/lit/ - Literature

>>16484643
You need Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) Russel. There is certainly more I'm forgetting. Frankly anon, you aren't going to get near as much out of your studies without looking outside of philosophy. You need literature and theology and history and sociology and even psychology. Philosophers have always been prodigious readers. Most of the stuff you read will be works of emergent thought. You may not see it but anything "the greats" wrote will be the product of a holistic exposure to all those aforementioned subjects on top of life experience and personal contemplation. The experience and contemplation is important because it grounds your very being to the lebenswelt that informs philosophical understanding. You should also be studying art, science, and music.

I'm going to be honest anon. If you think philosophy has been (non-rhetorically) ended then you have a long road ahead of you. And it will be bumpy.

>>16484643

There are many others, besides Marx, who larp as a Hegelians, so you might want to check those out too.

>>16484643
You think Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are, what, more 'scientific' and healthful than Foucault and Derrida? Drop them. Hume before Kant, Hegel then Marx (you think you're gonna get Marx without Hegel?), then Lenin, then maybe Lukacs, Althusser or Hyppolite if you're bored. Maybe fill in the blanks with writers who are orthodox Marxist and elaborate and revise his ideas for current conditions like Susanna de Brunhoff or David Harvey. You should also know Epicurus well: as you know, being such a devout Marxist, Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus. There are lots of things to which Marx responds you'll want to look into, especially early capitalist (Smith, Ricardo, material around the corn laws) writing and bourgeois revolutionaries in France throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries. Don't come back until you're finished all that.

>>16484725
>You think Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are, what, more 'scientific' and healthful than Foucault and Derrida? Drop them.
The fact that you take more issue with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and not that OP puts "science" on a pedestal is worrying anon.

>>16484747
There is no point in arguing with his notion that Marxism is scientific (or how one characterises post-modernism.) It's better just to lean in on these posts so they don't last for 4 days.

Deleuze.

>>16484643
Marx wanted to pass as a scientific be due to the masses being in praise of the scientific. So Marx said he was a materialist and said hisotry is materialistic.
Marx tried to so hard to larp that he even put high school maths his books, and made mistakes, but since the masses were not educated, just like today, they all viewed him as legit.
This from those people that you get ''history is a science'', ''economy is a science'', ''psychology is a science'' and so on. All those non-Stem crappy fields pushed by liberals as a science.


Then 150 years later, all the morons who idolize science and maths from popsci videos on YouTube still praise him.

So I have a question: are you one of them?

>>16484643
You sound a little upset that the postmodernists ended philosophy which also invalidated marxism as a consequence. You can ignore the truth and burry your head in the sand but just know it’s because you were too scared to accept the truth. Why are you even asking us? Do you want others to tell you that you are right to stop at Marx so you feel comfortable with yourself? You are already looking for comfort so how do you expect to arrive at any truth?

>>16484787
>Marx tried to so hard to larp that he even put high school maths his books, and made mistakes, but since the masses were not educated, just like today, they all viewed him as legit.
When did those high school math appeared, isn't it something like 1882? Didn't Marx died in 1883?

>>16484701
Thank you for your reply. I'm a fiction writer so I'm already familiarizing myself with literature, and I certainly plan on reading from a variety of disciplines. The reason I even ask these questions is because any time a novice approaches philosophy, the field looks so damn wide and it's tough to know where to start, what to read. Like anyone else, I believe in a canon, and having a limited amount of time, I'd like to skip the side stuff and get into the meat and potatoes. And I don't think philosophy's been ended, I just don't know what modern philosophy is worthwhile the same way I don't pay much attention to contemporary lit.
>>16484725
I don't know, I haven't read any of them. That's why I am asking you.thanks for your suggestions, I will look into those people.
>>16484747
What's wrong with science? What's wrong with rationality and logic? I certainly value these things more than nonsense and unsubstantiated claims

>>16484778
I never said I think Marx is scientific, I only want to read him because of how significant his impact has been.
>>16484787
See my answer above. Btw you answered none of my questions, rather you've assumed my beliefs and are attacking me based on them.
>>16484799
Who's upset? I haven't read any of these people. You sound like you're personally offended by my asking questions, and it seems like you feel as though I'm attacking you when I'm not. You've given no helpful answer whatsoever, just another ideological attack.
>Why are you even asking us?
If you're offended, then you could just not answer and move on. But instead you answer with this useless comment.

