/lit/ - Literature

>>19397442
Every single french philosopher

>>19397442
Hegel; because he was right about everything.

>>19397442

Plato

Myself

>>19397442
But Confessions is an all-time classic. Reveries is not far off it too.

>>19397466
Reading confessions is what made me want to delete him. He's so obtuse its unreal

Homer, the father of capeshit and soap operas

>>19397453
The most correct answer.
Communism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

I’ll start

>>19397466
Reveries is half unbelievably beautiful meditations on man and nature, half repellent schizo rambling about the giant conspiracy that is out to get him. I'm still not sure what to make of Rousseau.

>>19397608
>killing people is... LE BAD!!

>>19397614
based

>>19397623
>half repellent schizo rambling about the giant conspiracy that is out to get him. I'm still not sure what to make of Rousseau.
Is there any biographer who has attempted to make sense of this?

>>19397662
>killing people is...LE GOOD.

>>19397442
I dont think I would delete anything. You could argue that deaths under communism could have been prevented by deleting marx. By deleting the bible (i know, not just one author) you could have prevented many more deaths possibly. I dont think you should ban an idea because it could be eventually risky or dangerous. The idea itself doesnt kill but people who are easily indoctrinated by an idea. So actually every idea, book, author could be the start of a catastrophe. Doesnt make sense to delete any of this because in teh end it doesnt change a thing, something else will come into its place.

>Most human beings—especially in these "centres of civilisation," which are more hideous than anything the sun has looked upon since it watched the mammoths tusking the frozen earth or the ichtheosauruses wallowing in the primeval mud—go through this life blindly, mechanically, unconsciously, fulfilling their duties, snatching at their pleasures, and shuddering at the thought of the end.
>Few men and women seem really conscious of what it is to be alive, to be alive and endowed with imagination and memory, upon this time-battered planet. It needs perhaps the anti-social instincts of a true "philosophic anarchist" to detach oneself from the absorbing present and to win the larger perspective.
>Rousseau was of so fluid, so irresponsible a temperament that he never could be brought to take seriously, to take as anything but as suggestive subjects for eloquent diatribes, the practical and domestic relations between human beings in organised society.
>He played lightly with these relations, he laughed over them and wept over them, he wrote impassioned and dithyrambic orations upon them. But they were not his real life. His real life was the life he lived with his music and his botany and his love affairs, the life of his dreamy wanderings from refuge to refuge among the woods and chateaux of France; the life of his delicate memories and wistful regrets; the life of his thrilling indescribable thoughts, half sensual and half spiritual, as he drifted along the lonely roads and under the silent stars, or sat staring at the fire-light in his Paris attic while the city roared about him.
>No lonely introspective spirit, withdrawn from the crowd and hating the voices of the world, can afford to lose touch with the secret of Rousseau; with what his self-centred and impassioned existence really meant.
>We need not tease ourselves with his pious speculations, with his philanthropic oratory or his educational proposals. These can be left to those who are interested in such things. What we find arresting and suggestive in him, after this lapse of years, is a certain quality of personal passion, a certain vein of individual feeling, the touch of which still has a living power.

>>19397695
Rousseau was just crackers. He infamously managed to fall out with David Hume, the most good humoured man who ever lived.

>>19397727
I feel bad for the luxembourgs. To have to deal with his inane shit for five years only to have it blow up on them, with the consecutive releasing of two his most controversial books ever (and then acting surprised when these books did not get him a sweet pension ((which the would have probably rejected anyways while kicking himself screaming anyways)) such blistering genius is a rocky thing.

>>19397453
simply yes

>>19397614
without him my life would be meaningless

>>19397453
came here to post this

>>19397442
opbp