/lit/ - Literature

My nigga!

You clearly don't understand what philosophy is.

>>basically inspires all the concepts behind the verbal diarrhea that is philosophy

lol. This holds true for Baudrillard and Borges and pretty much no one else that I'm aware of.

Such mad competition is generally frowned upon in the year of our lord 2012.

>>2805322
you mean it's not pseudo-problems and mental masturbation in an ivory tower and dust-gathering writing?

>>2805326
okay let's do this

> 19th century realism
marxism
> freud
sophocles/shakespeare
> existentialism
dostoevsky
> jung
Henry James
> Lacan
Proust
> all post-structuralism
Borges, Melville

Why read books when you could be playing video games or masturbating?

>creating a dichotomy

they're just words dude

>>2805313
>Literature at its best is well-written, affecting and basically inspires all the concepts behind the verbal diarrhea that is philosophy.

Yes, literature at it's best becomes philosophy. Philosophy is the highest state a work of literature can achieve. I agree.

I don't even understand this thread.

How can you trade one thing for the other? What if it was the opposite, "what's the point of literature when you have philosophy?"

It makes no bloody sense. I understand not liking one of them, but you are not doing one in spite of the other, much like you don't trade news for movies.

They satisfy different needs.

>>2805347
I trade news for movies.

I'd rather be entertained than brainwashed.

The point of reading philosophy is so you can have a mental chess match with others concerning meaning of life.

The point of reading literature is... ? So you can have an argument with others about what a particular book meant, I guess? I don't normally read literature.

>>2805349
>implying you can opt out of being brainwashed whilst still consuming media

You are mistaken.

>>2805347

Movies are pointless "artistic" acts by childish auteurs.

art vs science
emotion vs logic

emotion is stronger. i agree with op. philosophy is boring. art has the power that philosophy lacks. art can make you weep.

>>2805333
If by 'inspired by' you mean 'had some kind of appreciation for'... Wow, Freud modelled some of his theories on Greek plays, breaking news at 11.

>>2805333
However, I'm curious about Marx and realism. Can you give any examples?

>>2805351
But literature does everything philosophy does but the difference is that it is well-written and can move you.

No one is ever going to be "moved" by Hegel or Kant.

Reading Shakespeare is 20x more fruitful than reading or "doing" philosophy.

I see OP's point. Philosophy tries to be logical and all about mental fights and arguments, but at the end it's fruitless mental masturbation. Literature can convey ideas and emotions in better ways than philosophy will ever be able to do.

The fact is, OP, that a lot of books written as pure philosophy contain important ideas, not all of which are expressed in fiction. These books are important. The author saw that the writing would be better expressed as a straight essay. To each his own.
If you read enough, you'll see that there is not a huge amount of difference between the best fiction and the best philosophy.

>>2805374
I think foucault can be affective.

>I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes- all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms.

>>2805349
No, you don't trade them, you just don't like news, which is fine really.

Now, if someone got to you and said "I want to be brainwashed" you wouldn't advise him to watch movies, you would point to the news.

That's my point, what drive us to one is different from what drives us to the other. We are able to judge within the spectrum of what one wants, say, if one asked for good fiction and a guy pointed to Twilight, you'd say "no, don't read that garbage, go for this other one because it is better fiction".

What OP is doing is not merely complaining about something and giving you an option that would suffice you. He is asking for a change which is completely unrelated to quality, but a deep change of heart which is absolutely gratuitous.

>>2805397
But he gave people AIDS.

I'm sorry, but that invalidates his entire philosophy. Not reading that disgusting asshole. Pun intended.

>>2805398
> mfw that could have been better expressed in sonnet form

>>2805400
your loss

>>2805313
You're a verbal diarrhea.

Science: -9001
PCs: 1

>>2805400
Dubs for truth.

>>2805398 here

Thinking about it and reading other posts, I guess I know why this is being discussed. I understand the thread now.

It's mere utilitarianism. OP (and others) assume reading is a task with a goal attached to it, assume others have that in mind when reading. That you read anything for a practical purpose instead of personal reasons.

Then there is no heart and no head into it at all. I'd say don't read anything, it's just depressing that someone would waste a book, fictional or philosophical, on something like that. I'm against this notion.

Philosophy IS literature. Not only that, but it's also science AND it's an exercise in thought that can't be replicated by novels or plays. Also you guys imply that philosophy is only logical and can't be emotional. The fuck? Go read that pussy Nietzsche.