>>16484857
>What's wrong with science? What's wrong with rationality and logic? I certainly value these things more than nonsense and unsubstantiated claims
Tell me, what exactly do you see as nonsense within the realm of philosophy? How does "science" offer us a differing (and more accurate) account? Rationality and Logic aren't things that any philosopher is opposed to in and of themselves. However, I think it's dangerous to form an ideology around them in order to legitimize claims with just as little substance as "nonsense". Scientism is a cancer to the philosophical tradition. It bounds things in terms that are concise and agreeable to those with little perspective. It's like making food taste better at the expense of nutritional value. Science is inadequate at speaking of things for which it lacks the terms to describe. Don't misinterpret me. I don't believe in a flat earth or reject heliocentrism. It's just that the lines of thinking to reach those conclusions don't offer us any substance from which transcendent truth can be distilled.

There is no end to philosophy. The suffering lasts forever

Wittgenstein is the end of philosophy.

It started and ended with the legendary figure of Socrates.
Few have earnestly attempted to grapple with the implications of his legend - most other "philosophers" were individuals who mired themselves in rhetoric, which only can recycle "knowledge" and prevent attainment of understanding, and were thus no different "non-philosophers".
People have said of that their tasks were "Socratic", or literary critics have described past individuals as having led "Socratic lives" - none of them succeeded.
Thus, individuals such as Marx, who are focused on symptoms of root causes, and who rely exclusively on rhetoric, are no different than you or me.

>>16485144
Except he changes his mind later on when he wrote PI

>>16484725
Lenin is philosophically worthless. He was a fucking midwit who's only worth was in political strategy.

>Is autistic soulless materialism and class reductionism LARPing as a science the end of philosophy?
Marxism refuted itself in practice

>>16484703
>Marx
>Hegelian

>>16484643
>I really don't see any point in reading the deconstructionists et al, who as far as i know were reactionary to Marx and whose ideas were harmful, suspect, and unscientific
What makes them any less "scientific" than previous philosophers? Or more "harmful"? If anything they were more scientific and philosophically correct at the end, imo.

The deconstructionists mostly wanted to help marxist ideas flourish by melting and questioning all the imperatives and ideas that opposed marxism at the time. Of course they could've applied this aswell to Marx and kill leftism too. Foucault did this and at the end of his career he became a sort of fascist.
If you really are being serious and not trying to make a massive bait to this board, i think you should read the french post-modern fucks and not simply think stuff "ends" with one philosopher.

>>16485465
I'm not trying to bait anyone, I've stated my intentions very clearly. I simply wanted to get some recommendations as well as some informed opinions about post-Marxian philosophy. I think seeing everything through the lenses of power and oppression, and deconstructing every thing until nothing has meaning or value, are both very harmful and responsible for much of the ideological garbage of today. I don't know the contexts in which those philosophers originally used their ideas, but it's being used in very harmful ways now. It's thanks to these ideas that people can infinitely cry "oppression!" and manipulate others to get things. I really do appreciate that you have responded without any personal attacks, because here we can go back and forth. There were a few posts earlier where they seemed to me to actually be bait, trying to stir shit up and derail the thread.

>>16484643
>Title
No, it doesn't. Find a topic you are interested, and read the SEP article or a course reader for oxford, routledge, etc.
Examples: Metareasoning, Cox and Raja
Philosophy of Mind, Heil
The Philosophy of Law, Schauer and Sinnott-Armstrong

You've made a bunch of other points in your post that reveal your ignorance in the subject and I suspect you picked them up from this board. That is a mistake.
I recommend you come to your own conclusions, libgen and SEP make it staggeringly easy to do so.

Furthermore, if you studied philosophy with concrete curiosity or goals, you would have done so yourself, instead it seems like you are studying it as some kind of misguided experiment in the western canon. If you can't disabuse yourself of this, please fuck off, we really don't want you.

