/lit/ - Literature

>>22658313
Livy, Tacitus, Plutarch, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, etc.

>>22658318
I doubt this. French & English enlightenment authors would have topped their reading lists afaik.

>>22658328
The Federalist papers quote classical authors and have lots of commentary about Ancient Greece and Rome. I don't think the American Founding Fathers were very influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers.

>>22658337
No idea if accurate.

>>22658313
Thomas Jefferson's personal library is on display

>>22658347
what's the nigger fresco?

>>22658313
Thomas Paine, a philosopher who directly inspired many of the tenets of American belief. If you read his stuff you’ll see language that looks extremely familiar, with themes of liberty and independence.

>>22658313
My diary desu.

So the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, medieval Italians, and Enlightenment thinkers is what I'm getting from this thread

>>22658360
The first time I read Paine, Locke, and Rousseau my first thought was “these guys are nuts”. I think it’s Locke (or is it Paine) at one point says that the natural state is matriarchy and women should have all the authority. Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense why things are so fucked up now. Plato and Aristotle they were not…

Infinite jest

Probably livy

>>22658313
The prince, the Bible, Common Sense and so many others, locke, I mean I don't know where to begin really. All of them, in a way

>>22658318
If they spent all their time reading the Greeks and Romans, how were their ideas so countertraditional? Were they just locked within enlightenment readings of these texts?

>>22658521
Yes. Every age reads into the past what they want to see in the present.

>>22658521
Yes. If you actually read these guys, you’ll see they make arguments about government and politics that are very similar to the ancient philosophers and even go about it in a similar way. But all of them have built in these ridiculous presuppositions about “the state of nature” and the like which lead them classical arguments to ridiculous propositions. Quite frankly, nothing the Founding Fathers said in a legal or political context are all that absurd. Everything is sound and that’s why even traditionalists can get behind the things they say. It’s all of the other stuff they wrote which we’ve historically looked to for context surrounding their political-legal writing that turned out to be nuts. This is basically how law is done in America. “When they wrote the second amendment, they didn’t have in mind assault rifles.” “So what did they have in mind” and hence their more radical enlightenment ideas come to the forefront. Moreover, Carl Schmitt’s critique applies. It’s one thing to expound on sensible principles of law. It’s another to do so as of law is the supreme authority as a matter of fact. At one point Locke, and I think Rousseau as well, confesses that all of his thinking is in contradiction with the right of a government to conscript soldiers, implying basically that authority doesn’t reside with the law but with the capacity conduct war, which is basically what Schmitt says. So that’s not so much an enlightenment idea as much an enlightenment preference. They were trying to do something specific with that constitution and it wasn’t necessarily what was in communion with eternal principles but rather a rationalist hope for the supreme governance of law. No faulty presuppositions necessary, just a misguided desire.

>>22658521
The enlightenment lawyers were also the smartest people around. Imagine if we had a civil war right now, and a handful of people went hunting for smart guys to structure a system of laws in the wake of that. We’d probably end up with a government drafted by progressive tech entrepreneurs and social climbers from Ivy League schools. It would be a nightmare. That’s the problem with the loss of aristocracy quite frankly. Power necessarily had to fall to the next classes and you’ve really only got a few choices: the lawyers, the businessmen, or the academics.

>>22658313
Probably the most important and influential books that all of them read were Blackstone's Commentaries

>>22658347
Whoa, a cheaply made American copy of 18th Century European culture

>>22658313
I am pretty sure George Washington kept a copy of meditations on him at all times

>>22658461
Based and true

>>22658416
The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

18th Century and 19th Century USA was much less a democracy than a headquarter without troops. Their theoretical emulations of democracy were not practiced in reality. Or, they were aspiring to nobility, to royalty, lead by the thirst of dominance and conquest, if an influx of Irish and East-German immigrants had not slowly changed and finally paralyzed the Aryan substance of the Anglo-Saxon.

