/lit/ - Literature

It could be worse. It could be better.

>>6813320

For me moder life is a great source of ennu

Against, but not in a reactionary way, more in Milbank's idea of an alternative modernist train of thought which is still there and isn't subservient to secularism.

>>6813334

Come off it all you /lit/ christposters do is whine about how everything went to shit from luther on.

You're a reactionary.

>>6813378
I don't think so, I'm a socialist.

>>6813390
I also don't think things went to shit from Luther one, I think Luther was a product of them already going to shit.

>>6813320
Anyone who's anti-enlightenment doesn't know history.

Free markets and natural rights are pretty much the only good thing to happen for the common schmuck in civilization, ever.

What argument is there for being a serf!? I mean, fucking seriously, these monarchists and communists...

The high premium the French Revolution put on human life is absolutely wonderful. I am for Revolution/Enlightenment 2.0 and think people should rediscover and study that period in history.

>>6813398
..
*on

>>6813406
>What argument is there for being a serf
Everyone is borne into a role, forcing oneself to attempt a climb of the social ladder will only lead to dissatisfaction

>>6813406
Serds often had good relationships with their lords and their fellow serfs. There's a lot to be said for that mode of production that plebs like you ignore because of 'muh progress'

>>6813406
Let's not forget that enlightnment thinking also has the horrors of the 20th c. as its consequence.

All in all, I think Enlightnment as a whole is bretty gud tbh, but being totally pro or contra without nuance is plain wrong. Also, enlightnment ideals are so prevalent in our western ideology, that one has to stay critical of them, lest one is blinded by the "muh education" or "muh individualism" or similar meme.

A pretty important lesson to be learned of kant, dogmatism a shit.

>>6813406
Serfs didn't really have it worse than workers of the Enlightenment did, considering urbanization and the industrial revolution. Workers didn't get shit from the Enlightenment. They only started improving their conditions when they banded together against all the merchants and money lenders who were benefiting from the Enlightenment.

>>6813461
No reason you couldn't have that mode of production without the serfdom, especially with technological advances that allow for more of a surplus.

>>6813390
>>6813398

Wanting to end secularism is reactionary though. I've seen posts you make here, you seem like you would be happier living in the middle ages, as long as you could still read about millbank every day.

>>6813476
Why would I want to live in the Middle Ages when the Church was the bitch of secular powers for the better part of it? Priests weren't even chosen by the Church or ordained, they were chosen by the family in power of the area and generally came from it. Most of the Popes were chosen by whoever happened to have his army in Rome at the time. Feudalism isn't even a product of theology, it was never desirable to the Church.

Daily reminder that all objections to the Enlightenment and modernity are aesthetic

>>6813513

Basic bitches just don't know.

>>6813513
I object to modernity and the Enlightenment because they tore down humanity's spiritual structure to make way for usury. I object to them because they cried about human rights, but only instituted those which were good for business, completely ignoring the three L's that Pope Francis said are human rights: land, lodging and labor. I object to them because they atomized families, and compacted communities to the point of alienation. I object to the Enlightenment because they completely tore down the old system without actually proffering a sufficient alternative other than money money money. I object to the Enlightenment because they made money synonymous with freedom.

>>6813475
That's why I like you, Thomas: we have identical ideas of what a good postmodern society would be like.

>>6813544

Read: the world doesn't look the way I think it should look. Boo.

>>6813545
Good to know, friend.

>>6813553
It's not about my personal whims, it's about what's decent and Godly.

>>6813513
This is astute.

I wish monarchists could smell a medieval city. I think they'd change their tune.

>>6813561

>It's not about my personal whi,s

Well, no, see, that's exactly what it's about. You're just labeling your own preferences 'decent' and 'Godly' and hoping others agree with the designations.

>>6813320
For, because pic related is pretty close to my idea of utopia.

>>6813571
No, I'm not. My personal whims are to fuck lots of women and do drugs. But those aren't decent or Godly.

I'm not talking about my personal whims.

>>6813571
He's basically just advocating the grafting of authentic Christian spirituality and values into the socioeconomic sphere, which is a pretty popular idea among one of the world's largest religions. Some Christposters aren't being ironic all the time, some of us genuinely believe that Christ is, was, and eternally exists as the Truth.