>>16484643
marx intolerably tarnished the philosophy of hegel. hopefully the plato and aristotle will give you enough of a foundation in real philosophy for your soul to be ready for the truth, if you ever come across st. augustine or thomas.

>>16484780
>metaphysics without metaphysics
useless

Philosophy ended with the greeks

>>16486779
based

Comrade, anything beyond the 1921 Comintern line is revisionist propaganda and probably the CIA. Never mind the postmodernists were trying to radicalize aspects of Marx in service of general human emancipation, they were anti-Marxist because they were somewhat critical of Marxist states which by the way weren't real Marxism.

>>16484643
Brentano/Husserl.

philosophy isnt concerned with marx, you fucking midwit

>>16484725
Anyone who drops Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is a complete and utter retard. Marx isn't even part of philosophy and the biggest blunder of the 20th century was too many writers taking his ridiculous "ideas" seriously.

>>16484701
>theology
Pure tripe

>>16484643
You don't get to criticise others for being unsientific while praising Marx as the end of philosophy.

>>16486629
All you explained is more in part with modern philosophy than post-modern philosophy.
I find it funny that you are complaining about the "ideological garbage today" when if anything that is more part of the popular modern philosophy today than post-modern, just as Marx tries to reduce stuff down to class struggles (im not a expert on marx so forgive me if i say dumb shit), or feminism tries to create endless ways to map society and history to always try to "prove" that everything that was a woman was deemed as inferior or being oppressed; thus creating zones to capture desire and sometimes form neuroses on their brains.
Post-modern philosophy more or less came to even kill such concepts like oppression-oppressor, since one of their major themes is more around the fact that you cant actually really prove that certain aggregates or concepts arent really as solid as they are and fall into ambiguity. They simply didnt kill the "left" because they only liked to apply those theories on the stuff they didnt like at the time.

If you read someone like Deleuze you would know what he isnt about deconstructing everything untill you reach nothing, he praises the ability of experimentation, breaking a wall reaching the nothing (body without organs) but boucing off and creating something new to invest in. In Thousand Plateaus he even warns of the dangers of deterretorializing too fast, there is no such thing as total desconstruction without a construction occuring somewhere else unless you literally die in the process.

You literally have nothing to lose on reading these more "contemporary" philosophers, even if you dont agree with them on the larger picture you can still learn new stuff that can be applied elsewhere for your needs.

>>16485420
He said larp.

>>16486964
seethe lol

>>16484643
Sartre is worth reading

Marx is not philosopher proper he is social critic/activist. He started what we may call critical social thinking, and Derrida, Foucalt and so on are part of this tradition. If you want to do philosophy then you have to read all of them, and all the others who opposed them. If you don't want to be philosopher and you already have preconceived notion that you want to realize politically (that is, you are an activist) then you don't need to read anything, you will butcher it anyway.

>>16487163
>If you want to do philosophy then you have to read all of these non-philosophical writers
Why?

>>16486742
Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite to thought in the third kind of knowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition. This plane presents two sides to us, extension and thought, or rather its two powers, power of being and power of thinking. Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration?

>Is Marx the end of philosophy?
No, but he is the generation of Theory, alongside Freud and Nietzsche. It's different to philosophy insofar as it is a critical perspective of the entire underlying cause for the existence of thought at all. For Marx it is dialectical materialism, that is to say, the underlying economic and class-based cause for ideology, for Freud a theory of trauma, and Nietzsche the universal will to power. This account cannot be ignored by philosophy, but, it also means unintelligibly without philosophical reasoning. Brassier wrote a really good essay about this.

