/lit/ - Literature

They were already fossils and out of place in universities, Eliade talks about how his own students rebelled against his paradigms for Marxist and psychoanalytic ones even when he was at the height of his "influence". All the most prominent ones did. Most of the people who took the side you mention seriously were laypeople reading at a popular level.

>>16249834
ancient greece is dead get over it loser

>>16249834
I have read lots of this stuff in the first years of uni because I wanted to be an edgy contrarian rightwing person, but after a couple of years they grow stale. Mostly, if you study philosophy like I did, you notice that their argument are very weak and that they are literal footnotes to Plato (which is not true for all philosophers), in that their thought presupposes, explicitly or not, some kind of metaphysical formal structure to which they give moral value and following which the world comes to be ordered.

Now, if you agree with this point of view, reading authors in the Platonic tradition will be much better for you than reading these guys. Supporting your ideas with misreported stories of your patients (young) or with misinterpreted religious sources (Eliade, Guenon, Evola) does not hit the point as Plato himself did 2000 years before with good arguments. Contemporary Platonists are way better than these guys ever were in conveying their points. Most of their studies, especially when it comes to history of religion and such, are giant arguments from authority for a Platonic metaphysics. Plato, at least, had actual arguments for a Platonic metaphysics.

If you disagree with them, you are in good company, because most people, from Aristotle onwards, have pointed out that Platonic metaphysics have lots of problems, starting from how is the interaction between ontologically different planes possible in the first place. Many philosophical advances were made since then. Reading Kant will help you understand where we are in terms of thought way more than reading these guys, which will mostly make you bitter about not living in ancient Greece, or Rome, or Hyperborea, mostly by conving you that they had a closer contact with "the divine" or "the sacred", when most people were likely as confused as we are, if not significantly more. Lots of authors have made giant steps in philosophy of mind, which seems to me like a much more fertile ground if one wants to understand something about the world than this crypto-religious bullshit is. Ironically enough, Plotinus is a good read wether you agree with them or not.

>>16249834
Hermetic shit has always been esoteric and probably always will be. These ideas will continue to bubble up from the depths every now and then, but I wouldn't expect them to ever mainstream.

>>16249926
Eliade isn't super original but he is a good introduction for many people because he really did believe in platonic metaphysics and think he experienced itself and had discovered deep structures of other cultures interacting with it

Of course Eliade isn't Plato, but he brings a lot of people around to reading Plato

The energy was redirected to pseudo-mystical charlatans like Lacan and new age Indomania.

>>16249926
>I wanted to be an edgy contrarian rightwing person, but after a couple of years they grow stale.

This has got to be a fake story, right off the hop. It's odd how so many of these "yeah, I used to be a cringy rightoid" stories emanate from the mouths of midwit leftoids.

I think >>16249926 has a point on the flaws of these sorts of projects, but I also think that "they're flawed" isn't really why they didn't get big. Marx is just flat out wrong in clear empirically observable ways, but there's still plenty of academics sperging out over his dribble.

Ultimately, these men (Jung, Eliade, but also people like Evola and Spengler) construct a worldview that isn't in agreement with what Academia and Liberalism want. Liberalism wants this soft Cartesian dualism where there are no higher values so you should just CONSOOM and PRODOOS endlessly with no higher principles what so ever. Eliade's Sacred and Profane says within like, the first ten pages, that Liberalism is evil, wicked, heinous, and as far from truth and goodness as you can possibly get, as do basically all other thinkers who posit that there are "higher things" in life. Is it any wonder, then, that Academia, rooted so tightly in Enlightenment thought, ignores people who say the Enlightenment was bad (implicitly or explicitly)?

>>16249926
Yikes and cringe in the same post

>>16249926
But these guys literally grew out of the post-Kantian, post-Hegelian idealistic milieu that you endorse. Could there have been Eliade without Rudolf Otto and the entire school of Religionwissenschaft in 19th century Germany?

>reading these guys, which will mostly make you bitter about not living in ancient Greece, or Rome, or Hyperborea, mostly by conving you that they had a closer contact with "the divine" or "the sacred", when most people were likely as confused as we are, if not significantly more.

This is pure conjecture on your end.

