/lit/ - Literature

The Übermensch as described by Nietzsche a replacement for God. God is dead so he must be replaced with another purpose in order to not fall into nihilism. So the Übermensch it's just a self created purpose. It's just basically the same thing as absurdism.

>>17748150

>>17566312
Hi bros. Please say a prayer for me tonight. My mental health has not been so good. I scheduled a counselling appointment but the soonest time slot I could book is a couple weeks out. There are terrible forces at work in my city and I'm living in constant fear. Please pray to God for my peace of mind and deliverance from evil.

> “Those who are sufficiently purified by love and wisdom live the future altogether without corporeality and reach even more beautiful abodes.”
- Fwj Schelling

I see a lot of despair on this board and from people my age in general. I know this world is bad and getting worse, but their are values, there is good, life has purpose and the world contains beauty, humanity has been through awful shit before.

>>16817369
Me in my head

>>16815841
Excellent post. This is rather difficult.

I think the first thing to recognise is that YA can be exceptionally good. The ability to write something compelling, that holds the attention of a young adult, while at the same time delving into more mature themes that have some significance, without at the same time moving into unsuitable, even traumatic territories: to create worlds and plotlines, characters and narratives that reflect the adolescent viewpoint while giving guidance and even spiritual help -- this is a craft, and like all crafts, it holds at least some artistic value, and should be admired for the technique and skill it demands.

It should also be recognised that some works cross the boundary between YA and literature: it is possible for a book to be both (just as children's literature can still be considered 'literary').

I suppose here 'inferiority' is synonymous with 'immaturity' -- just as a mass-market paperback is less intelligent, less artistic, and less profound, either in that it fails to break new ground, or play some truly disruptive role, or build an archetypal narrative, one that speaks to the timelessness and transcendence of the human condition, so too does the YA novel fail to fulfil the conditions for true 'literature'. It's impossible to pin down what these are: there is no list of 'necessary and sufficient' conditions for deeming a work 'literary'; perhaps this might sound like a 'pseud-tier talking point', but I think you really do 'know it when you see it'.

I'm going to read Sorel now.
Good-Bye!

I don't understand why people romanticise this state of being; it's profoundly difficult, especially as an adolescent. You're under constant pressure from your family, and your own deeply-held sense of style and 'form' to behave in certain ways (particularly in terms of language), in a way that inevitably alienates you from your peers. You have all the resentment towards the rich (especially the nouveaux riches who you perceive as morally beneath you) that comes from growing up poor, not to mention the physical and mental stress that results from being constantly aware of your situation and wondering what will happen if the money stops coming in, while at the same time your peers treat you with precisely that same resentment because you exhibit those same upper class traits, which makes you a pariah everywhere (because when you do meet people of your social background, they can inevitably tell that you don't live in the same circumstances as they do).

You are trained to hold particular aesthetic values and tastes that clash with your surroundings, which you cannot escape. If you work in menial jobs to try and supplement your family's income, colleagues and customers, even managers, wonder what you are doing there and again resent you for the way you act. If you try to change that and conform to your surroundings, you betray yourself, your family, and your lineage.

Politically it's impossible: you can identify with the working class (because in economic terms, that is what you are), but at the same time, in social, cultural, and spiritual terms, you are so clearly not one of them -- and the bourgeoisie are profoundly distasteful to you, and you feel compelled to reject everything about them, while at the same time yearning for the security and comfort of their lifestyle.

I've finally reached a point in my life where I'm no longer embarrassed about who I am and what my name is; I no longer try to hide my accent and I refuse to change the way I act to conform to the demands of others -- but at the same time, I can't shake that feeling of resentment towards the Rich, and find the upper classes more generally impossible to spend time with -- and they will always sense that I am not really one of them.

The only people it's really possible to be friends with are foreigners and intellectual types, which of course has its own challenges.

>>16631324
He's identifying events in the modern world with the cycle described in the Upanishads: this is the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age in which everything falls apart, and finally leads back to a new Golden Age, and so the cycle continues.