I figure that writing and reading would come to me more easily if I had a particularly voluptuous nigress slave vigorously slobber all over my dick under the desk so loudly that even the neighbours wouldn't be spared.

hobbes
locke
Madison
Montesquieu
Adam Smith
Rousseau
Thomas Paine
Edmund burke
Hamilton.
muh bible

>>22658914
Lmfao

>>22658318
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson particularly despised Plato.

>I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past. having more leisure there than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. while wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, & unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? how the soi-disant Christian world indeed should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. but how could the Roman good sense do it? and particularly how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? altho’ Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practised in the business of the world, & honest. he could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world. with the moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. they give the tone while at school, and few, in their after-years, have occasion to revise their college opinions. but fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities, & incomprehensibilities, and what remains? in truth he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption & incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. his foggy mind, is for ever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen thro’ a mist, can be defined neither in form or dimension. yet this which should have consigned him to early oblivion really procured him immortality of fame & reverence. the Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need3 explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it’s indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power & pre-eminence. the doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained. their purposes however are answered.

>>22658931
cont.

>Plato is canonised: and it is now deemed as impious to question his merits as those of an Apostle of Jesus. he is peculiarly appealed to as an advocate of the immortality of the soul; and yet I will venture to say that were there no better arguments than his in proof of it, not a man in the world would believe it. it is fortunate for us that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity; or we should now have been all living, men, women and children, pell mell together, like the beasts of the field or forest.

TJ to JA, July 5, 1815

>>22658931
>>22658939
cont. (1814, btw, not 1815)

>flections upon him, So perfectly harmonize with mine. Some thirty Years ago I took upon me the Severe task of going through all his Works. With the help of two Latin Translations, and one English and one French Translation15 and comparing Some of the most remarkable passages with the Greek, I laboured through the tedious toil. My disappointment was very great, my Astonishment was greater and my disgust was Shocking. Two Things only did I learn from him. 1. that Franklins Ideas of exempting Husbandmen and Mariners &c from the depredations of War, were borrowed from him. 2. that Sneezing is a cure for the Hickups. Accordingly I have cured myself and all my Friends of that provoking disorder, for thirty years with a Pinch of Snuff.

Some Parts of Some of his Dialogues are entertaining, like the Writings of Rousseau: but his Laws and his Republick from which I expected most, disappointed me most. I could Scarcely exclude the Suspicion that he intended the latter as a bitter Satyre upon all Republican Government,16 as Xenophon undoubtedly designed by his Essay on Democracy, to ridicule that Species of Republick. In a late letter to the learned and ingenious Mr Taylor of Hazelwood, I Suggested to him the Project of writing a Novel, in which The Hero Should be Sent upon his travels through Plato’s Republick, and all his Adventures, with his Observations on the principles and opinions, the Arts and Sciences, the manners Customs and habits of the Citizens Should be recorded. Nothing can be conceived more destructive of human happiness; more infallibly contrived to transform Men and Women into Brutes, Yahoos, or Dæmons than a Community of Wives and Property. Yet, in what, are the Writings of Rousseau and Helvetius wiser than those of Plato? “The Man who first fenced a Tobacco yard, and Said this is mine ought instantly to have been put to death” Says Rousseau. “The Man who first pronounced the barbarous Word ‘Dieu,’ ought to have been immediately destroyed,”17 Says Diderot.

In Short Philosophers antient and modern appear to me as mad as Hindoos, Mahomitans and Christians. No doubt they would all think me mad, and for any thing I know this globe may be, the bedlam, Le Bicatre of the Universe.

JA to TJ, July 16, 1814

>>22658910
What’s your point?

>>22658914
You fucking midwits with your low brow Alt-Right/Evolian takes are so fucking annoying. You read 4 fashy books and think you’re classically educated aristocrats now. And you always say shit that makes people who actually read and think cringe because you try so damn hard. Just stop. Grow up already. And read more.

>>22658931
> >I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past
Do you really want me to read all this? I already lost my guts at the first sentence

>>22658964
This is is actually a helpful post, even if anons don't understand it yet.

>>22658964
I read nothing fashy except for the knowledge that if you are Germanic philosophy comes naturally and doesn't have to be taught from books
I'm just at height with the ancient Greeks because they were Aryan just like the Germanics of today

>>22659043
Stop embarrassing yourself.