>>16250005
He's not entirely wrong since Eliade thought that man without religion was doomed to go insane and manifest schizophrenic symptoms. He doesn't think the answer is to "go back" however, he was emphatic that we need to move forward. He was most Hegelian like you say. Like Jung says, "not around, but through."

>>16249926
>ancient Greece, or Rome, or Hyperborea, mostly by conving you that they had a closer contact with "the divine" or "the sacred", when most people were likely as confused as we are, if not significantly more
Jung literally wrote that we know more about mysticism and symbols that the ancient Greeks. What'd you read, a wikipedia article?

That a few people in this thread interpret the studying of traditionalists as nostalgia is a sign of the diminishing intellectual level of /lit/, that a few sensationalists (usually anglos) project onto others their own limitations and misunderstandings, their love of larp and flashy historical reenactment is both pathetic and amusing. It is understandable as the american crowd seem to equate traditionalism with the most vulgar form of modernity (protestant ethics) but one has to be very ignorant in both fields to equate the two. To that I must add that longing for something, anything, is a pathology, not a sentiment. No. I couldn't care less about paved roads and big temples, in fact for the intellectualy oriented, only the most abstract representation exhibit some kind of interest.

>>16249834
Jung and Eliade are radically opposed.

What caused the downfall? Morons like you who couldn't see the glaring antinomy between both authors. Jung and Eliade are coincidentally the two authors I am most familiar with. Don't waste your time with the former.

>>16250039
Jung knows nothing of symbolism. Nothing. To equate the immanence of the 'unconscious' with the transcendental aspect of symbolism is nothing short of satanism, the real, unapologetic version of satanism: Jung's entire oeuvre serves the purpose of sacralizing evil, in a perverse attempt to deify the unholy as part of a new quaternity.

>>16249926
excellently crafted bait

>>16250069
Elaborate.

>>16250088
Elaborate.

>>16249971
>"yeah, I used to be a cringy rightoid" stories emanate from the mouths of midwit leftoids
I'm not a leftoid, I just got fed up with reading bad books.

>>16249947
I agree. Eliade is somewhat tolerable for me and he's still important as a sort of founder of the field of comparative religion. His books however become repetitive very quickly, like those of most authors working on his line. You can almost predict what he's going to say next, once you know that he takes everything as evidence for the existence of a Platonic metaphysical order. Again, I believe that reading Plato is way more edifying, in this case.

>>16249985
I don't know, I feel like there are a lot of generalizations in here. I'm not sure I get the connection between Englightenment and Liberalism. How would the first necessarily lead to the second? Englithtenment as such as produced many Platonically inclined thinkers (Kant, in my opinion, is one of the biggest among them). I see the englithtenment as mostly positive: criticism to superstition and appeal to reasons seem to me good advancement in getting rid of so-called "spiritual" authorities pestering european thought for centuries. This doesn't mean you don't have higher values: there were several deists and pantheists among those. Now the materialism of the current age is of course bad, but assuming that people before us where not materialistic in my opinion is a big mistake, if anything because it was mostly aristocrats - i.e. people who had leisure and time not to worry about materialistic things - to write philosophy. Do you believe a greek slave or a serf from the middle ages where not concerned with material goods? Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure enlightenment and materialism are necessarily connected, so I'm not sure someone who follows the principles of englithement would necessarily reject Eliade & co.

>>16250005
>Could there have been Eliade without Rudolf Otto and the entire school of Religionwissenschaft in 19th century Germany?
Of course not, but post-Kantian and post-Hegelian thought generated other tendencies beside those. I very much enjoyed reading Otto, but there's not mistake that he's a scientific dead end with no support to his theories. That sort of tendency to misinterpretation, cherrypicking and sloppy empiricism has been carried forward but it was clearly less successful than its counterparts.

>>16250094
To think that this is one of the rare times I decided to sit and actually make some effort in posting the truth instead of ridiculing the OP with some short and edgy shitpost:(

>>16250104
>I don't know, I feel like there are a lot of generalizations in here. I'm not sure I get the connection between Englightenment and Liberalism. How would the first necessarily lead to the second?