>>6813594
That's real fuckin' decadent last man.

>>6813606

I know what he's saying. What I'm saying, in agreement with the other poster, is that this, too, is basically an aesthetic preference. He's said nothing to convince me otherwise.

>>6813608
Whenever I get called a decadent I feel a slight twitch in my penis in a pleasant way to be frank.

Against, with all the fiber of my being.

I would love nothing more than to smash Modernity to rubble. It's time to go back to the Middle Ages.

>>6813621
You need to read Either/Or if you honestly can't wrap your head around this being something more than aesthetic.

>>6813629
Don't worry bro. The West will come crashing down sooner or later and the cycle will repeat.

What do you think the New Middle Ages will be like? Corporate hellhole? Mob democracy dystopia?

>>6813649
>the cycle will repeat
This pagan meme needs to go

>>6813635

>Implying Churchyard wasn't the prototypical modern philosopher
>Implying he help didn't initiate, with Nietzsche, the collapse of the ethical into the aesthetic
>Impyling you know what you're talking about

>>6813665
>History moves in a linear manner!
Just go m8.

>>6813406
>I'm a Jacobin

>>6813685
History is neither linear not cyclical.

>>6813668
You haven't read him

>>6813695

Please. The "lol go read more" tact is played the fuck out. If you have nothing more to say, there's the door.

>we're so far from poverty and suffering that we being to romanticize pain and oppression

Jesus Christ, people, just watch a movie or play a video game. That's what they're for. Go slay the Big Bad and then have a moccacino and cheeseburger.

This really is as good as it gets.

>>6813649
It depends on what the Church will be like.

>>6813721
Now THAT is the interesting question. Just what the "New Christianity" will be. I'm thinking it won't be outright religious as we think of it, but rather some kind of "ethical system". Or maybe I'm completely wrong and people will start going back to hard theism.

Perhaps as Corporations rise in power the national governments of the West lose more and more power until they are little more than a shell organization acting as a moral arbitrator.

I guess the question would rely on figuring out if we're in the Roman Empire or the Roman Republic. If the Republic, we've still got a ways to go. If the Empire, then finding the "New Christianity" would be a worthwhile endeavor.

>>6813706
If you literally can't comprehend values other than aesthetic, we have nothing left you say. It would be like trying to get Patrick Bateman to understand there's more to life than aesthetics..

>>6813737
i think it would be alright to have a new kind of Arianism for a change

Modern Gnosticism is starting to get boring

>>6813737
Liberal Christianity, what you're talking about, the sort Bishop Spong and Paul Tillich promoted, is a total flop, I can tell you firsthand since I'm an Anglican and it's killing my Church. Milbank is an Anglican too, but he has hope that liberalism in theology will, because just ends up as inter-religious stuff.

The only two viable strands of Christianity are fundamentalism and orthodoxy.

>>6813717

You're a fucking dullard.

>>6813739

You aren't understanding me, you thick fuck. You are completely divorced from the conversation. The fact that you cite Kierkegaard as somehow supporting your own position is just so hilariously wrong-headed I don't know whether to cry or puke or both. Fuck off.

>>6813756
>hopes that liberalism in theology will die within the Church

>>6813748
Mormonism?

>>6813765
>Mormonism?
No, modernity is a kind of gnosticism

>>6813760
Kierkegaard made a major distinction between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. You can't see beyond the first, you can't understand ethical or religious values, you just write them off as "aesthetic". They can include aesthetics, but they are also beyond aesthetics.

>>6813748
Well the new religion will be radically different from the native religion of the Empire after all so I doubt it will be Christian. Or even Abrahamic really. Rome went from Indo-European Polytheism to Semitic Monotheism after all.

To find the new Christianity we should first find the new Judaism. Freemasonry is pretty clearly the new Mithraism.

Thus we should look for a small nation/ethnicity that was ruled by "Babylon", which was then conquered by "Persia" which was then conquered by "Alexander" whose nation then broke apart leading to it ("Israel") being controlled by "Egypt". It ("Israel") will be taken by a second "post-"Alexander"" nation that was built on the bones of what was "Persia".