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/27

>>16486712
Thanks for the suggestions. I am absolutely ignorant on this topic, I think I've said that several times now. I'm not telling anyone what to think, I'm much more interested in hearing your opinions about which philosophers are worth studying. I don't even really understand your final paragraph, especially the unwarranted hostility.
>>16486734
I certainly will read those two, thanks for the comment.
>>16486908
Thanks for the suggestion.
>>16487004
I'm not praising Marx lol
>>16487021
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, definitely going to look into Deleuze with an open mind.
>>16487163
Yessir, I get that, the main reason I even mentioned Marx is because I know his work was very influential for the philosophers who followed his era. I have no agenda, I simply want to learn about the best and most influential ideas, and I was looking for some tips as to where I should be focusing so I don't have to read 100 extemporaneous philosophers.
>>16487316
Thanks for the comment and essay link, very interesting. Will check it out!

bunmp

>>16487316
>It's different to philosophy insofar as it is a critical perspective of the entire underlying cause for the existence of thought at all.
Yeah philosophy certainly never addressed that question until Marx and Nietzsche. ffs

>>16489055
>>Yeah philosophy certainly never addressed that question until Marx and Nietzsche
Exactly correct. Genealogical inquiry's disillusionment with the image of thought as truth (philosophy as the will to truth) overturns this naive perspective which was held by philosophy up until this point. Before Marx and Nietzsche, thinking presupposes that if it can justify itself, then it is truth which it has found. But Marx and Nietzsche ask the question "what are you justifying yourself for?" Any more questions?

>>16487316

Absolute brainlet-tier outline. Unbelievably stupid.

>>16484643
>Does philosophy end with Marx
no

>>16484643

Would you faggots stop reading Marx and this other continental bullshit? Seriously, start reading serious thinkers and not just influential thinkers. Try Lakatos for a pretty easy response. There are lots, actually. Pick up practically any good anthology of analytic philosophy and get on board with the goddamned program.

>>16489202
why are you so mad

>>16489261

Too many fools, brother.

I bet you faggots dont even read philosophy, I hate every single one of you

>>16489141
Just as one example Hobbes had already put forward the idea that people only used reason as a tool to accomplish the desires of their emotional world, and thought our faculty of judgment was basically biased and untrustworthy for this reason.

>>16489298

Bishop Berkeley, go read it. Hume too. Go.

>>16489229
Another boofhead who believes in the divide. Going from frege and russel, to strawson, donnellan, and grice to kripke Austen and serle, then to Quine and Davidson, the conclusions you’d find in this trajectory aren’t much different to the conclusion of what you’d find in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida. Continental analytic is the same.

>>16484643
And you posted this here expecting people to react how?

>>16489298
yes, and Plato said that the tripartite soul has desires which are contrary to reason, but are necessarily part of the same soul, and therefore desire can use reason for its own ends. What's your point? Philosophy is a slow revolution of the same wheel for eternity. Genealogical analysis was just another novel challenge that went deeper than any before it.

>>16489307
I've read Berkeley's main Treatise, and quite a bit of Hume's body of work. I don't see how they're related to what I said about Hobbes, Hume's skepticism isn't the same as Hobbes' take on the relation between reason and the passions.

>>16489335

I don't agree, at all. I do agree Husserl and Heidegger made important contributions to understanding, and that some analytic philosophy (especially early) is pretty niche and turned out to be unfounded. But the catch is that the same analytic crew is responsible for the dismantling; very few "fan club" extensions have spawned in the analytic tradition.

>>16489389
My point is that Marx and Nietzsche were not the first people to suspect the narratives that reason presents of having ulterior motives, which is what the poster said. It's a very basic psychological insight tbqh.

>>16489395

Hume says similar things about the role of practical reasoning, but the Hobbesian "ugliness" is cast off and there's at least some effort to spell out moral motivation. Berkeley is of course a great (the great?) account of why pure practical reasoning motivated by desires cannot be correct.

>>16489389

The Hobbesian/Humean view (more Hobbes) is that reason is actually just (properly) a slave to the passions. Plato of course wouldn't agree to this at all; that's the Republic.

>>16484643
I highly recommend checking out Spengler.
It's philosophy mixed with history. Very interesting read.

>>16489403

It's not even that there are ulterior motives. It's that entire frameworks (including logic?) are a consequence of our day-to-day fiddling around. Wittgenstein has the better version of this. Marx is literally feeding a just-so story that on reflection isn't all that compelling.

>>16489437
Is this even true though? Are there not universal rules of logic that all humans have to some degree?

>>16489432
Thanks bud, it's certainly on the list. Is it okay to read the abridged version, or should i go with the unabridged?

