/lit/ - Literature

>>6134201

Which part of his work do you want to read?

His essays are pretty good and you can jump straight into them.

>>6134208
I plan to start with Essays and Aphorisms and then maybe On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Why do people disregard 'start with the greeks' as a meme? You don't have to read everything including the pre-Socratic philosophers but having a good idea of the greeks, the most popular greek plays, hegel and kant is elementary. What do Americans learn in high school??

>>6134276
fuck off memer

>>6134276
>What do Americans learn in high school??

You read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby and some crappy YA novel about being a gay eskimo in high school or something.

>>6134280
But seriously. You take four years worth of classes, what do you read in history and literature classes?

>>6134201
at least read Plato you ginormous faggot

>>6134308
We read the god damn United STates constitution. Ever heard of it? Now kiss my ass communist fuck lord.

>>6134315
top kek

>>6134308
in history classes you learn about specific events from a text book, you don't read literature. Literature classes are optional and most people don't take them since most of that stuff is covered in English.

>>6134319
So you honestly can graduate high school and never learn about the very fundaments of your culture?

>>6134331

What's the point of learning about your culture when your only goal in life is to work the same factory job your father did and to do nothing but drink beer in your spare time.

>>6134331
I guess. It's not like that matters to the average person.

>>6134201
Everyone needs to start with the Greeks.

>>6134315

Written by the same guys who wrote the declaration of independence, right?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"

>self-evident truths
>unalienable rights

kek

>>6134310
>at least read Plato you ginormous faggot
>read Plato
>Parmenides

Good luck ginormous faggot

>>6134348
I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this buddy. If you're implying those two statements contradict each other you're wrong.

>>6134338
Well, here where I live you start with le greeks at 13-14 with myths, very basic philosophy and some Sofokles. How do people in USA understand such things as katharsis or prometheism? O.o

exactly how much does one really need to know about the Greeks? I remember a bit about them from a high-school art class and I find pre-reading a slog when I'm hype for a book

>>6134348
Also the Constitution was mostly written by James Madison while he didn't have a hand in writing The Declaration of Independence at all

>>6134336

This. Most English classes don't even teach the fundamentals of grammar anymore. My freshman year in college I was taking my core classes to get them out of the way and you had people who didn't even know how to write an essay.

Honestly I'm not even sure what people learn in school anymore, I feel like they just get answers given to them so that they can move along the chain.

>>6134276
I can give you a quick relapse of my high school reading career a couple years ago

>had to read To Kill a Mockingbird THREE times
>Scarlet Letter and make an annotated bibliography for it (we worked on that book for the whole year, still hate looking at it to this day)
>Beowulf
>Grendel

I skipped the class that read Gatsby but that was there of course

>>6134361
The US does this as well (myths and Sophocles), but that's all you get. It definitely doesn't prepare you for deeper Western Philosophy.

>>6134361
As a whole, we don't.
I'm a different anon than who you are talking to, but at my high school, what we call "social studies" classes went like this:
Global Studies or Western Civilization (you could pick)--->US History (end of requirements)--->electives in sociology, psychology, government, etc.
For literature, there was just English 9, English 10, etc. which were essentially literature classes with grammar and shit thrown in. Up until I was in AP English we only read stuff like The Scarlet Letter, Great Gatsby, Huck Finn. My AP English teacher was great and introduced us to much more challenging works but most Americans graduate knowing barely anything and then either re-learn it in their first 2 years of college or go off to learn a trade or be a bum and never think of those things again.

>>6134358
he's probably implying they're both bullshit and that they didn't think so good

>>6134358
He's trying to say that men being created equal is not a self evident truth, and that there's no such thing as unalienable rights.

He's right.

Is there a greeks4plebs or something that gives run-down of the general ideas a /lit/fag should understand?

So how do you populate le ivys if your public education is so shit? Heck, I came to a decent university as an exchange students and many people I met were bright and well-read. Baffling.

>>6134452
Ivies are full of Private School gaybois, even the biggest US public schools send like max 1 person to any particular Ivy.

>>6134452
ivy league is more about money than education

>>6134201
You need to know some Kant. Seriously. Schopie will tell you the same.

>>6134469
This. I went to a very big high school with 4k students in a 99% white town, one girl in the grade above me went to Harvard and a girl in my grade goes to UPenn, and that's all I know of for kids from my high school going to Ivy Leagues. Most of us just go to state unis, most Ivy kids are from private schools.

>>6134435
http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/

>>6134479
aren't most of Kant's ideas incorporated into Schopenhauer's work anyway?

>>6134276

> What do Americans learn in high school??

Freshman: To kill a Mockingbird
Sophomore: The Odyssey
Junior: Great Gatsby
Senior: Beowulf, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet

seriously thats it.

>>6134493
The popular meme right now is that Ivy League education is not particularly better than top state schools, and a good amount of them have even been deemed Public Ivies.

