/lit/ - Literature

My grandfather had the same instincts. He bought a plot of land in disrepair and turned it into a cozy cottage home with an orchard at the back, and would tell his wife that he had a desire to be some kind of gypsy / itinerant.

>>5384692
>semen-slurping
shouldn't such obscene talk be below you? you're going to hell.

>Also, from the scraps of lit I've read and listening to people talk about it I've gathered that words like "culture", "class", "urbanity", "wit", "genteel", "refined", and so on, have been code-words for a certain effeminacy and softness of manners for a long time.

I think there are three levels to understanding literature.

There's the plebs that think it is for faggots.

There's the Bourgeois who think it is "civilization", "culture",
"learnedness" . . . "insight into the human condition" (lol), etc., etc.

Then there's the Patricians who think it's for faggots.

>>5384692
It depends. You have to work in the countryside, to afford a car and a house instead of a cheap apartment, and I'm sure more. I prefer the countryside as well, but living in a city means I can take the bus, rent a very cheap room, and walk to all the needed places, like the grocery store. The country might be a place where the rich people who made their fortune in the city when they were young go to retire.

>>5384710
Check out this quote from a certified Patrician, for example:

"Poetry is for faggots",
- Plato, The Republic, Book X.

And mind: Plato was referring to Homer and the tragedians, who were actually decent poets.

>Also, from the scraps of lit I've read and listening to people talk about it I've gathered that words like "culture", "class", "urbanity", "wit", "genteel", "refined", and so on, have been code-words for a certain effeminacy and softness of manners for a long time.
The only man softer than a literary gent is one who's well versed in Christianity. Enjoy your robes and theosophy and noncing the choirboys.

>>5384692
You sound like a bitter grad student who things aren't going well for. You're scared of failure, you're becoming aware of your own inadequacy, and instead of devoting yourself, you are ready retreat from it.

Man up, if anybody is an emasculated semen slurper, it is you.

>>5384764
Nah, that's not where I am. I can see how you'd infer that no. I have no investment in literature or the academy; I have never studied it formally.

I'm not too bitter. Maybe emasculated but not irredeemably.

>>5384768
>not irredeemably emasculated
>devote catholic

>>5384768
Luther and Machiavelli would like a word with you.

>>5384775
What would they say?

>>5384776
That Catholicism is intrinsically emasculating. It removes the teeth on anything it doesn't like by restricting it to certain segments of their intelligentsia

>>5384783
I'd be interested in knowing what they would mean by that.

>>5384791
Bottom line is convert.

>>5384794
To?

>>5384797
Catholic master race.

>>5384791
Well, the Dominicans are a good example. If you want to combat heresy, you give it a place to exist within the structure of the church, and you confine it there. It has always been okay within the Church to intellectually do what you want so long as you don't flaunt it and only discuss it privately with people who can understand it for what it is. An example of this is Erasmus and Luther.

What this does is give the illusion of intellectual freedom. They can't complain that it is oppressive, but the products of these intellectual endeavors have no way of getting off the ground. Italy was under similiar conditions intellectually,but the proximity of the Papacy did it to them politically as well,which is why Machiavelli was pissed.

Luther got self righteous and pissy about it, because the Italian situation created a kind of feedback loop and the grip on certain things was becoming more loose. Leo X was essentially pagan.

>>5384805
Luther was aggressive and ambitious though, so he basically just related to Machiavelli, despite really just not liking his menial status and having his own views that he refused to bend on.

I'm not Catholic, but the reformation was a disaster, and the vision of Luther just silently creating a list of complaints is a bitch move.

>>5384805
>Well, the Dominicans are a good example. If you want to combat heresy, you give it a place to exist within the structure of the church, and you confine it there.

Are you saying that the Dominicans harboured heresies?

>It has always been okay within the Church to intellectually do what you want so long as you don't flaunt it and only discuss it privately with people who can understand it for what it is.

I'm not sure what is wrong with this. You say, "intellectually do what you want", which would imply that Catholics were allowed to preach whatever heresies they felt like, but then qualified it with "as long as you don't flaunt it and only discuss it privately with people who can understand it for what it is", which would imply that the Church did allow a certain measure of private "freethinking", but would not allow any heresies or errors resulting from that thought to be spread. I don't see what is wrong with this. Are you saying that the Catholic Church was "intellectually repressive" and only gave men an illusion of freethought? Well, I'm not a liberal, I don't think "intellectual repression" is evil and I don't think that "freethought" is good.

