/lit/ - Literature

what do you mean by "actually"?

The most influential writer the last 300 years is either the early liberals like John Stuart Mill/John Locke, or someone like Marx. I mean, I can think of no other people that influenced practical politics to a larger degree than them.

>>18845393
their works caused important historical events/social changes

Martin Luther

Ludicrous mode: no writers known primarily for nonfiction work.

Would consider a lot of 20th novelists/poets/playwrights attached to social movements. Abba Kovner, Federico Lorca, Ethel Voynich come to mind.

>>18845379
Simone de Beauvoir. Whatever your opinion of second wave feminism, you have to admit the massive changes that it has brought.

Kant. Everything distinctively modern flows from him.

>>18845409
Easily Hegel, grandfather of modern nationalism and Marxism, as well as a grandfather of postmodernism. Hugely influential in every field.

Two super powers, first the USSR, now China have a left Hegelian doctrine as a sort of quasireligious unifying principle, as do several smaller states. The Cold War got to define a century and a new one might soon define our time. But Hegel is no less influential on the Right. You see it in Fukayama using it for Neo Cons or in the spiritualist nationalism of the Trumpist era, as well as back with the Reich.

Hegel might sit behind Kant in relevance to philosophy directly, but in terms of motive force of his ideas no modern thinker has been as influential.

>>18845572
>Easily Hegel, grandfather of modern nationalism and Marxism, as well as a grandfather of postmodernism.
Wow what a jerk

>>18845572
>Easily Hegel, grandfather of modern nationalism and Marxism, as well as a grandfather of postmodernism. Hugely influential in every field.
Wow what a chad

>>18845572
>Easily Hegel, grandfather of modern nationalism and Marxism, as well as a grandfather of postmodernism.
Wow

>>18845571
And that's why Kant is bad.

>>18845379
freud was hugely influential

>>18845572
Hegel is responsible for destroying the world, but he also gave us the means to save it.

>>18845571
Kant was a reaction against everything that gave rise to the modern world. He didn't inspire modernity, he tried to save tradition from it. The problem is that he failed and his Copernican turn in realizing that our faculties shape our reality just became part of modernity in turn.

>>18845677
Kant literally wrote in favor of democracy, tard, and he purposefully went against the will of the Prussian king

>>18845379

>>18845379
Wagner

>>18845379

>>18845677
I'm saying that Kant invented modernity as we understand it today, and that practically the entire civilization that existed at his time has been replaced, ship of Theseus style, by something radically different and antithetical to what came before, and that new civilization was built by his children. I can't see how Pope is of a kind, in any way, with Joyce, or Vermeer with Picasso, or Washington with Hitler. In fact, the seconds of those pairs are all a systematic attempt to destroy the firsts, a project made possible and necessary by the destruction of the belief in the power of reason and the essential intelligibility of reality. And that's Kant.

>>18845682
Jesus Christ, the fucking superiority complex of people here. "Everyone else is a retard, I alone have perfect knowledge."

Yes, Kant was liberal in many ways. He was a child of the Enlightenment. The point I was making, a point Kant himself makes in his personal letters about his own work, is that his project was to save traditional morality and religion from modernity. That is, he recognized the success of reason as an authority above that of church and king, however he also wanted to preserve the old moral order. Thus, his system is an attempt to break off the religious and moral from the realm of direct rationality and stave off relativism and hedonism.

>>18845808
That's fair, I just wouldn't put Kant at the front of the ship of modernity. The train had already left the station by his time. If anyone strengthened the faith in reason and the Enlightenment most I'd say it's Newton because the proof was in the pudding when his theories proved out time and again. But I suppose he is more of a scientist than writer. Locke, Hobbes, Decartes, etc. had already built the rationalist project by Kant, and then the early strings of post modernism are more Hegel than Kant.