/lit/ - Literature

happiness is a fleeting feeling that comes and goes, it should never be a goal in life because it can never be permanently attained.


go ahead and eat raw meat, have fun being filled with parasites you moron

Schopenhauer believed that childhood is far more enjoyable than adulthood, because the former is centered around Intellect as opposed to Will. After puberty, many men are ruined by their sexual craving, and the true joy of life -- learning -- is forgotten. In a sense, he is right.

But I want to make a distinction: Learning as an adult is very different. Whereas childhood learning is centered around existence (giraffes exist, countries exist), adulthood learning is centered around "why". Why does democracy fail? Why do markets collapse? These are adult questions -- "why questions". But after much thought, I believe this variety of questioning is extremely harmful to most people, and it's thanks to repeated failure with "why questions" that adults usually give up learning.

Answering even a single "why question" to a satisfying degree is insanely difficult -- even for a trite question like "Why are movies not as good as they used to be?". You will have one idea, but your friend has another, and your enemy yet another, and so in the end nobody will have learned anything, and you are pitted against everyone else. This is the natural flow of any "why" conversation. Thus, nearly every man who routinely tackles "why" questions is really just preoccupied with asserting himself, at war with other men like him, so it becomes a battle of ego. Meanwhile, those who only wanted the answer feel their time is wasted, and so they gradually feel that "learning" as an adult is hopeless.

I realize the irony here; I've committed the same flaw I'm criticizing. But I don't think "why questions" themselves ought to be abandoned. Rather, we should pick our battles very carefully: Resist tackling questions of "why" until there is huge evidence we can get a true answer. Until then, we ought to expand our knowledge not by tackling "whys", but by learning more "whats" (e.g. studying history, the arts, gastronomy, and things that merely exist, as a child does). My role model here is Fernand Braudel: To understand capitalism, he undertook a survey of the material and economic conditions across the entire world in the Medieval period, down to clothing, gastronomy, population sizes, health, wealth, and so on. This is the level of focus that any "why question" demands. If you aren't prepared to do this, I would say, don't even address the question.

Even as adults, we should focus our education around "existence" -- this exists, or that exists -- and save "why questions" for much later, when our pool of knowledge is immense, and we have a glimmer of hope to answer them. Until then, I say they should be categorically ignored.

no, i was more drawn to Schopenhauer, im still a bit of a pessimist, but ive sort of moved on. Only later on that i learn neitzche took shoppys ideas and was more like mmmmm pain good

wagner was influenced by Schopenhauer therefore its a battle between marx and schoppy.

actually marxists tend to avoid ever uttering shcoppys name

Anyone else spend 90% of time just thinking about random shit in their head all day, life's biggest problems, and you feel like somehow it's all gonna click one day and you'll realize something incredible? Both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche led lives like this, they just spent all their time thinking, but it doesn't really seem like it worked for them. I'm wondering if maybe this is just a form of mental illness

My hair slowly reaches into schopenhauerian dimensions. How shall i cope?

>What kinda cut you want senpai?
>"The Pessimist"

>>21599347
Pic related was a 100x brighter mind than simpcraft

mind not the times but the eternities

I am not a nihilist, i am a pessimist, nihilists believe there is no value in life, i believe there is negative value in life.

“When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

How does /lit/ balance reading and thinking? How much reading is "too much"? What are "thoughtful" passtimes to do alongside reading? Why am I asking /lit/ of all places?

Thanks in advance to any anons who have good ideas.

>>18386601
No factor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4SzvsMFaek

>Virtue cannot be taught. The tendency toward good or evil is the result of inborn character. Characters are determined by nature, not by the environment.

>Character does not change. It remains the same throughout life. This is presupposed whenever a person is evaluated as a result of their past actions. Given the same circumstances, what was done once will be done again. Behavior, however, can change when a character learns how to attain its goal through a different way of acting. The means change, but not the ends. This is the result of improved cognition or education.

Would you agree in general? I mean this was written in 1800s so maybe there is some scientific evidence to it for or against it? So lets go through some examples. If somebody was a dirtbag in his youth, comitted pety crimes, was the bully in school etc does this mean he will forever be a dirtbag in his life and only acts as a good person and doesnt comit crimes anymore not because his moral improved but he learned that crime doesnt pay and being unfriendly closes doors to his wills goals and motives?

What about somebody who has a bad temper, is impatient and has a greedy unsatiable will because of some neural deficit like its the case with dopamine and adhd. Now if the medication calms him doesnt this mean his personality as a whole have changed?

Sorry for bad esl english

When Arthur Schopenhauer met Flora Weiss, he was 39 and she was 17. They were attending a boating party on a lake in Berlin, and the German philosopher, pleased by her youth and beauty, courted her, apparently while brandishing a bunch of grapes, but she rejected him, and his grapes, remarking in her diary that she didn't want the fruit (which she tossed overboard), because "old man Schopenhauer had touched them."

Schopenhauer literally shit himself in the woods /lit/, a colossal Grizzly Bear charged at him and he froze where he stood. Sweat rolled down his "gotcha" shaped brow, and then dripped onto his leather, moleskin Boots. He quickly imagined scenarios where the bear would just run past him or false charge him only for it to just dissappear into the thicket. He wrote about the matter in a letter to his friend, Samuel Brook: "I was trembling with the utmost fear, my mind picturing images of my childhood that came like a visceral tidal wave, in a fraction of a second I was flipped from one mood to the next. I slowly meandered back with uncontrolled excrement seeping down my garments"

SPOOKED
TREMBLING
ABSOLUTE SHAMBLES
nice one /lit/

Opinions on this dude?
Where should I start with him?

Schoppenhauer went sicko mode with his 'On the freedom of will'. Has anyone refuted him? Please recommend me some books about free will (for and against) + discuss!

destiny? no coincides? no free will? he obviously believes that something has ordered our lives, and he only figured it out by the end of it but he was too headstrong to admit it.

Based thread.

>believed in physiognomy
>being miserable is natural
>you got to balance your humors bro
>was opposed to 1848 revolutions

>Walking down the street at night to get home
>Woman walking the other way crosses to avoid me
Well I wasn't going to rape you but now I feel like doing it out of fucking spite you self absorbed cunt.

Schopenhauer was right.