So I'm thinking something that came out of Russia, maybe?

>>6813784
oh no, Christianity is here to stay
im talking about a new heresy, not religion

>>6813571
Shut up you meme fuck with your shitty shitposts

>>6813621
Im sorry maybe im dumb but what do you mean by aesthetic difference or preference or whatever? To change from power in a few to power to the locals, communities whatever, is a big change. To call it only "aesthetic" seems like the goddamn biggest spook of my life, by golly george.

>>6813717
How long has it been since you left that basement?

>>6813406

Free-markets necessitate choice. Choice of how to self-identify. The depressive position is one of uncertainty and choice.

People may ave been unhappy back then, but I don't they were depressed the way an office worker who chose to be an office worker is.

The greatest freedom is freedom from choice

>>6813467

Actually enlightenment/IR made life considerably worse for workers initially. Would you rather work on a plot of land or from your small home or in a massive facory, breathing poisonous air, drinking shitty water and sleeping 4 to a room in the East End of London

>>6817064

> The greatest freedom is freedom from choice

Kek, get a load of this guy.

>>6813756

Cross the Tiber m8

>>6817064
>he thinks work is volontary

>>6813476
>wanting to end secularism is reactionary though
hashahahahahahahahahahahahah

hahah

>not realizing that secular reason produces capitalism to some extent
>not wanting to forge an alternative modernity
>not wanting to go beyond liberalism

for me the milbankian critique of modernity is really good when paired with a type of catholic traditionalist (as opposed to catholic historical fetishism) + a form of council communism would be THE SHIT for me

>>6817064
And freedom leads to suffering; thus people rather live in their bullshit comfort.

>>6813463
>the horrors of the 20th
It only looks so terrible because the wounds are still fresh.

Genocide wasn't a one-time thing.

There were other military advancements, before nuclear arms. Firearms killed more anyway. And still not as much as pointy sticks.

Large scale wars actually tend to have a lower casualty rate than small wars (think tribal skirmishes).

All in all, it was a good century, not compared to the ones before and after, maybe, but still pretty good in the long view.

>>6817117
>>6817117
The enlightenment didn't necessarily lead to industrialism nor the policies enacted during that time. They were separate; one of mind and one of material. It's the same separation we still fight with today.

Considering the idea of wage slavery really came into the sphere of consciousness during this time, I don't see the relationship other than they both happened.

"Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" and so when the laborer works under external control, "we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is." -Wilhelm von Humboldt

>>6813513
Given that aesthetics are pretty much the only thing making life worth living those are extremely strong objections.

>>6813569
You'd be surprised. Gourmets aesthetes rave about rotting stinking cheese and rotting fish sauce. I've read quite a few verses of countryside-poets lauding the stench of manure.

>>6813463
>enlightnment thinking also has the horrors of the 20th c. as its consequence.
why?

communism and fascism are essentially neomonarchies with excessively centralized power, they both lead to brutal oppression, genocide, and getting BTFO by their capitalist superiors.

I think our modern day Hegelian wizard Zizek sums up nicely on articulating the choices we have with dealing with the enlightenment's legacy:

>However, the ultimate argument against "big" political interventions which aim at a global transformation is, of course, the terrifying experience of the catastrophes of the XXth century, catastrophes which unleashed unheard-of modes of violence. There are three main versions of theorizing these catastrophes: (1) the one epitomized by the name of Habermas: Enlightenment is in itself a positive emancipatory process with no inherent "totalitarian" potentials, these catastrophies are merely an indicator that it remained an unfinished project, so our task should be to bring this project to completion; (2) the one associated with Adorno's and Horkheimer's "dialectic of Enlightenment," as well as, today, with Agamben: the "totalitarian" potentials of the Enlightenment are inherent and crucial, the "administered world" is the truth of Enlightenment, the XXth century concentration camps and genocides are a kind of negative-teleological endpoint of the entire history of the West; (3) the third one, developed, among others, in the works of Etienne Balibar: modernity opens up a field of new freedoms, but at the same time of new dangers, and there is no ultimate teleological guarantee of the outcome, the battle is open, undecided.

http://www.lacan.com/zizviol.htm

>>6817531
>(1)
pretty much true
>(2)
complete bullshit
>(3)
true

>>6817565
>totalitarianism isn't the inevitable consequence of the decay of Western liberal democracy

>>6817886
>implying western liberal democracy wasn't the inevitable consequence of monarchist totalitarianism
>being a jacobite

It is too early too tell.