Seems like you guys a) don't know all that philosophy encompasses and b) just can't understand it and this thread was made out of insecurity. Sucks for you plebs.

>>2805404

>HE DID IT ON PURPOSE

>>2805421
proof?

>>2805413

Truth

>>2805423

No, I'm agreeing with you, that's a bullshit unsubstantiated rumor.

Also not reading someone because they were a bastard pretty much precludes at least half the entire literary canon. You might as well not read Heidegger, Hemingway, Mishima, Joyce, Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, to name a few.

Also from what I've heard, Foucault was a pretty stand-up dude.

>>2805428
Oh, then I agree. From the interviews/audience questions he's answered he seems like he was really nice.

Why the fuck does everything have to be some bullshit competition with you people?

You can enjoy both philosophy and literature. There's works of philosophy that are great literature and vice-versa.

Jeebus, I thought /lit/ was where all the intelligent people on 4chan were.

Also, your internet dick-waving insults the memory of Toshiro Mifune and his being the perfect man.

We Mifune thread now

>>2805413
>This kills the thread

>>2805441
The place where all the intelligent people go is /tg/. If you're not a neckbeard, too bad. You shouldn't be browsing 4chan in the first place.

>>2805397
This is funny. Foucault is describing his ideal criticism by using descriptions from everyday life experience, because he has chosen to spend his life with criticism instead of experiencing nature, so he wants to experience nature while doing criticism... OKAYYY.

>>2805441
>Why the fuck does everything have to be some bullshit competition with you people?

It's a trait common in young, immature people.

They'll grow out of it one day. Chances are they tried reading Kant or Hegel and gave up, and decided all philosophy is rubbish.

>>2805452

More like saves it.


/lit/, what's your favorite Toshiro Mifune performance?

>>2805460
The one he is badass in it, what is it called...?

>>2805458
>implying Kant and Hegel aren't the black sheep of modern philosophy

>>2805457

>>2805462

>Implying this invalidates his sentiment and weren't merely being used as hypothetical examples

>>2805438
>>2805428
I think he comes across as highly unlikeable. Confer the video on youtube in which he talks to Chomsky. He knows he is being a twat, smirks about it, licks the side of his mouth like a retard, and when he runs out of arguments he smiles and goes 'Whatever you say, you cannot prevent me from believing [...]' NICE ARGUMENT.

>>2805465
Pick better examples.

>>2805463
Well, my post wasn't well-phrased, but I made a semi-cogent observation, whereas you just posted a pretty lame picture that gets posted on some board every 2 minutes.

>>2805462

They're not "black sheep". Their ideas were decent and many philosophers expanded on them, such as Wittgenstein.

I merely mean that such thinkers tend to be poor writers, and thus put a lot of people off. I know when I first read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, it was a fucking chore like no other because he had such poor style.

>>2805468

Except Chomsky pulls the same argument later in the program when Foucault waxes pessimistic about justice as a universal justification for revolt, and Chomsky just shrugs and says "Yeah, no, I don't agree with that". Every thinker has their derp moments, even the great ones. Learn to read and engage their whole thought before you decide you're smart and have things to say.

>>2805469

>Nitpicking makes my position seem stronger

>>2805468
The Foucault vs Chomsky debate was a disagreement over very trivial things. Both were being petulant and they both know it.

I'm not sure why people refuse ot believe that Foucault gave people AIDS.

He was pissed as hell when he found out he had AIDS and wanted to take as many people out as possible.

It's like you refuse to acknowledge that this is a somewhat common thing in gay subcultures.

>>2805474

Your observation deserved it, because it was ill-formulated.

>>2805374
If you are "moved" by anything anybody else does, I have some bad news for you about your authenticity as a person.

>>2805482

Sauce bro.

>>2805486
his sauce is probably /pol/

>>2805482

Me either bro.
As if admitting that he did some fucked up shit when he was desperate at the end of his life somehow negates everything else he ever did.
Its okay liberals and fags Foucault was a murderer and an important scholar no biggie.

>>2805480
Erm... no? The disagreement is central to their thought, actually.
>>2805477
He does that because they are running out of time and Foucault is trying to say something. Of course they have different opinions, and of course they cannot support everything by argument in a TV show, but Foucault just comes across like a douche to me. Oh no, I have an opinion, jesuschristhowhorrifying.