>>22658964
>>22659038
This

>>22658964

>>22659046
Embarrass myself about what? I don't need to read the Greeks I intrinsically understand them by being Germanic
> The foundation of the governmental doctrine of the Hellenic Aryans was personal freedom. Anything that could guarantee this right, to the greatest extent possible, was good and legitimate. What restricted it was to be pushed back. Voilà
And how exactly is this any different from classical liberalism? Only in that one sprang from the hymen of the Greeks and the second from the hymen of the Germanix, my kin

>>22659068
Lmao based

>>22659068
> I don't need to read the Greeks I intrinsically understand them by being Germanic
This is extremely embarrassing but I'm not sure you have the brain capacity to understand this.

>>22659072
Their old theology professed simplicity. They knew three commandments: hounour thy parents, make offerings to the Gods, do not do harm to a bull. The application of this doctrine is enough to reach enlightenment. From complication comes stupidization.

>>22659075

>>22659075
>greeks
>no harm to a bull
uh anon?

>>22659075
Schizoid ramblings. Learn math or something.

>>22659107
Why should I?

>>22659043
> I read nothing
Yeah, we can tell.

>>22659120
It will keep your mind from going off kilter. Rather than random ideas getting jumbled up together with not fully formed impressions you'll be able to articulate what you mean to say with focus and clarity. You'll also catch yourself being illogical l.

>>22658313
The Satanic Verses
-Taleb

>>22659151
Hmm, where do you want me to start?

>>22658416
>>22658959
>Suddenly, it makes a lot more sense why things are so fucked up now.
Your comment implies that we live in a feminist/matriarchal society because the founding fathers were influenced by authors like Paine. My point is that you are wrong and that women were not even allowed to vote until around 150 years after their time.

>>22659183
> My point is that you are wrong and that women were not even allowed to vote until around 150 years after their time
Neither were men.

>>22659183
So why can’t it be the case that these presuppositions took generations to arise out of a contained Christian context?

>>22659193
OY VEY!

>>22658318
You forget to mention Xenophon

>>22658347
There’s absolutely no way this nigger read all of those books

Was that his backlog? Is that what personal libraries really are?

>>22661539
the man was an aristocrat who didn't have the internet or television
people read books back then

>>22661545
Look at that shit though, there’s at least 500 books in a single shelf. I’m not saying he didn’t read just that he never touch more than 10% of those books.

I’m even further convinced that was his backlog. He was probably a book collector or a hoarder.

And didn’t they have hobbies in 1776??

>>22661550
i mean, the man was known for being a quiet and bookish person even back in those times, started a university and designed his own house, had the best education possible in the 18th century when there was no other entertainment beyond playing an instrument or farming
gordon wood has several good books on that time of history and what it would be like to live in that era

>>22658313
>Mistresses for dummies: The Enlightenment's Guide to Extramarital Relationships
and
>"I Really Just Want to Fuck My Daughter" Confessions of an Upper Crust Protestant Luminary

>>22658313
Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Xenophon, Laurence Sterne, Seneca, Cicero (a lot), Shakespeare. Livy, Epicurus, Tacitus, Plutarch, Homer
cicero and montesquieu were probably the two biggest influences
here's a pretty good podcast about them by a military prof

https://whyy.org/episodes/what-the-ancient-greeks-and-romans-taught-the-founding-fathers/

>>22661560
> >"I Really Just Want to Fuck My Daughter" Confessions of an Upper Crust Protestant Luminary
Wait what?

>>22661574
dude white rich people bad lmao

>>22661574
It was a very popular book in its day. Fortunately even a protestant could rarely ever actually go through with it. So they came of with the mistress system instead.

>>22661552
I’ll go check him out, any book I should start with?

Also any other related authors?

>>22661591
radicalism of the am revolution is good by wood, very even handed, won the pulitzer pirze
Daily Life in 18th-Century England by olsen is a generally good one for what it would be like to live in that era

>>22661586
>>22661575
Are you guys joking or was that really what happened? For a second I thought it was a book.