So it's rather like the early Christian authors identifying Torah prophecies with events in Jesus' life, or modern evangelicals interpreting modern events in terms of the Book of Revelations (e.g. 'Obama is the Antichrist', etc).

>>16631619
National Socialism is the ultimate coping mechanism: the deranged, unworkable synthesis of schizoid occultic ramblings and economic fallacies; it is a plebeian philosophy, born out of grandiosity and narcissism, and a materialist, biological conception of race than denies any true divinity, whose hatred of the Jews is an obvious manifestation of resentment and envy -- jealousy of God's Chosen People: the Protagonists of History, for whom the tragedy of the holocaust was a mere stumbling block, perhaps even a necessary stepping stone to the reconquest of the Holy Land; the People who have overwhelmed the West not through some absurd and fantastic conspiracy but simply through superiority and intelligence, who have gifted the Arts and the Sciences with the masterworks of the centuries, whose holy texts and theology became the foundations of the most successful religion in world history, that conquered not just Rome, but marched with the British and American Empires into every corner of the globe, and who, despite your best efforts, continue to prosper, and truly thrive. Nazism is a failed philosophy, and will eventually fade into the footnotes of history. Fascism is futile; follow your Fuhrer and kill yourself.

>>16605685
Excellent thread OP. You write well.

Not to contaminate the board's aesthetic, but the critical drinker (youtube video essay/reviewer) talks about this, not explicitly, but he does make those same observations regarding Mulan, Marvel, and Star Wars.

Personally, I think it could be a good development (for example, exploring the nihilism that emerges if you are good at everything, face no adversity whatsoever, and learn no lessons -- or even rejecting that idea and asserting that a charmed life has meaning -- or alternatively show how such nihilism can be transcended by engaging with difficulties outside your experience, thus recreating the Journey, but perhaps recognising that such a recapitulation of genuine adversity, when chosen freely, is a hollow shell and cannot ultimately overcome the meaninglessness of an easy life.

However, this isn't how things are playing out. The lessons being learned are ones of aspirational liberalism -- an infantilised, feminised ideal of heroism without real adversity.

>>16602982
Marxism is bourgeois in that it is materialistic, concerned not with the spiritual circumstances of man, but rather with the physical conditions of his working and domestic life; it has as its aim not liberation of the self, or aspiration to some higher plane, but rather the extension of the comforts of the bourgeois to the working masses, thus revealing the limitations of this worldview: that the only thing worth having is material gain, and an increase in prosperity understood in material terms; it is thus willing to sacrifice freedom, spirit, humanity itself, nobility and passion; it is profoundly middle class and anti-aristocratic, negating and disputing the ancient human values, without any reference to the transcendent self, but bring dragging mankind down into the murk of materiality.

>>16578813
If you look at the argument between Marx and Bakunin, and between the Marxists and the Anarchists within the International more generally, you find that right from the start, Marx is advocating revolutionary dictatorship and vanguardism, which the Anarchists correctly predicted end badly: the State, even a workers' state, could never 'whither' away, but would instead ossify; the concentration of power in the hands of the few would breed a new, red bureaucracy, as Bakunin said: "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself" - Marx repudiated this, but it's clear his vision for the socialist road, while differing substantially from 'actually existing socialism' (Marx would indeed have been horrified by the famines and the gulags, the cultural revolution killings and the struggle sessions, the limitation of human potential by Stalinist totalitarianism) still ran through Jacobin territory: a committed minority, using the means of terror and violence, leading the working class to take absolute power over the institutions of the State; in other words, Marx leads inexorably to Marxism, to Leninism, to Stalinism and Maoism; the inevitable logic of authoritarian control cannot be resisted, and all who would reinterpret Marx with the hindsight of history, and adapt him to the conditions of the modern world, must reckon with this reality.

We developed a practical philosophy that led to science and technology: medicine and manufacturing. Metaphysics and morals were best left unexplored, relegated to a place of faith. The Church of England could tell us what to think and leave us be - and the lower classes could have their bible-bashing nonconformism.