Marx ended philosophy. He is the final boss and is irrefutable.

>>16489491
I bought a copy of the unabridged but before starting it the autist in me felt unsatisfied, so I got an epub of the unabridged and I'm currently reading that.
Can't comment on what's left out or how important it is, sorry, but I think it might depend on your autism.
Definitely a big rec. Feels like reading a forbidden knowledge book.

>>16489398
>But the catch is that the same analytic crew is responsible for the dismantling; very few "fan club" extensions have spawned in the analytic tradition.
What do you mean by “fan club”? That it’s less likely one would an enthusiastic reader of Davidson as you’d find with Derrida? Anyway, the point I’m making is that both traditions lead to a critique of representation - which has been the most persistent question of the last 40 years. I’ve never understood the divide as anything more than a shallow stylistic difference.

>>16489514
copy of the abridged* oops

>>16489432
Spengler contradicts himself by relativizing philosophical frameworks as cultural constructs and then creating his own meta-philosophy the provenance of which he never explains properly. I got into an argument about this with an anon here a while ago and he told me I was wrong about Spengler not explaining how his meta-philosophy emerges from the late Faustian period, so I might be missing something but I've read Decline several times and I really don't remember him saying anything that would explain the contradiction. Hegel has a similar schema of different philosophical 'styles' according to periods and peoples but he does try to ground his own transcendence in a self-consciously historical manner. I would be lying if I said I understood how Hegel does that though.

There is another anon that sometimes posts about Vico, saying that he was the first to come up with this view of history and Hegel and Spengler sort of built off him, but I haven't read Vico, could be worth checking out if you are interested.

>>16489488

I don't know about particular rules everyone would agree to (even formalizing basic logics has turned out to be super hard), but I do agree there is a "logos." Marx and his clown-troupe seem to think that it's all (potentially) just an arbitrary consequence of some lifestyle. So yes, I agree, but the Marxists would not.

>>16489525

I think you've probably encountered the recent "make everyone happy" thing that people like Putnam are pushing, where they are trying to extract pieces here and there that might be something that analytic philosophy would be interested in engaging. But the same thing is pretty much true of anything. You can read Don Quixote and see elements that are relevant to certain topics. It doesn't mean that Cervantes was necessarily engaging deep philosophical topics.

>>16489525

And by "fan club" I mean people who literally build their careers by spinning a particular extension of some other nonsense in some direction. Lacan, Zizek, etc. It's a big extension, not a seriously critical look at the original thing. Compare with Lakos. It's undeniably a different kind of thing and that's what I mean by "fan club."

>>16489514
>>16489533
thanks! I'm looking forward to it

>>16489534

This is exactly why trying to "put philosophy in historical context" is bound to fail. You can't have a "historical answer" without a serious methodology and you can't have a serious methodology without at least engaging directly the issues.

>>16489534
Haven't finished the book yet so I can't really comment in full.
From what I've gathered so far he seems to be looking into why certain modes of thinking emerge in certain cultures and how those modes of thinking influence the culture and the people who live in it.
Forgive me if I'm ignorant I'm new to both these guys, but he seems like a good counterpoint for Marx who focused on how the material affects the psyche, whereas Spengler examines how the psyche impacts how we navigate and use the material. Chicken, or egg?
>how his meta-philosophy emerges from the late Faustian period
Does Spengler claim to transcend his own time's philosophical influence?

>could be worth checking out if you are interested.
I saw The New Science posted here a few weeks ago. It's on the list.

I'm new to Spengler and Marx so apologies if this is a shitty post.

>Does philosophy end with Marx?
No, it ends with Wittgenstein

>>16488704
>I don't even really understand your final paragraph, especially the unwarranted hostility.
I'm saying you need to set aside goals like "learning about philosophy". Pick a theme you're curious about: law, justice, consciousness, etc. Learn about that. You will come to understand the way contemporary philosophy works, and why stopping at Marx is an abject error. Because in the real world of philosophy, we read one thinker, then if we think they are really good, we read their critics, and if they are really good we read that critic's critics. We don't "just stop" until we have writing of our own to do, let alone at fucking Marx.
I feel hostile because my field of study gets a lot of attention from people who are attracted to the name and pedigree of it, without understanding why it's valuable— the whole "western canon" bullshit schema, that often comes hand in hand with dismissing modern philosophy and "deconstructionists".