I don’t think fathers wanted to fuck their daughters during the colonial times. That would never happen. I feel like that’s a modern degeneracy thing

>>22661602
Thanks Anon, I’m not actually from /lit/ but I’ll go check them out

>>22658313
A Man of Erudition need not have more than a dozen books in his library; a couple of the ancient Chinese texts, Plato, Homer, Plutarch, Dante, Chaucer, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Whitman.

>>22661607
Its really what happened anon. Its why they came up with protestantism in the first place. Its the protestant luminary's dream to one day find a way in which they can 1. actually go through with it, and 2. still
go to heaven.

>>22661620
>anon
go back to your subreddit

>>22661618
Why have ancient Chinese texts? They wouldn’t be able to read it. For meme value or to seem smart and cultured?

>>22661632
Washington died 20 years before Whitman was born. They had those books to indicate they were time travelers.

>>22661632
Maybe they just liked the FOORMS..

Probably not though. They were free masons, and materialists through and through. It was likely part of some effort to unlock the ancient hidden knowledge of being able to fuck your own daughter. Its just really hard to do. But no one has come closer, I do not think, than our great luminous founding fathers.

>>22661651
>>22661620
Why do you tell lies Anonymous?

>>22658328
Thomas Jefferson read Plato and hated him for the part where he talks about emancipating women in politics.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0341

>>22661662
dude it was a weird joke by a crazy who clearly doesn't like anglos

>>22661666
the wife sharing polyamory bits in plato also

>>22658313
Gay trans shit about engineers in pink socks like Nehemiah, Kings or Chronicles.

capital in the 21st century

>>22658313
>>22658344
you can check the matter somewhat roughly by searching the names in the correspondence of the founding fathers here
https://www.founders.archives.gov/
do note that spellings often vary, so you can encounter 'Pufendorf', 'Puffendorf', 'Puffendorff', etc.

>>22661632
Jefferson was influenced by Confucius which had been translated to French in his time.

>>22658844
Shut it, Hans

>>22658337
>I don't think the American Founding Fathers were very influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers

How do people this dumb even formulate opinions?

>>22661918
people who just wandered off of /b and plebbit

>>22661918
The guy claiming decently educated elites from the 1800s wouldn’t be familiar with Plato is equally stupid. This is just a very stupid thread.

>>22658931
Makes sense why pseuds like Dugin support him considering the end goal of Platonism eventually usurps natural law to the community.

>>22661922
Yeah. At best the Republic is a strange polyamory wife sharing tyrannical thought experiment that Plato didn't even really support whole heartedly, but pseuds like dugin and straus like to take it seriously since they can be (((advisors))) to a dictator

>>22661922
Dugin is a conman who just likes anything which he can use to justify totalitarianism. Is NazBol not intended as a symphasis of both Lenin and Ilyin, a literal White Russian emigre? Complete schizo shit.

>>22661926
Plato was himself literally advisor to a dictator, Dion of Syracuse. Philosophy is a giant Ponzi scheme. For real, I agree with your sentiment though.

>>22661550
>>22661539
Books were the "television" before the radio era.

>>22661550
>>22661552
>Regarding Spanish, Jefferson told John Quincy Adams that he had learned the language over the course of nineteen days while sailing from the United States to France. He had borrowed a Spanish grammar and a copy of Don Quixote from a friend and read them on the voyage. Adams expressed skepticism, noting Jefferson's tendency to tell "large stories."[6]

>>22662046
if you already knew latin and french not that far fetched if you had literally nothing else to do

>>22661930
>Philosophy is a giant Ponzi scheme
Explain it better.

>>22658939
Wait why would his idea of a republic consign us to living as beasts? I completely agree with their disavowal of plato's mumbo jumbo metaphysical ideas, but his ideas of how to run a society honestly seem sound to me.

>>22663188
His ideal was probably the nuclear family of Christian society, which would be dissolved in Plato's state.

the federalist papers

>>22661927
You know what is really schizo? The fact that you retards have suddenly started ranting about an obscure Russian professor on a post that had nothing to do with him

>>22658416
Rousseau is a blatant misogynist and he openly says women should shut it, focus on the kids, and not be allowed political power in the Emile.