Sitting around navel-gazing and worrying about the Death of God while dying of syphilis isn't much use when you're trying to build the greatest Empire in the history of mankind.

Perhaps one day we will recapture that spirit and the English race will rise once more.

But it seems unlikely.

1. Religions which ask for compassion tend to be more successful (downtrodden masses make up the majority and respond to these values).

or

2. Human beings, on the whole, have an evolutionary propensity towards compassion rather than its opposite, and this tendency is brought out over time through cultural change -- the initial formation of hierarchical societies inhibited its expression, but after thousands of years of civilisation it gradually comes to be prioritised.

or

3. God wants us to be compassionate, and has manifested himself in a sequence of messengers: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, etc., all of whom carried that same message, filtered by their respective cultures and epochs.

or

Following the sequence of the four ages, the lunar principle is ascendant, thus compassion is sacralised by the mainstream religious cultures and becomes more widespread, at the expense of other, more solar values.

I saw this mentioned on here previously: it's the memoir of a British man who fought on the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Looking for his name and the book's title.

Help much appreciated.

And how I dream of England, the woody vales and morbid moors of yesteryear, an island in the sunlit seas whose endless rains and waves came crashing in on beaches unspoilt by man. I miss the sound of church bells and country smells, the hedgerows and the fields with ripening corn, luminous beneath slate grey skies, shining in the sunlight that broke through the clouds. I yearn for those ancient days; I feel their image printed on my brain, a memory of that lost home whose crumbling walls still stand, roofless, decrepit, overshadowed by the tall towers of Mammon's Kingdom. Before the New World sent back its false promises and sordid gifts. I feel it in my bones, those who came before, and I wonder who I might have been, in what noble body working among honest folk, could this broken mind have travelled from birth, through charmed life, to calm death, buried in the fertile soil of ancient English lands.

And yet we are betrayed, lost, bereft, sunken in this worldly mire of plastic and wasted wills. The links in an unbroken chain that stretched back across a thousand years, tightly secured around a sense of self, of England, have been left to rust, or deliberately filed down, and I feel them breaking now, within me, and though I reach out and try to grasp at something firm, something solid, something real or more than real my fingers feel nothing but air. I am undone, unwound, naked in the dark, staring at the void, dissolved.

And yet there is still hope. I hear them roaring in the past, despairing at their children, demanding that we return, footsore, eyes smarting in the glare of a million flashing screens, yet determined to recapture this, our ancient island home. I feel their heavy hands pushing at my back, forcing me forwards, onwards to that better place. And so I heed their call, and steel myself for the fight that comes.

For we will make England ours.

There has been a philosophical exchange between East and West for a very long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

Also, if you take the time to really study Buddhist philosophy, especially Tibetan Buddhism, you will find many of the developments in Western philosophy, both continental and analytic, are either anticipated or inspired by analogous ideas in Buddhism (such as Leibniz's Monadology, Schopenhauer's Pessimism, Postmodernism, etc.)

I'm a little biased, but I would say Korean, Mandarin, or Japanese.

If you stay within the Indo-European language family you limit your ability to think. Learning a language with a heavy reliance on classical Chinese concepts can help you better understand the Eastern philosophical and literary traditions.

It's a fascinating experience to think with a system of grammar that works in a completely different way. It allows a different perspective on something as fundamental as causation, for example.

However, the work required is immense. If you are looking for a language requiring minimal effort with maximal pay-off (in terms of the works you will be able to read), then I would recommend French. However, the language is sufficiently similar to English that translations are fairly reliable. I would actually agree with the previous poster who suggest Polish, if you want to choose a language where much is lost in translation. Russian is, in my experience, about as difficult as an Indo-European language can get (although of course the literature is world-class and covers one of the most important periods of global history, in terms of the concepts and politics that have come to define the modern world).

However I personally find Poland to have the best science fiction.

Also, in terms of general language-learning advice:
1) Avoid gameified apps like duolingo.
2) Get a good textbook.
3) Practice every day with a native speaker as soon as you have a working vocabulary of 1000 words. I recommend Anki for learning vocabulary, although you mustn't rely on it too much.

