/lit/ - Literature

>>11642910
well, there you go. you've got at least one all-time classic to look forward to. the greeks are bosses. and nobody ever loved the greeks (well, some of the greeks, anyways) more than nietzsche.

one thing about sloterdijk is that he doesn't really seem to do a lot of name-dropping w/r/t other philosophers. he's read both foucault and deleuze and seems to admire both of them, but mostly everything that he's writing is coming out of his own perspectives, and with very different results. nietzsche is the guy he goes to the most. he likes heidegger a lot too (and so do i!) but it's not really like you will need to have a huge grounding in either of those guys before you can read and find something interesting in his work.

if you can get through CoCR you won't regret it. that's one of the major reasons to read sloterdijk, imho: the prevalence of cynicism and its effect on culture and thinking. more recently peterson has sort of begun doing this as well. maybe now things have changed so much that it's not even ironic cynicism, but even worse, the kind of militant cynicism we see everywhere. it's an outgrowth of the former, i think, but that in turn was an outgrowth of thought that came to fruition in the mid-20C: structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, semiotics, all the rest. which is a really fascinating story in itself, and an important chapter in the intellectual heritage of western (and global) civilization.

and so now it's 2018 and we're kind of suffering from reality deficiency as a result and a rage virus seems to spreading all over the world. philosophers don't always have the cures for these things, but they do have unique and insightful ways of looking at the problems. sloterdijk is more interesting than most in that regard because he actually does come fairly close to prescribing a solution (always a dangerous thing, in academia): that is, anthropotechnics. work on the man. and maybe work to build practices that make work on the man a cultural imperative their own. and other things.

i don't want to simplify or essentialize things or just bloviate endlessly with my own fuckface opinions, though. you'll reach your own conclusions. but when in doubt, always start with the greeks. have you read the stoics at all? epictetus, marcus aurelius, seneca, those guys? bearing in mind what nietzsche says about them (and that he basically picks fights with everyone, and not always in a fair way) they're worth reading also.

Can the Republic be skipped if one isn't interested in politics? Is there more to the work than just political theory?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b_IHjWXbuM&list=PLZBnpApciNZ9dX1kKAsf2rSuRvyOKYs1v&index=1

This whole album was specifically made with The Republic in mind, specifically The Allegory of the Cave.