I attend a top state school, but as I have not experienced an Ivy League education I'm unsure as to whether this is true or just a myth spread by the ruling class to keep the plebs from getting rowdy.

>>6134516
mine was same without macbeth. and our romeo and Juliet was having the written play open on our desks while we watched the movie

>>6134525
What schools are considered top state schools?

>>6134525
I also attend a top state school and am (silently) very proud of my school. I really can't imagine getting much of a better education at an Ivy... certainly no worse, but not much better either.

>>6134201
you can do anything you want, anything you do is shitty anyway.

>>6134501
Yes, but a lot of what Schopenhauer writes will seem confusing if you don't know Kant. He presupposes you know him, he says this himself.
Concrete example: first few pages of his magnum opus; if you know Kant you will immediately recognize references to him; if not, it will seem like abstract nonsense.

>>6134525
>>6134541
I went to an Ivy and there is no doubt in my mind that if you take the right classes and develop relationships with your professors you can get just as good of an education from a good state school.

There might even be slightly less obnoxious stupid people in your class at a state school than at an Ivy.

>>6134516

We did Beowulf in 6th grade along with The Giver and Ender's Game. The rest was shit, even mostly through high school. We got to read some Bradbury books but most of the shit we read were Civil Rights muh slavery shit and janky pseudo books that didnt really have any pertinence to anything.

>>6134531
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/top-public

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Ivy#The_Public_Ivies_according_to_Greenes.27_Guides

>>6134516
Shit nigga really? I was at the biggest school district in Texas and ours was quite a bit better

1: Tale of Two Cities, Romeo and Juliet, Odyssey, Animal Farm, Dandelion Wine

2: Fahrentheit 451, excerpts from Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, Count of Monte Cristo (abridged), assorted muh Blacks

3: Great Gatsby, Scarlet Letter, Huck Finn

4: Awakening, Tess of D'Urbervilles, Frankenstein, Hamlet

I realize a lot of this is not particularly significant but It's not like we were sitting there picking our noses

>start with greeks
>Parmenides spiel on being and not being

holy fuck what

>>6134588

That sounds like a lot. Although my high-school didn't even have a Literature class, just a general English class, so we spent a lot of time not reading anything and learning the structure of a 5 paragraph essay.

year 1: Moonfleet, 12th night
year 2: To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet
year 3: Frankenstein, Macbeth, Death of a Salesman
year 4: The Great Gatsby, Hamlet

There were some "Pick your own book" projects where students just chose whatever had a Sparknotes page.

Some of the assignments we had to do were really stupid. For To Kill a Mockingbird, we had to make a mixtape of songs that reminded us of scenes in the book. And for Frankenstein the big assignment was making a bullet-list summary of the basic plot. For the ones where we got to pick our own book, we all made tumblr pages and wrote a basic book review that wouldn't seem out of place on an amazon page. These were for the Academic level classes.

>>6134201
double down with the dorians

Look into this OP.

Gives brief biography, summary of empiricism up until Schoppy, an explanation of Kant, and then explains Schoppy's ideas from there.

>>6134516
>seriously thats it.
That's soooooooooooooooooo much better than what I had. Honestly, I look at your list and think how lucky you were. Why oh why did my English department not care about us students...

>>6134264
I read Essays and Aphorisms without having read Kant, which app. is a huge deal for Schop., so you're fine homie.

>>6134516
Freshman: All I can remember is some Greek mythology.
Sophomore: The Lord of the Rings (god damn, it was horrible), Brave New World (didn't even read it)
Junior: Huckleberry Finn, selections from Walden, Emerson, Dickinson, lots of American literature.
Senior: Othello, I think. The teacher was fucked up and most of the class was her yelling at us and sitting at her desk shaking and mumbling to herself. Sometimes when she took her drugs, the class was basically her and the class talking to each other about anything, mostly religion and racism and stuff like that.

>>6134264
Nigga, you're fine with reading Essays and Aphorisms. You might also want to check out The Wisdom of Life. Fourfold Root is going to be pretty boring though and all of this is going to collapse around you and before you even get a full grip on the system, you are going to realize that Schopenhauer is full of shit and move on to the superior philosopher, Nietzsche.

>>6134971
but Nietzsche is babby's first philosopher

>>6135013
that's exactly what the new world order wants you to think

>>6134971
Nietzsche is for fags who want a way around Schoppy's truth.

>>6135049
I wish Schopenhauer fans would live his philosophy.
Where's your daily suppression of the Will? Why are you arguing with people on 4chan? It's vain and it only brings you pain and suffering.

>>6135071
I don't know if that's what Schopenhauer even teaches. He is basically like "look at yourself from the outside and don't be a perverted retard who chases desires just for another desire to spring up." It seems like people take him too far sometimes or maybe he sends different signals. Even with Nietzsche you will get that though, except he doesn't value asceticism in itself, it has to be some towards some kind of life-affirming goal. Schopenhauer leads to being a faggot and never taking any risks and just trying to get by as safely as possible and drinking beer and watching Netflix.