>>16489558
Sorry, I’m still not sure what you mean. Are you against the use of a framework to investigate something, ie. zizek using a lacanian frame to investigate culture? And by using that he isn’t critically engaged with the tools he’s using?

>>16489639
Spengler makes a quite radical metaphysical claim about what civilizations are, basically cultural organisms formed around a Prime Symbol, which informs the development of their philosophy, religion, art, even their math. This is an intriguing idea, despite coming under quite a lot of criticism for forcing things into boxes they don't necessarily naturally fit into. And yeah it's the polar opposite of Marxism, in Marxist terms the superstructure would be determining the conditions of the base in Spengler's system, and the superstructure is metaphysical, not materialist, and isn't even operating according to causality. Spengler sees the form of mercantile and industrial capitalism as a result of the Faustian symbol of striving into an infinite horizon, which is to put it mildly rather different than Marx' take.

When I say he contradicts himself it's when he starts in the second volume to discuss his notions of Cosmic Beat and Waking Tension, among several other concepts he explains. These concepts are used as a meta-philosophy to explain the origin of the Cultures and their prime symbols, indeed of life in general. His whole methodology of Historical Analogy is also a bit of a problem, which he appears to reconcile by saying that the Faustian outlook is inherently historical(as was for example his view of the Egyptians though in a different way, as opposed to cultures like the Classical and Indian which he says cared nothing for history), which is why he is able to do this kind of bird's eye view comparison of different cultures. And he doesn't claim to transcend his time, rather he doesn't even address the issue. The language he uses when discussing these issues in that chapter is simple and declarative and he doesn't even mention its relation to the Faustian worldview. It's not that you can't reconcile these things theoretically, as I said Hegel does that in some abstruse manner, it's that he doesn't even go into it at all from what I can tell.

>>16484643
I unironically think anyone of you little faggots who uses the phrase "x ended philosophy" should be lined up and shot.

>>16484643
Why would the works of some standard Hegelian mark the end of philosophy?

>>16484643
>I really don't see any point in reading the deconstructionists et al
Those people are pseuds not philosophers, retard. Learn what philosophy is.

>>16489779
yes, KILL someone for asking a question. Sounds like your immersion into the world of ideas has made you an open-minded and enlightened person
>>16489877
There's a lot more to the post than just MARX. Give me more than "learn what philosophy is." Point me in the right direction, mr. wise sage.

>>16489749
I really like his theory of cultures being organisms since it fits nicely into evolution and simulation theory. Cultures seem to follow the same pattern of birth, life, death and mutation that all other life forms follow so it's apt to categorize them as organisms. Like the cells that inhabit us we are the cells that make up the super-organism of society/culture. We can mutate or become infected etc. and that can destabilize or kill the super-organism.
Ideas, like life, are born, changed, and killed, but they leave traces of their DNA in the collective pool. The collective pool of ideas could be considered another super-organism made up of all individual ideas and ideologies. The individual components mutate, change and die like the cells in our body which changes the whole.
One way I like to conceptualize idea as life-form is by looking at how reason and intuition function. Or left brain vs right brain. The creative, intuitive side gives birth rapidly and the rational mind is an executioner. It's killing shitty deformed babies day and night, but when a good idea is born the axe does not swing. The idea is allowed to live so long as it justifies its existence to the executioner. If an idea lives it can witness the births and deaths of new ideas to inform it on how to mutate and give birth. The dead ideas' memory also still lingers in the collective idea pool. Like in a simulation the dead and discarded ideas are taken into account to inform the new iterations just like the living ideas that made it past the executioner.
The universe as evolution/simulator is a really interesting concept that I'm hooked on right now and Spengler using that type of interpretation is justified in my eyes since it seems to be in harmony with how the universe operates.
The symbol is the lasting idea that escaped the executioner and became mother, or lightning rod for future ideas.

