/lit/ - Literature

Ask questions and attempt to answer

Reword it and compare with what you read online

Quiz yourself on the topics

Talk about the topic as if explaining it to a 15, 25, and 50 year old

Philosophers don't even understand what they are talking about.

>>18017231
You only, truly understand something when you can explain it to someone else. Imagine trying to explain what you're reading to your mom.

>>18017330
Sometimes you do understand something without being able to explain it to someone else.

>>18017244
>Ask questions
What sort of questions though? The general ones that come to my min md are like "What are the main divisions of the text" and shit like that

>>18017369
It completely depends upon the lens that you are looking at the work through. Take the platonic dialogue of ION for example. It's extremely short, but to know and understand it fully you have to look at it from quite a few different angles. There's the material content of their discussion, which involves contextual elements of literary merit, but that itself misses the point that Socrates was trying to make about the origin of knowledge, but even that doesn't yet take into consideration the actual writing of the dialogue and the procedural elements that the medium brings to the message, nor the historical context of the piece's place in the cannon of philosophy or even just the other works by Plato. You could then take any sort of modern analytical tool or any subsequent philosophers mode of operation and apply it to that work in reverse. The analysis of any given work is endless. At some point you have to move on.

>>18017354
how can you prove you know it without speaking or writing it without help?

>>18017354
Explaining it forces you to reveal gaps in your knowledge and stop fudging things though. It teaches you a lot and gives you a reality check. Very valuable.

>>18017231

You should gauge it by trying to reframe things yourself. Either write down things as you see them or try to explain it to someone else. Alternatively imagine yourself explaining it to someone who doesn't know it or two 'third parties' in discourse inside your head trying to discuss the philosophy you seek to understand. If you choose to write do not fear imitation at first, just keep going along until some ramification occurs to you.

You won't get to immediate understanding without refinement, let alone without checking secondary sources (i.e what other people thought of the philosophy) or getting feedback from others. But trying to phrase things yourself should already be better than mere and raw categorization of the concepts inside your head.

>>18017330

>implying that everyone's mom is stupid and will appreciate her nerd incel son mansplaining Fichte to her
>"nuh-uh, I didn't actually say that, you're just projecting your own misogyny bro"

>>18017854

This is legit. I'm currently reading something that I strongly disagree with, and I'm taking notes in a very peevish way, in my own idiom. The text is itself very peevish and combative, so this is clearly rubbing off on the current note-taking activity. Now, I can explain all the details and even do it in an even-handed way, my private feelings aside.

>>18017231
just try that with Huangbo Xiyun

Pretend a very stern, no-nonsense European professor just asked you to explain what you've been reading to him and the class. Puts hair on your chest.

>>18019278
Yup, conjuring this image in your mind works.

t. European

test