/lit/ - Literature

I considered myself a communist for the past 15 years until about a year ago. I would fervently argue with everyone in my life and online about it to the point of even convincing some people I know to be communists (something I now regret). I got pretty deep into the theory, like I know quite a bit of jargon from Capital and my bookshelf is full of academic communist books. There are still leftist thinkers I like (Marx, Pashukanis, Adorno, Cohen, Buber, Baudrillard, Bookchin, Gorz, and Graeber), but overall it's a wash.
What changed my mind was two things: 1. interacting with leftists and 2. reading more historical leftist literature. In both cases, it started to become difficult to ignore the disparity in values between me and them. The main realization I've had is that (with perhaps very rare exceptions) leftists have the same values as liberals, just different institutional preferences. They call this "immanent critique", i.e. critiquing something on its own premises. I am skeptical to the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality, and hostile to the morality of Recht (that branch of morality that concerns justice, fairness, rights, and "owing"), which I think makes me neither a liberal nor a leftist. The way I would summarize it is by saying that I'm opposed to individualism and think people should be loyal to others and form a strong sense of community from which nobody can be excluded. But I also think that modernity and its values inappropriately instrumentalizes people. I am opposed to professionalization (in the sense of paid labor), either by the market or the state, and think everything should be distributed freely and that individuals should work out of a motivation to help their fellow sentient beings. Despite insisting on the abolition of the state, I think leftists desire professionalization through it in practice. One of my realizations has been that leftists want to maintain impersonal relations; I am deeply opposed to this, and wish for a society of personal relations, which they would view as reactionary. I still want the abolition of markets, but I also want strong bonds of family-like fellow-feeling and think this should be actualized wherever possible.

what does /lit/ think of Alasdair MacIntyre?

>>17559285
*blocks your path*

>>17235404

>MacIntyre opposes Nietzsche's return to the aristocratic ethics of Homeric Greece with the teleological approach to ethics pioneered by Aristotle. Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment moral theory does not work against a teleological ethics. For MacIntyre, "Nietzsche replaces the fictions of the Enlightenment individualism, of which he is so contemptuous, with a set of individualist fictions of his own."[2]:129 Nietzsche's Übermensch , his solution to the lies of the Enlightenment, exposes the failure of the Enlightenment's epistemological project and of its search for a subjective yet universal morality. Nietzsche neglects the role of society in the formation and understanding of tradition and morality, and "Nietzsche's great man cannot enter into relationships mediated by appeal to shared standards or virtues or goods; he is his own only moral authority and his relationships to others have to be exercises of that authority... it will be to condemn oneself to that moral solipsism which constitutes Nietzschean greatness."
This seems like a pretty devastating critique of Nietzsche. I know a lot of people love Nietzsche here but how would you respond to his critique?

Has anybody else noticed that the vast majority of modern Christians are either really stupid or really smart?

They're either illiterate peasants in poor, third-world countries, or they're absolute geniuses who become philosophers and theologians and artists.

On the other hand, it seems like the vast majority of atheists are midwits.

Alasdair MacIntyre is unironically based.

>>16385938
Illiberal Catholicism? They're all Catholics, right? And they're all pretty much picking up a strain of anti-liberal, anti-mass-democracy thought that's always been present in the Church. I know in particular that Deneen and MacIntyre are Catholic converts.

>>15589597
On the other hand, how do you account for some of the greatest thinkers of our time being religious, or even becoming religious after being atheist? Alisdair MacIntyre converted to Catholicism after being an atheist for the longest time. There's tons of extremely smart people who are religious.

Everyone who claims they're "smart" and who reads themselves out of Christianity is almost always a midwit, rather than being genuinely smart.

>btfos Nietzsche
>btfos Max Weber
>btfos Sartre and all of the existentialists
>btfos all forms of individualism and collectivism, including capitalism and communism
>proves Aristotle was right all along that you should follow your own telos
>all in one book
Has someone notified the based department?

>Evelyn Waugh
>Gene Wolfe
>G.K. Chesterton
>Graham Greene
>John Henry Newman
>Alasdair MacIntyre

What is it about Catholic converts that causes them to produce such high-quality /lit/ material? In both literature and philosophy.

>The Enlightenment was a good thi-

Ahem.

What the fuck is his problem?

*butchers aristotle and aquinas to advance his own brand of moral relativism*

heh, nothing personal kiddo

>>10081597
every Catholic should know this man

>>9770841

Yes, although I believe his importance in philosophy has somewhat diminished with the recent transition to moral skepticism.

But Analytical Thomists is growing in popularity in some European university departments.

Even though it's not entirely accurate to call him "right wing."

Just starting on After Virtue. What am I in for? What do you think about him?

>>6270044


>could a rational worldview

all forms of rationality are embedded in and an expression of a specific inherited tradition, you'll have to be more specific.

This guy is a genius. I've been comfortably agnostic for a very long time and this man is the only person to ever make me seriously consider religious concepts. There are a good few officially uploaded videos on youtube of him reading papers. All are pretty powerful even if you don't agree with him.

In this one he BTFO of a loud-mouthed priest at 55 minutes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tm-5JXRXkM

In this one he talks about literature:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fURsunj61Y

>>5166127


>normative dualism

disgusting

>>5082460


above and beyond