Competition is the foundation of Western discourse. Stop bitching about people trying to refine the canon.

>>2805508

>implying an internet dick waving contest on 4chan amounts to important intellectual work.

>I have no face

>>2805413

There is nothing scientific about philosophy. One can see this in the results of both forms of inquiry. In philosophy, opinions proliferate. In science, opinions get whittled down to one the vast majority of practitioners hold.

There are many settled questions in science. The trend in philosophy has been the unsettling of assumptions, to the point where the field is now considered to be just a bunch of undefined word games, unless of course you don't agree with Wittgenstein, which many philosophers don't.

"There is no thought so strange that it has not been held true by some philosopher."

>>2805495

>Liberals and fags

>>>/pol/

>>2805501
>>2805501
>The disagreement is central to their thought, actually.
Okay, what specific disagreement are you talking about here? From what I remember there are some but it's mostly as a result of talking past each other.

>>2805535
The idea of human nature. Chomsky is advocating anarcho-syndicalism on the basis that it satifies human needs (which are born out of human nature) better than the present system, Foucault argues against the 'repressive hypothesis', that is he is convinced that every conception of subjectivity is a discursive construction and there is no human nature that is being repressed by our culture. Personally, I am somewhere in between in that I feel that some of Foucault's criticism is valid and interesting, but there are obvious problems with his approach that he (to my knowledge) never adressed: 'Discursive construction', okay. But even if I accept the primary importance of discourse (over, say, biology; also: how much non-linguistic interaction / power is included in discourse?), in order to construct something you need materials to build with. Foucault seems to be implying a 'blank slate' on which to build a subject, which is simply not true. One could compare this to the base / superstructure metaphor in that a human being clearly has some biological limitations which will only support a limited set of psychological and cognitive constructions, so while there may not be ONE HUMAN NATURE, monolithic and unchangeable, there are certainly constraints to the kinds of subjectivity that humans can achieve, there are certainly also different ways in which these subjectivities affect our biological and psychological existence (happiness, digestion, what have you) and there is no reason to believe that the scientific method or rational discourse are in principle incapable of helping us assume better forms of subjectivity, or that these analytical methods are inherently inferior or more coercive in achieving such results than Foucault's language-games, free play, or whatever the fuck he is advocating.

>>2805480
> The Foucault vs Chomsky debate was a disagreement over very trivial things. Both were being petulant and they both know it.


But this is all philosophy does. Petulant assholes disagreeing over very small things and refusing to write well.

>>2805561

yeah, I agree. Poststructuralist denial of the human nature leads to overlook the 'human condition', and then you get nothing but social construction that apparently comes from nowhere.

>>2805477
It's at the same point, and as has been said, they're really not saying very different things. Chomsky is saying there is some sense of Real Justice at the heart of our justice system, but that he can't say exactly what it is, Foucault says that even if you thought you could say what it is, it may be an apparition resulting from class oppression. Foucault doesn't disagree with Chomsky saying we have a sense of justice in our capitalist society, Chomsky doesn't disagree that what we think justice is after the revolution is different to what we thought it was before.

>>2805401
What?

>>2805561
>Foucault seems to be implying a 'blank slate' on which to build a subject, which is simply not true.
No more so than Chomsky. Foucault's worry for the future is that we will think we are free of political coercion, but it'll turn out something which at first seemed banal is instrumental in reinstating class. He isn't criticising anarcho-syndicalism apart from to say its view of class or classless is too narrow for what it wants to achieve.

>>2805522 In science, opinions get whittled down to one the vast majority of practitioners hold.

This is why science is inherently uninteresting as a field of study.

And also why science appeals to people who tend to be fascists.

>>2805636

What could possibly be uninteresting with investigating and deciphering how reality works?

>>2805655 how reality works

Evidently we have quite different opinions over what is real.

>>2805313
If you think that you can have a full appreciation of literature without recourse to philosophy, then you are mistaken. You are creating a false dichotomy between philosophical thought and literature, when in reality you must have a firm understanding of philosophy in order to understand literature.

>>2805750
> begs the question
> thinks I need to read Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Aristotle and all sorts of dusty turds to appreciate universal art

Yeah, okay, bro.