Seriously: start with Descartes

>>6135078
>you will never drink beer and watch Netflix with Schoppy while discussing how shitty things are

>>6134276

I don't know why everyone else had it so bad at their high school, I got to study:

- Socrates
- Euripides
- Plato
- Aristotle

All only within 9th/10th grade

We got through at least 5-6 Shakespeares in decent depth, We read Dante/Virgil, we studied Whitman, Poe, Eliot (lots and lots of Eliot), etc. (about 15 other major poets)

And 11th grade was spent on good American Literature and 12th grade was (mostly) spent on Modernist and Post-Modernist 20th century (mostly good) literature (and tons and tons of Eliot)

where the fuck did you guys go to school, Detroit?

>>6135107
nigga where the hell you from is this public school

>>6135117

Washington DC area

>>6135107
>>6134902
South Carolina

I started with the Greeks through podcasts, but that's probably not /lit/ approved

>>6135071
Schopenhauer believed people can't be improved, we're here forever.

>>6135128
Represent.

>>6135078
Schopenhauer led to Tolstoy. Nietzsche led to Hitler and edgy youth.

>>6135256
i hope you jokin dog

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_and_reception_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche

vs

tolstoy fucking around out in the country pretending to be a monk after he already wrote all of his good stuff

>>6135256
Hitler: "Nietzsche ... doesn't have the same crystal-clear understanding as Schopenhauer."

>>6134276
>edgy 9th grade english teacher with no curriculum-manager higher up
>iliad
>odyssey
>oedipus rex
>candide
>a tale of two cities
>the prince
>leviathan
>paradise lost
>the social contract
>the wealth of nations
>the tempest
>other stuff, was a long time ago
>in excerpts of course

Readings were a bitch for that one. Had to prove it with 2x pages of notes triweekly, and every-single-fucking class was a 2x page quiz-test right after a short lecture, triweekly.

then

10: i can't remember. one of them was that diary of a midwife from colonial times.
11: frederick douglass, the raven, O Captain, My Captain!, other yung American stuff
12: "SOCIAL JUSTICE"; romeo and juliet, the stranger

12 was literally just going to be writing on social justice topics. Then her husband killed himself jumping off the only five-story building in town. Her interim successor was a temp who knew she wasn't going to pick up full time anyway, so we mostly watched movies and bullshitted.

>>6134276
Atlas Shrugged

Anyone can pick up and read his essays.

WWR and Fourfold Root are a different story

>>6134516
>Beowulf
Americans learn Old English? I thought one had to go to university to learn it these days.

To actually answer OP's question rather than shitpost, an understanding of Kant would be especially helpful, but the essays (i.e., Parerga and Paralipomena) are very accessible.

Cartwright's biography is quite good too.

>>6135125
Tax dollars at work.
Fuck the Beltway.

>>6135125
Tjhsst?

>>6135443
here's how a real collection looks

>>6137077
>kaufmann
le kek dell'ultimate

>>6137077
I've read that Mencken one, it's so hilariously Ameripleb.

>>6137093
>>6137115
ressentiment detected

>>6137077

I have all those in first editions

Begone pleb.

>>6137118
I like Nietzsche, it's just that Mencken interprets him through his American plebeianism and turns him into a sort of simplistic social darwinist libertarian.

>>6137162
yeah i agree it was pretty shit

>>6134348
that's not even mentioning how the "pursuit of happiness" is an inalienable right (and supposedly a 'good' thing)

Start with the Indians

>>6134201
DUDE

DUDE

>Ein Hauptnutzen des Studiums der Alten ist, daß es uns vor der Weitschweifigkeit bewahrt, indem die Alten stets bemüht sind, konzis und prägnant zu schreiben.

THERE

EVEN SCHOPENHAUER FUCKING TOLD YOU TO START WITH THE GREEKS

>>6134201
To read Schopenhauer's major works you probably should understand earlier philosophers, but you can read his essays without any background in philosophy and understand them perfectly.

>>6137386
Yeah. Start with the Indians, OP.

Schopenhauer said you should read his essay On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason before you start his main work and also be well acquainted with Kant and the Upanishads.

He also demanded that you read his work twice.

>>6138785
He also said you should read his dWaWuV in his essays. Well, shit compared to his essays WaWuV. He just felt like pimping his lesser known works which have been lesser known for a reason.

>>6137251
>pleb too lazy to start with the Western foundation of philosophy
>capable of speaking German

Where do you think you are?

>>6134400
Would you home school your children? I feel like the reason education is worse now is because the standards for teaching have been lowered. (So many crazy immature stupid chicks in uni with plans to go to teachers college) This allows the government a massive selection of teachers to chose from, resulting in a lower pay grade which in turn lowers the standards again. At least that's my half baked theory.