>he doesn't even go into it at all from what I can tell
I'm honestly not seeing the issue you're seeing. Can you put it a different way or outline the core issue?

>>16484643
Yes, he basically solved philosophy. I can only recommend reading later Marxists like Zizek or Adorno.

>>16489954
That's an interesting integration of Spengler with more contemporary ideas; the comparison between his analogy/nature dichotomy and the right/left brain, and the simulation theory accounting for the role of metaphysical Cosmic Beat are pretty good fits. We do have to differentiate between the two modes of analysis though- and this is where his meta-philosophy comes into play. A simulation obeys causal laws, it's deterministic, even if it has an overarching structure that makes repeated patterns emerge. Spengler's metaphysics is explicitly acausal. He attributes the patterns between civilizations not to a process of the natural world, the world we analyze through science and reason, but to the Historical analogy, which produces outcomes at determined moments in the progression of a civilization from a supra-spacetime alignment of reality according to higher order, this is his Cosmic Beat, which he claims to have gleaned from Goethe's eccentric forays into speculative science(his relativist inquiry into civilizational disparities he says came from Nietzsche). Imagine a Godly hand if you will, that stands above human history, and plucks notes at given periodic times, one note is Alexander, another is Caesar. These men were born to fulfill a role that was not given to them by their local environment or nature, they were destined by a higher order of reality to play out the parts they would. This is Spengler's system of history as analogy, and it is fundamentally pretty mystic.

>the creative, intuitive side gives birth rapidly and the rational mind is an executioner. It's killing shitty deformed babies day and night, but when a good idea is born the axe does not swing. The idea is allowed to live so long as it justifies its existence to the executioner. If an idea lives it can witness the births and deaths of new ideas to inform it on how to mutate and give birth.
You see how this is a naturalistic, scientific, causal view of how things develop, which is at odds with how Spengler conceived things. It might be possible to unite the two perspectives somehow but he didn't do this, he separated them and allotted them different purposes, and the one subservient to the latter.

When I say he is getting ahead of himself it's because this view of reality cannot be the prime symbol of Faustian or Greco-Roman or Indian or whatever Culture. It is clearly antecedent to any such worldview, and it explains their origin and their nature. How can such a fundamental understanding of the workings of reality originate from a man whose mind is itself nothing but a result of a particular form, the Faustian, in a particular stage of its development. It's possible that every culture reaches into these depths, or that only some do, or that only the Faustian really does- he did not explain this. He did not reconcile this totalitarian philosophy with his constant emphasis on the extreme gulfs that separate the Cultures' understandings of how reality works.

>>16490031
Could this god-hand not be conceived of as a cause?
One way to explain it could be that time is not linear, that the past is not the only influence on the present but also the future holds influence on the present/past. I'm not too well versed in this theory but it seems plausible since the true nature of time could be distorted by the senses.
The guiding principle of the simulation could also be that god-hand. Whatever end it is that the simulation is looking for must be embedded in us for the simulation to work. The simulation must have a goal and the simulation participant must be aware of the goal in order to correct itself correctly. Whether or not this awareness is conscious is another matter, and it most likely is not. This could be our instinctive drives, the animal brain informing us on our path to organic "perfection" but the tricky pickle of it is our conscious mind. It's highly unlikely to be a mistake but it complicates the simulation and its true nature or reason for being here just opens up more questions.

>It might be possible to unite the two perspectives somehow but he didn't do this
>the one subservient to the latter
I would also view the rational subservient to the mystic. I would also say there can be common ground found between the two. It's partially a conceptualization difference between different types of people.
One would say the big bang, and energy, another would say the creation and the creator. They both speak of the same things they just conceptualize it differently. The God conceiver will arrive at more conclusions more quickly, but their conclusions, while potentially right, will not be as satisfactory to the rational mind. The rational side/people come in and investigate and have more evidence to back up their claims.
One is not necessarily superior to the other, but the rational is far slower than the intuitive and exists based on the intuitive/mystic proposition/hypothesis. The rational serves to correct errors in the mystic or expand upon and explain the mystic in further rational detail.

