. I have no idea, really. I only feel like the activity of modern philosophers could be quite accurately described with this quote by Leibniz: «We often reason in words, with the object itself virtually absent from our mind» (in German: «Man denkt oft in Worten, fast ohne den Gegenstand nur im Geiste zu haben»).