>>2805748

Yes, and some opinions are more rooted in reality than others. Christ, everytime some retard get's mad he lacks understanding of a certain field of science he turns to the blind alleys of epistomology.
It's getting old.

>>2805655
science does not investigate how the reality works. its just perpetuating on a notion of metaphysics that is flawed.

>>2805796
>a notion of metaphysics that is flawed
What is your evidence for it being flawed?

>>2805789
I disagree with your conclusion. While literature is certainty art, and while the theme of the text is certainty universal, understanding the communication of theme without recourse to philosophy is limiting, difficult, and if one desires a full understanding impossible. Try reading Wilde without having read Longinus or Burke or Addison. You can do so without a doubt, but your understanding of the concept of the sublime and the beautiful will be limited and facile. Similarly attempting to understand the majority of mediaeval work without recourse to Aristotle's Poetics, or Plato's Republic or Aquinas's Summa Theologica is pure stupidity. Philosophy is crucial to knowing literature.

>This thread

I've officially lost my faith in /lit/

>>2805817

I agree, it's gone to shit.

>>2805860

I expected /lit/ to have the occasional "HURR DURR PHILOSOPHY IS WORTHLESS BECAUSE IT'S NOT SCIENCE/LITERATURE" bullshit, but this is a new standard of 100% refined derp

>>2805816

It is very easy to enjoy Wilde without reading philosophy, just as it is easy to enjoy medieval literature like the Canterbury Tales without reading philosophy.

I think you overstate the discipline's importance to literature. For any given text, I would say history would be a more crucial companion discipline.

>>2805880
While you may have certainty understood Wilde or Chaucer at one level I disagree that you can achieve a full understanding. For example Chaucer's work was heavily influenced by Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, which was in turn built upon Plato's Republic and Lucretius's De Rerum Natura. I would agree that historical context is important, and I think that your disagreement with my position stems from the misconception that I am downplaying historical context. I simply think it is ludicrous to expect to truly understand literature outside of philosophy, just as we would both agree that it is ridiculous to try and understand literature outside of history.

The point of philosophy is to convey ideas in the clearest manner possible.
The point of literature varies between pure entertainment and conveying ideas in an interesting fashion.

>>2806042
Literature is better at portraying the human impact of theory or whatever in emotionally persuasive ways, as well as ambiguities and problems of real-world application.

>>2806054
>all literature is emotional
>2012
whereisconstanzawhenyouneedhim.jpg

>>2806017

You misunderstand my position. I believe it is ridiculous to say one cannot understand literature outside of history or philosophy, or any other discipline.

Saying to understand something one must first understand something else in this fashion leads to an infinite recursion similar to Carl Sagan's quip about baking apple pies from scratch, or that one involving Bernard Russell, the old lady, and a stack of turtles.

In turn, I believe the difficulty here may lie in the qualified alternation in your posts from the quixotic "full appreciation" and "full understanding" to "firm understanding" to mere "understanding."

They are both aiming at the same target a lot of the time, the only difference is their approach. Lit takes a very artsy approach and phil takes a sciency approach.

tl;dr
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0CYJNw9YJQ

>>2806069
*Bertrand

>>2806069
In that case allow me to clarify my terminology. It would be a ridiculous statement to say that because someone does not know history or philosophy that they understand nothing about literature. Thus I wanted to distinguish between various levels of understanding, with "full understanding" really meaning "fuller understanding". I agree that in order to 100% understand literature one needs to in effect "create an apple pie from scratch" but there are diminishing returns based on discipline and context. What I was trying to prove is that while no-one can claim a perfect understanding of an individual text, getting a good or adequate understanding is impossible without recourse to other fields viz. history, philosophy, and language. You can read In Search of Lost Time in English if you want but you will get a flawed understanding because of your inability to understand the language. Likewise, not knowing historical or philosophical context will result in half-baked unfinished opinions that fail to properly address underlying themes. What I think you are afraid of is of there being no metric with which one can reasonably define any given field as necessary or unnecessary to a given text. That is mostly done rhetorically, but I can assure you that knowing literary history, philosophy, history, and language will prove crucial and indispensable to an understanding of literature in a way that can not be approached by say molecular biology.

lit w.out philo is pita no filling

lol philosophy is boring and useless, why would you read derrided or bodrilard when you can have more emotion and ideas in a grrm martin novel

Best philosophers were anti-philosophers, or at the very least literary philosophers.