>He did not reconcile this totalitarian philosophy
If he did claim his philosophy to be the end all be all then he fucked up.
His philosophy could also be viewed within his own frame-work as a product of the Faustian age and fallible/limited in perspective, but still a work of merit.

>>16490165
That is a very interesting idea, of future influencing present and past in a kind of giant object that exerts its causal paths in ways distinct from our correlative science of x causing y. But I think you're introducing a large number of concepts that need to be reckoned with.
>The guiding principle of the simulation could also be that god-hand. Whatever end it is that the simulation is looking for must be embedded in us for the simulation to work. The simulation must have a goal and the simulation participant must be aware of the goal in order to correct itself correctly.
This makes of a Spenglerian belief in metaphysical order a pattern that was set in the code of the simulation. There is a different metaphysical view which sees the emergent analogies as given from a basically disparate and incomprehensible force.

I think this concept of a 'beyond' which doesn't allow any of our human experiences to reach and encompass it might be a point of fundamental rupture between the two interpretations of Spengler we have.

We are not just talking about Spengler anymore here though, this is a fundamental split in the ontological domain. The rational cannot subjugate the mystic in its peculiarities, because the mystic is defined as being beyond the ability of the rational to interpret reality. Any such dynanism would fall into a plague of relativism, just like all these philosophers did.

the rational can measure the effects of a given mystic doctrine as it presents in reality, but it can't account for its basic nature, which is inherently defined as being outside such considerations.

It's a question of what you choose to see as the ultimate arbiter of reality, mind or practice, which evolve through enormously complex fashions to present constructions, but it still wavers on that question of what you can trust as ultimate metaphysical truth. If a resolution exists, I am not aware of it.

>>16490249
I'm not entirely sure how to reconcile this belief since the pieces aren't all together yet but I can't in good faith reject a belief, or a willingness to believe, in the metaphysical. Of a divine incomprehensible God-hand.
I don't know if it's mystical intuition or simply faulty material intuition telling me the metaphysical is real, or that there is some higher power, but I can't rationally dismiss it.
This is why I like Spengler. He tickles the Mulder in me.

>If a resolution exists, I am not aware of it.
Neither. I struggle with this constantly.

Man, you guys really all suck, don't you? You all need books to tell you things. You already seem to believe that Marx is evil and disgusting, so why do you need a book? Is it to reinforce your already established beliefs? Why? Why not write a book about how disgusting they are, you know, form your own opinions? Instead of doing even the most basic of thinking, you feel the need to post on 4chan asking for a book that will already tell you something you already believe in. You guys all need to stop posts like these. You don't need a book to solidify every fucking opinion you have, you can just have an opinion

>>16484643
Marx was a second rate thinker and his heirs are even worse. Use your time wisely and focus on the classics.

>>16484841
Nigga calculus was 200 years old by the time marx put his grubby hands on it
we had the beginnings of Boolean logic and computational theory being described in the 1880s meanwhile marx couldn't fucking had a subject most 15 year olds today can do (provided they're white or asian)

>>16490249
Oh, one reason I rationally justify the metaphysical in a Spengler related view is that it seems necessary to build a healthy culture. When culture turns to civilization the mystic is sacrificed for the rational and as a result the culture dies.
If mystic tradition is an effective tool that brings people together and helps them thrive it would be a strange thing for it to be wrong.

Also, if you haven't seen this (you probably have) it's interesting to watch after reading Spengler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM

>>16490343
Marx was a Grade A observer at a very relevant place and time, and thus a far more critical to understanding anything as it is or could be than any classic.

>>16490503
>a jew neet is the best

yep society dead

>>16484643
Read Lasch, retard

>>16490543
NEET BAD!! OMG HE WASN'T A WAGESLAVE HIS WHOLE LIFE!! MARX THE LOSER PROBABLY COULDNT EVEN AFFORD FUNKOPOPS AND ONLYFANS SUBSCRIPTIONS

>>16490691
this, neets are based

>>16490320
I don't think you even read OP's post, you're just angry about Marx

>>16490679
Thanks for the rec

>>16484643
Absolutely nothing ends with Marx