I certainly found it to have a great deal of merit. Something can be both popular and good. The book's structure is fairly unique and his somewhat reticent references to past experiences with mental illness, along with his relationship with his son combine with the more philosophical aspects to give an enjoyable read that feels meaningful, and sometimes even profound.

Something nonSTEM people often fail to understand is how Science is really an extension of Art; that the creativity and significance of artistic pursuits are replicated in the search for knowledge and understanding -- it just requires different skills. Pirsig does a good job of describing a specific technological discipline to laymen, and gives a sense of how a more mechanical and systematic approach can yield further insights. His theory of Quality is more than pop philosophy (I find most of the people with whom I discuss this book couldn't really understand it) -- he even attempts to bridge aesthetics and metaphysics: his 'Quality' seems to play a similar role to (the later) Schopenhauer's 'Will' as an intermediary between the world of sensation and the Kantian Thing in Itself.

Don't be misled by the title -- it has little bearing on the book itself and was, it seems to me, designed to sell copies of a fairly dense and difficult work of philosophical literature to the unsuspecting countercultural masses.

I also think it worth mentioning that Pirsig's style (specifically the long and detailed descriptions of a technical pursuit largely incidental to the plot) rather reminded me of Moby Dick. If you enjoyed that book, details on whaling included, then you will probably enjoy this.

Book recommendation thread.
Post ten of your favourite books.
Then other anons recommend you something you might like.
Feel free to add details about the kind of book you'd like to read (e.g. genre, non-fiction or ficiton, etc.

I find it a little strange that people blame Sanders himself for his lack of success, as if in a democratic system the candidate should be blamed for the decisions of the people. He presented a coherent program of rational solutions to the crises facing your country, but unfortunately, the American people have never gone in for rationality.

How could one individual, acting with the best of intentions and running on a platform of unity and justice ever hope to succeed when faced with the seething and spitting mob that is the American body politic? How could he ever hope to convert to the cause of equality and fairness the twittering dogmatist hyperliberals, so consumed by commercialism, isolated and atomised, that for them the only battles worth fighting are for the vacuous causes of self-expression and identity. How could he reach the ignorant and close-minded masses of identitarian retirees, paying their last dollars to prosperity gospel televangelist huxters, placing their faith in magic and iron-age superstitions combined with Vegas glitz? How could a culture so vapid and plastic and material and base, so lacking in spirit or integrity, seemingly devoted to vulgarity as an end in itself, that vomits up Bidens and Trumps in an endless line of slick and shining opportunists, ever raise to the position of the presidency someone plain-speaking, honest and dedicated to the cause of his countrymen, regardless of gender or race, someone who fights for Americans as citizens, not interest groups?

And so he was forced to capitulate, to compromise, to settle for the lesser evil, because he recognised that the American people, this bloated, undereducated and overfed mass of navel-gazing narcissists, self-psychoanalysed and deconstructed and Freudified, who have either given in to a simplistic and Fascistic form of Christian heresy, or abandoned spirit altogether for the empty promises of glamour and glitz, prostrating themselves at the altar of Mammon, demanding the universe for themselves alone without thought for the rest of us who have to share this world, would never vote for him, would never drag their heaving, cellulitic, diabetic selves to the polling stations and mark for the highest office someone of true humanity, but would always be drawn, like rats to a sewer, to the lowest and most stinking candidate.

Do you see me now? Do you see me as a dog, as a meaty mutt, a furbound skinsack of blood and bone, black eyes, black nose, wet in the cold and sat in the snow, or am I just another image, a facsimile, plastic or plastercast, to be swiped past with your prematurely sclerotic thumb, the print smudging the grease on your screen, a mix of sweat and chipfat and semen, oncewiped and gleaming, catching the light that shines in from outside through your half-open window, from the world beyond the confines of your stinking sordid room.

>>16334994
>any random kiss
=/=
>teenage LOVE
To behold the dawn on stillness justifies all the world.