There's no excuse for turgid writing. If you can't put the work in to give me good writing, I'm not putting in the work to decipher your frothing-at-the-mouth jargon.

I'm not asking for clarity, I'm asking for quality.

>>2806560
> that feel when I never read philosophy and have read the entire In Search of Lost Time in the original french

No way in fucking hell is Deleuze's shit paste theories going to enlighten my understanding and deepen my appreciation of Proust.

And I didn't really read what you wrote, cause it looks like stale philosophy-tier writing.

>>2806570

Fucking wisdom.

What's the point of reading literature when you can read philosophy?

I never understood this. Philosophy at its best is well-written, affecting and basically inspires all the concepts behind the verbal diarrhea that is literature.

Wittgenstein is greater than any (il)literate.

Literature: 0
Philosophy: over9000

>>2806630
But Wittgenstein thought philosophy was a waste of time.

>>2806635
>>2806630
lol told

>>2806630
You realize philosophers who disagree with Wittgenstein basically call him a "destroyer of philosophy." It's not intended as a compliment.

linguistics and sociology and, most of all, mathematics are but branches of philosophy as well. philosophy is the love for truth. some people like my little pony and collect pony figurines; what philosophers collect is truth.

>>2806640
he's the destroyer of what I don't like about philosophy (suck it, Deleuze).

>>2806647
basically, this. Well put, Anon.

>>2806672
> suck it deleuze

My nigga!

Because literature is for the aesthetics and philosophy is for learning. Using literature as a means of learning about the world and its people isn't viable, contrary to what many teachers would have have you believe.

>>2806690
>Using literature as a means of learning about the world and its people isn't viable
Explain, please.

>>2806690
> philosophy will teach you about people and the world

Right. From sheltered virgins. Schopenhauer is gonna teach me about women alright. Foucault is gonna teach me how to give people AIDS.

>>2806721
>Schopenhauer is gonna teach me about his view on women alright. Foucault is gonna teach me how to give people AIDS.
Interpretation helps.

>>2806728
> Joyce
> Proust
> Shakespeare
> Cervantes
> not being way more enlightening than philosophers

ISHIGGY DIGGY NIGGY

>>2806708
It has its uses, sure (ie broad messages like in 1984), but the layers of interpretation and ambiguity, baggage caused by the very nature of fiction, and that non-fiction simply does a better job at didactics.

Anything one learns, from say, 1984 can be better learned from a non-fiction source (importance of freedom and limitation of government, methods government may employ to control its people, etc.) because, ultimately, fiction is just fairytales and all that can be truly learned from a novel is about the world the author has created.

>>2806721
Well, considering psychology and many (soft-)science fields are very related and even subsets of philosophy, yes, you'd learn more about woman from a non-fiction source than you would Anna Karenin or Mansfield Park.

>>2806767
It has its uses, sure (ie broad messages like in 1984), but the layers of interpretation and ambiguity, baggage caused by the very nature of fiction, and that non-fiction simply does a better job at didactics.

Wow. I didn't think people were this stupid. I mean, it doesn't seem like a troll.

Must be murricans online

>>2806767
Whoops, thought I had completed the first sentence properly, hah.

>at didactics makes didacticism non-viable compared to non-fiction.

>>2806774
Explain.

yo, philosophy bros. I read literature but know almost nothing about philosophy and would like to change that. what would be a good starting point for someone trying to get into philosophy?

>>2806786
It'd probably be helpful to find what philosophy influences what you already read

>>2806745
>cervantes
>enlightening
Have you even read Don Quijote? What the fuck are you talking about?

>>2806786

Start with the Greeks; Epicurus, Augustine, Epictetus, Plato, Aristotle.

Then just go for Kant, Hegel, Hume, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard.

Those, at the very least, will set a good starting point. After that, you'll be able to get into a lot more contemporary (19th to 20th century) philosophers.

>>2807218
>Greeks: ... Augustine
>Augustine
Wrong.

>>2807218
Why read any of that when I can just read the wikipedia or at best that faggy stanford encyclopedia?

Seriously, you can nitpick all you want about interpretations, 2 paragraphs is all you need of any philosopher.

>>2807578
just read a book on logic and critical thinking. that is enough in my opinion.

if you're still interested, then read an anthology of epistemology to get a rough idea of what phil is about.

whatever you do, don't get in to those continental cults.