>>16250069
>That a few people in this thread interpret the studying of traditionalists as nostalgia is a sign of the diminishing intellectual level of /lit/, that a few sensationalists (usually anglos) project onto others their own limitations and misunderstandings, their love of larp and flashy historical reenactment is both pathetic and amusing. It is understandable as the american crowd seem to equate traditionalism with the most vulgar form of modernity (protestant ethics) but one has to be very ignorant in both fields to equate the two. To that I must add that longing for something, anything, is a pathology, not a sentiment. No. I couldn't care less about paved roads and big temples, in fact for the intellectualy oriented, only the most abstract representation exhibit some kind of interest.
This is how someone who has actually read some of these books would answer, and it's a good answer. But still, this "most abstract" representation of yours suspiciously resembles a mixture of aristocratic ethics and Platonic metaphysics: you do know how all those things are sort of old fashioned, and that there is such a plethora of objections to both that literal books have been filled with those? You know most of the categories you use have been pointless and irrelevant in both public and academic discourse for at least 70 years? How do you hope not to look "nostalgic" if you believe books which believe books from 2000 years ago?

>>16250104
I suppose I am making a bit of a generalization in my jump from the Enlightenment to Liberalism, and while I could take the time to try and connect the two (A strain of the Enlightenment?), it's really besides the point. What I'm getting at is this: Eliade and Jung both promote philosophies that speak of higher ideals (whatever those are) above the mere satiation of material needs and the achieving of material wants. This is not to say that prior societies (the Greeks, the Medievals, Chinese peasants, whoever) were not concerned with material things (they very much were), but rather that they understood that there were such things as higher ideals.

So then, when Liberalism takes over, and says that there IS only the material in a very specific context (I suppose we could construct some theoretical philosophy where there is only material, but there are still higher ideals, but that is not what Liberalism does), it makes men like Eliade and Jung and Plato and Evola and such useless from an educators standpoint. These men, by believing that there are higher ideals (which disagrees with Liberalism), are wrong. Why teach students the wrong ideas? Liberalism doesn't say Plato is wrong because of some Aristotelian or Eastern critique of the Forms, but rather because his idea of higher ideals is wrong.

>Why aren't pseudo-neoplatonic/hermetic revivalists more popular in academia?
Is like asking
>Why aren't there more Thomists in academia?
They operate off of a worldview that is fundamentally at odds with the one that academia is trying to inculcate. It's not really that there's anything wrong with what they're thinking, it's how they're thinking it (so to speak).

>>16250104
I don't have much knowledge about the things you're saying, but I just want to touch on one point:
>assuming that people before us where not materialistic in my opinion is a big mistake
What makes you think that? Your example of the slave makes sense in a way that a slave needs basic material necessities which he barely gets. Does that make him inherently materialistic? Are material goods his purpose in life? I doubt it since he probably knows he'll never get them so he's likely to search for satisfaction in religion.
I think people underestimate how much religion was a part of daily life and I'm not talking about Christian times.
You also mentioned the Aristocrats had time and leisure to not care about materialistic things, but they had less than the average person has today and the average person today is way more materialistic. The person of today is materialistic through and through and can never satisfy his greed for the material.
Moderation is something even the richest aristocrats knew of and that's because they knew that moderation would appease the gods.

So i would say people back then were less materialistic. Even the poorest people would let go of a part of their material possession to make a sacrifice for the gods.
Even the poorest people would be hospitable to strangers and serve them food and drink, because it could be a disguised god testing them (a lot of stories like this exist).

>>16250098
Elaborate on what, exactly?

>>16250104
Slave on his own accord. The eternal slave is enamored with the destruction of archaic models of oppression because he perceives in the Enlightenment the foreshadowing of his own emancipation.

One who lost touch with the radicality of Being ends up tailing the cause of his own suffering, forever.
The sacred and profane dichotomy is itself a sign of the Fall, as the totality of Being is entirely 'sacral', and the descent towards substance a requisite of manifestation. It is hard to decipher the Traditionalists because this particular aspect is never outright explained. Manifestation is degenerative, the traditionalists are meager compared to the Hindus for example, whom are, in turn, inferior to their anteriority.

>>16250223
On Jung being a dumbass, or on Jung and Eliade's profound differences, whichever one of the two you are.

>>16249834
>pseudo-neoplatonic/hermetic