>>6813489
>Why would I want to live in the Middle Ages when the Church was the bitch of secular powers for the better part of it? Priests weren't even chosen by the Church or ordained, they were chosen by the family in power of the area and generally came from it. Most of the Popes were chosen by whoever happened to have his army in Rome at the time. Feudalism isn't even a product of theology, it was never desirable to the Church.

>people who never studied things commenting on them

>implying choice

almost got me/10

>>6813544
This is pretty much on point.

>>6819594
I actually have studied these things. You need to understand that anti-modernist, anti-secular Christians like Milbank, are different from reactionaries. The issue is reviving theology as a framework, and reexamining where Medieval theology could take us. Yes, there are many aspects of Medieval society that we think modernist heartlessly scrapped, like the integration of the home and the work space and the community space outside the state and market, but that doesn't mean Medieval society was in any way optimal from a theological standpoint. The theologically optimum set up is acknowledging that God is the sole owner of all property, and that right to use is ought to be determined according to who can use something to its optimum degree.

>>6820915
Thnaks

>>6813320

>/lit/ being unironically Marxist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67ZdOUqDqBY

Glad this death cult is almost over. Let's keep it that way.

>>6821085
Atheist, plz.

>>6821085
>"I love exploitation and alienation"

>>6821136

BOOHOO I HAVE TO WORK AND IT'S NOT AS FUN

>I love putting people in gulags for having a different opinion
>I love not handing out food to people for not being able to recite the Quotations of Chairman Mao

>>6821085
he's not looking that weird these days

against

the fundamental problem with modernity is that it separates action from thought, and it gives humans a false impression of superiority over nature.

Think about what cultural nihilism really means. It means a reductionist attitude to all relations and behaviors. When all things are reduced in some way to money and/or power this eliminates any sort of authenticity to action. Action becomes sterile and mechanic. It is selfish, but not only that, people know it's selfish and continue forward with it because it's all they can do.

Existence prior to modernity was characterized by mystery, uncertainty, and a close relationship with nature and death. This sort of climate forces one to think about action as more than just a biological reductionist result of programming. It forces you to take action very seriously and it forces you to develop some kind of philosophy.

>>6821169
can you point out where Marx talked about putting people in a gulag? Im having a hard time trying to remember it

>>6821264
>feeding trolls

The revisionism concerning the French Revolution is pretty stunning. I was in a French school for three years and we were told that the Terreur was an aberration and the revolution was all about placing human rights above the right of Kings and clergy.

The more I have read actual history, the more i have come to realise that the Enlightened Republic was not only baptised with blood, but had destruction and repression at its heart. thousands of dead in the Vendee, anti-clercical persecutions, many more dead in Brittany. then of course colnialism, which was always a left-wing, Republican endeavour in France, and the deaths and displacement of thousands more

More than that, the supreme 'rationality' at the heart of the Republic led to the near extermination of the rich heritages in the regions. Languages like Occitan, Breton, Basque etc. nearly disappeared. People forget that Mistral won his Nobel prize party for his Occitan writing. This was all diregarded as France became cetralised and anti-federalist. i've read accounts of young girls from Bretagne having to go to Paris to find work, being unable to communicate and being treated like sex-slaves essentially.

In short the French Revoltion led to its own kind of Cultural Revolution. The enlightenment has been almost wholly a destructive force

>>6821264
Marx doesn't need to specifically state a need for gulags. Communism requires a one party state thus dissenters must be put down.

>>6821264

Point out where Marx put forward an actionable plan for government anywhere. Given, however, that he called for a dictatorship of the proletariat, this is pretty easily read as justification for taking political prisoners