/lit/ - Literature

>>8241981
>Reading works written by the equivalent of twelve year olds

Please leave.

>>8231356
I haven't read much but i'd narrow the list down to Spenser, Chaucer, Goethe, Ibsen, Shakespeare
Middlemarch isn't that great, and i'd stay away Ovid and Milton (personal opinion)....not sure about the other authors mentioned.

>>8196691
>The representation is my world.

>>8189257
you stole my ''ignant'' shit posting shtick, you motherfucker!

> 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.

So /lit/, have you read yourselves stupid yet or do you occupy your time with meaningful activities? Or perhaps you think that Schopenhauer is wrong?

>Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life—the craving for which is the very essence of our being—were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.

― Arthur Schopenhauer


I want to read schopenhauer so fucking bad because a lot of I've read about him and how he thought is relevant to quite a few things that I've been dealing with lately. Unfortunately I'm still on the greeks and have to study 2000 years worth of canon before getting to him.

>That is greatness
Who cares.

Spongebob: What’s better than serving up smiles? Squidward: being dead or anything else

Absolutely not.

Schopenahauer: "will to life."

Nietzsche: "will to power."

Wasn't Schopenhauer actually in the right here?

It's fairly easy to see how life could be construed as a self-perpetuating will. Most conceptions of genetics seem to point in basically that direction.

Will to power, on the other hand, is kind of hard to defend intellectually. It certainly isn't a sweeping characteristic of all life; plants and bacteria don't have any 'will' at all. But even applied solely to social animals this theory seems to have its limits. The will to power per-se seems subordinate to need to survive; we have to secure food and sexual partners, and to this end, power is extremely helpful, but in the final analysis it seems primarily to be a tool of survival rather than the overriding concern of life.

How is Buddhism different from what Schopenhauer is advocating?

I find that essentially both suggest that going against the Will-to-Live is the only way to go against the suffering in the world

A LOTTA LOYALTY FOR A HIRED ORIENTALIST

>>6272454
>Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.