>>22658521
Yes totally. Check out the Jefferson Bible if you want to see an Enlightenment era bugman’s perspective of Christianity. Truly a strange book.

>>22658347
did he even read infinite jest?

>>22661550
They did not have hobbies, no. Hobbies as such are a cope for meaningless and painful modern lives.

>not one mention of Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
The first chapter is what you want OP

Read that and JGA Pocock's Machiavellian Moment. The Founding Fathers were all genius-schizos who carried 14 flintlock pistols and unloaded all them at random rustling bushes because they thought a king might be trying to pass legislation to create a standing behind the bush

>>22663752
>a standing army*
Sorry I'm drunk at work

>>22662046
>Jefferson was full of shit

Typical, what else do I need to know about the founding father

>>22663258
Bugman? What do you mean
He was still Christian though no?

>>21597424
>Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of general Grant but the condition of their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn’t the moral force to translate knowledge into action I don’t believe it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.

>Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat’s-paws. The fascist hate of demi-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases, they don’t and have not.

>I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 500 men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
>And ANY means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.

>Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power. The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order. Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.
https://archive.org/details/JeffersonAndOrMussoliniPound1935

>>22663785
He takes out every verse that doesn’t fit with his rationalist skepticism. I would not say he was Christian and his opponents in elections explicitly called him an atheist.

>>22663808
he was a deist who didnt believe in jewish fairy tales, the jefferson bible removes all miracles

>>22658313
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/thomas-jeffersons-library/overview.html

https://archive.org/search?query=-collection%3A%28printdisabled%29+AND+mediatype%3A%28texts%29+AND+date%3A%5B1732-01-01+TO+1799-01-01%5D+AND+%28language%3Aeng+OR+language%3A%22English%22%29+

>>22663820
So a bugman materialist like I said

>>22663827
a chinese cartoon poster calling anyone from the 18th century a bugman is fucking lol
can you play an instrument?
know how to farm?
read greek and latin?
You are the bug

>>22663830
Yes I can?

Jefferson even praised Weishaupt, the father of all redditor.

>>22661539
Anon you have to realise there were no computers back then, if you ever wanted to look something up you had to have a good selection of books. So of course he didn't read all of them, but it was important to have them nonetheless.

>>22663840
*redditors
fuck phoneposting

>>22663830
If you read more you would realise there have always been bugmen.

>>22663856
yes, i'm sure your ancestors were pleb bugman who were also unable to farm or read greek and latin, just like (You)

>>22663865
>unable to farm
Probably.
>read greek and latin
Every properly educated person could back then.

>>22663865
Jefferson literally had slaves waiting on him his entire life and farming for him. He didn’t “know how to farm” anymore than you do.

>>22663892
is slavery good or bad now? you sounds like a lib cuck

>>22663897
No one said bad or good. I said he was an effeminate bugman who didn’t actually “know how to farm” because he had slaves doing everything for him.

>>22658360
Most founding fathers thought Paine a moron.

>>22663907
yes, plantation masters didn't know how to farm because they had slaves kek
your brain when educated by the internet

>>22663919
Yes, telling other people to go out and harvest plants (on land given to you by your daddy) is not impressive.

>>22663924
>harvesting plants is farming
kek thanks for revealing how little you know of agriculture redditor
where did you get your knowledge? facebook's farmville?

>>22663931
You are extremely cringe anon.

>>22664000
Kek glad im not alone. Im not really interested in debating who knows more about farming with this autist.

>>22664006
maybe try not being retarded next time you post here, mr. farmville

>>22664073
Ok, bug

>>22664199
lol you got btfo bugman redditor (aka mr farmville)
tell me more about how slaves were bad and farming is "harvesting plants" KEK

>>22664296
It literally is harvesting plants, bug. Im sure you read a neat book about how its a noble art though.

>>22664621
reading books is retarded, says the bugman redditor
stick to the internet champ

Hello

>>22661574
>This is what they took from you

>>22661607
All bourgeois are bisexual sex freaks