>An example of this is Erasmus and Luther

I suppose you mean that Erasmus was spreading Humanistic thought. Well, I don't like Humanistic thought and I think the Church had every right to repress it. Luther's heresies were diabolical; the Church should have been quicker to silence him.

I'm generally having trouble understanding your position mate.

>>5384710
Patrician is either enjoy it or don't enjoy it for recreational reasons. Hegel, Freud, Marx and Lacan are fun. Zizek has demonstrated that.

>>5384818
>and the vision of Luther just silently creating a list of complaints is a bitch move.

You mean the Protestant have falsely cast Luther has a saintly character with a humble list of complaints in contradistinction to the stubborn politician that he was?

In Wagner's Case, Nietzsche asserts that the Germans fucked every good thing Europe had going, Luther fucked the Renaissance was one of many examples Nietzsche listed.

>>5384839
Philosophy is not what I meant by literature, but even then "Philosophy" is full of sophisms and idle babble. I'm reminded of the pragmatic Cato denouncing Socrates for being an idle chatterer. Not that philosophy is illegitimate; I think it can be good, but it can easily be corrupted so as to be deceiving rather than enlightening. I think a lot of modern philosophers and thinkers were more shrewd politicians, demagogues, and legislators than "lovers of wisdom".

>>5384856
Sophism and idle babble if simply complex frivolity, it is how people with developed minds play with each other.

>>5384856
>I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views about things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. 'When I was a young man,' he said, 'I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: 'Jew! Get off the pavement!' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,' was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I had contrasted this situation with another which befitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies.

From Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
Hegel was a promoter of the Prussian State as the culmination of World History.
Marx was a demagogue who wanted to see bloodshed.

>>5384861
I don't think so. I can tell by listening to them that they are tragically convinced of their own sophisms, and they take their idle babble seriously.

>>5384829
>Are you saying that the Dominicans harboured heresies?

That is exactly what it was founded to do. Developing and harbouring heresies is the best way to convert and emasculate the heretics by bringing them into the fold.

>I'm not sure what is wrong with this

I wasnt saying it as if it was something wrong. Free thought isn't intrinsically good. My point is that this is how they emasculate. You let the heretic be a heretic, they dont have to legitimately convert, simply play by your rules under the watchful eye of the Church.

>Well, I don't like Humanistic thought and I think the Church had every right to repress it.

It didn't repress it, the Church's longevity stems largely in part from the fact that avoided being oppressive. It was largely the rulers of foreign lands who were oppressive, because Catholicism offered them a solid foundation of control

>>5384841
To be fair, it only worked because people could choose to follow it. Protestantism is basically silent athiesm, but it was an opportunity for the people to make a choice in what they believed. Simply give them the choice and people will jump on it.

>>5384856
You can only really convey philosophy through sophistry. It is an utterance, and the minute you try to write it down, you are doing it simply to amuse yourself. The philosophical mind is in constant distress, because it is perpetual motion with only the most basic and fundamental truths to latch on to.

>>5384692

I know this might be a shock to your narcissism, but no one here actually cares what you do in real life.

>>5384752

>The only man softer than a literary gent is one who's well versed in Christianity. Enjoy your robes and theosophy and noncing the choirboys.

B T F O
T
F
O

>>5384865
I'm not sure what your point it about any of these. It doesn't mean they didn't develop interesting tools.

>I don't think so. I can tell by listening to them that they are tragically convinced of their own sophisms, and they take their idle babble seriously.
Some do. Some children take their play seriously as well. So what?

I like Socrates because he had something of the "anti-intellectual" in him. He and Cato weren't that far apart, I imagine. If Cato was as surrounded by pompous sophists as Socrates was perhaps Cato would have felt the calling to be an ironist exposing the emptiness of the sophists.
Plato can be quite profound. He makes a lot of good points. A lot of the sophisms that Plato deals with in his works are sophisms that are popular today. The Socratic/Platonic method which amounts to training yourself to beware of being bewitched by rhetoric is good and useful because it saves you from being manipulated and dominated by demagogues and poets.

>>5384882
Socrates felt that the oracle thought he was wise because he knew that he knew less than other people, but other people knew more but thought they knew more than that.

Plato's ideal of a philosopher is someone who shuns all empiricism for pure reason, and he has Socrates saying he knows an awful lot through this.

Of course both ideas were penned by Plato, but they seem contradictory.

>>5384878
> It doesn't mean they didn't develop interesting tools.

Interesting tools, sure, they are interesting, curious. I don't think they've been put to any good use though, and they've often been extremely harmful.
I hear that sociologists today borrow a lot from Marx, which would sound like Marx must have developed something of lasting worth; but to me it would seem only to suggest that his sophisms have had lasting popularity. I don't see how meditating on such things as "class warfare", "class consciousness", "alienation", "the materialist conception of history", do anything beyond make people discontent, bitter, and angry at "society".
Same with Freud. I don't see how using terms like "ego" or "subconscious desires" are an improvement on words like "soul" and "desires of the flesh". On the contrary, I think we are worse off. "Superego/ego/id", "the subconscious", etc., this to me is just psychology with a macabre, ugly, pseudoscientific aesthetic; superego/ego/id is no more valid than St. Paul's spirit/soul/flesh, but St. Paul's has the superiority of being more aesthetically appealing. Why "big ego" rather than "proud soul"? why "bruised ego" rather than "bruised soul"? why "unconscious desires" rather than "concupiscence"?
>So what?

They do harm to themselves and to others.

>>5384913

>the superiority of being more aesthetically appealing

You reason just like every other vain effete intellectual and you don't even see it.

Yeah I know mate, it's just a bad habit. I notice it but I haven't changed my ways due to apathy. I see that you deleted your post but you made a valid point.

There's more to it than one being more "aesthetically appealing", whatever that means. When people substituted Freud's terms for the older ones it was part of the change taking in place where people were beginning to see humanity more as mechanical biological units / animals than as being "a little less than the angels". My disapproval of Freud's terminology is that I see it as rhetoric that obscures the spiritual nature of man; just as Marx I find to be a rhetorician that fills men's souls with vain utopian hopes and an awful dis-contentedness that fosters rebellion and bloodshed.
The vanity and hypocrisy in what I am saying is that I am accusing Marx and Freud of false rhetoric when I'm engaged in it myself, I know (though I'm less skilled than they were). I'm fighting rhetoric with rhetoric which is vain.

>>5384913
>Interesting tools, sure, they are interesting, curious. I don't think they've been put to any good use though
That depends on what you mean. If you mean, "practical application," they're far too abstract for that. If you mean a fresh outlook on reality, a new lens, they've been put to good use. They don't go anywhere toward reaching objective verification, but having many subjective ways to structure reality is nice, for the same reason that learning many languages is nice even if you don't live in the countries where these languages are used. The more structures we can apply to our perception of reality, the more eyes we can see it with, the more fulfilling our life can be. Of course if you dogmatize and only acknowledge one structure, then you miss the point.

>and they've often been extremely harmful.
Not really, they're too impotent for that. Communism as a movement existed since the French Revolution, and there would have been a Lenin in the Russian Revolution regardless of Marx.

>I don't see how meditating on such things as "class warfare", "class consciousness", "alienation", "the materialist conception of history", do anything beyond make people discontent, bitter, and angry at "society".
Most of the people who are bitter at society and talk about these things, are already disposed to bitter, just as those who are happy and talk about them, are already disposed to be happy. I doubt there are many joyful people with fulfilling lives, who discover Marxism, then become sulking and bitter.

>Same with Freud. I don't see how using terms like "ego" or "subconscious desires" are an improvement on words like "soul" and "desires of the flesh". On the contrary, I think we are worse off. "Superego/ego/id", "the subconscious", etc., this to me is just psychology with a macabre, ugly, pseudoscientific aesthetic; superego/ego/id is no more valid than St. Paul's spirit/soul/flesh, but St. Paul's has the superiority of being more aesthetically appealing.
I personally find Freud to be far more appeasing. Paul is the ugliest, most plebeian aspect of the entire Bible, and casts a hideous shadow over the more beautiful parts.

>Why "big ego" rather than "proud soul"? why "bruised ego" rather than "bruised soul"? why "unconscious desires" rather than "concupiscence"?
Nietzsche uses terms like "noble soul" psychologically, it does have a nice ring to it, but Freud using different terminology helps distinguish his theoretically structure from Nietzsche's.

>They do harm to themselves and to others.
Not really.

>>5384973
>far more appealing