/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11646660]

Give it to me straight, do I actually need to read all of Kant first or will I be alright if I understand his main ideas

[Anonymous No.11646669]

>>11646660
If you're going rawdog then no.

[Anonymous No.11646675]

Schopenhauer spergs out about Fichte not reading Kant well enough in the intro, dude. You have no idea how autistically badly Schopenhauer wanted people to understand and study Kant "properly".

[Anonymous No.11646677]

You will not read Kant and you are going to make these threads for eternity.

[Anonymous No.11646679]

>>11646677
Dude, he hasn't even read Schopenhauer yet, don't Nietzsche him.

[Anonymous No.11646682]

Kant is fucking trash shit for philosophy undergrads to murmur to each other while they stroke their cocks.

[Anonymous No.11646685]

He literally tells you what you have to read/understand in the intro to this book.

IIRC it's :
First chapter of his On Vision and Color
His PhD the Fourfold Root
The Upanishads
Have a complete understanding of all of Kant

[Anonymous No.11646686]

>>11646682
>he's never read Kant's views on sex or Hume
Do you get turned on by contract law?

[Anonymous No.11646764]

>>11646660
He steps on Kant and Plato and there are a lot of other implicit influences in the text from Fichte to the Bhagavad Gita.
That said he is an amazing stylist and I could say the the surface of his ideas are very well presented, most of all because he uses his own notions to explain the world, which he so-so defines in the book. He also left notes to how to approach the book which could be quite useful.

[Anonymous No.11646845]

I have a volume one of Kant's complete works, his pre-critical writings, should I just read all of it or are there some essential ones? It's fucking a thousand pages long

[Anonymous No.11646847]

He wrote for the biggest brainlets of his time in a desperate attempt to get anyone to watch his lectures, so no, even a third grader can understand his "philosophy".

[Anonymous No.11646873]

>>11646660
BASED /nrl/ bro

[Anonymous No.11647034]

>>11646847
t. Hegel

[Anonymous No.11647036]

>>11647034
It was Schopenhauer that was obsessed with Hegel, not the other way around. Hegel probably didn't even know who Schopenhauer was.

[Anonymous No.11647045]

>>11646847
>even a third grader can understand his "philosophy"
This but unironically
also be my gf

[Anonymous No.11647060]

if you read that you wont be able to understand kant

[Anonymous No.11647083]

>>11646660
tfw i just ordered this book among others

rate

[Anonymous No.11647091]

>>11647083
>diving into the Critique raw
>wanting people to rate your amazon cart


buddy I'm gonna tell you this straight: if you're not serious about knowledge, don't waste your time or your money. this shit isn't beach reading, you gotta work.

[Anonymous No.11647099]

>>11647091
I want to ;_;

[Walkie No.11647115]

>>11647083
>>11647083
>penguin CPR
kys

[Anonymous No.11647120]

>>11647115
What should i have got instead?

[Anonymous No.11647122]

>>11647115
>being a cucked materialist
kys yourself

[Walkie No.11647123]

>>11647120
Cambridge Edition, edited by Guyer and Wood

[Anonymous No.11647126]

>>11647123
I will look into it. What exactly is the difference?

t. book noob that wants to start reading books

[Anonymous No.11647128]

>>11647099
well then good luck, study hard, lift, eat clean, meditate, contemplate, and read tons of secondary sources

[Walkie No.11647130]

>>11647126
>What exactly is the difference
The Penguin edition is a mildly edited translation of something that was in the public domain, the Cambridge Edition is a recent translation by 2 very prominent Kant scholars with an up to date introduction and citations

[Anonymous No.11647132]

>>11647126
Penguin is fine for fiction, but Oxford and Cambridge are better for philosophical texts translated from other languages.

[Anonymous No.11647133]

>>11647130
I will keep that in mind, thank you for explaining.

[Anonymous No.11647191]

>>11646660
he writes very clearly and he spends a lot of time recapitulating Kant, so it's readable. ofc it would be better to read Kant (and everything else) first.

>>11646845
lol nobody reads complete Kant.

>>11647036
wasn't Hegel on Schopenhauer's dissertation committee?

[Anonymous No.11647205]

>>11646685
I read all but On Vision and Color, and only sort of skimmed through Kant. I think you only need to understand his Critique of Pure/Practical Reason and Prolegomena...Metaphysics to begin with Schopenhauer.

[Anonymous No.11647237]

>>11646685

Schopenhauer's philosophy is trash, and not worth getting into.

[Anonymous No.11647309]

Read Prolegomena first. Then CPR, then Schopenhauer dissertation. Then the world as Will and representation. Only way to fully understand him.

[Anonymous No.11647323]

>>11647237
His metaphysics are GOAT though.

[Anonymous No.11647345]

>>11647323

Gayest off all time for sure. No but seriously, he is probably the worst metaphysician in the history of philosophy.

[Walkie No.11647353]

>>11647345
>probably the worst metaphysician in the history of philosophy
That's not Wittgenstein

[Anonymous No.11647370]

>>11647345
>>11647237

The second form of the principle of sufficient reason requires that you explain this shit.

[Anonymous No.11647374]

>>11647353

>claims it is integral to read Kant to understand his work
>Kant uses decades of his life articulating why exactly it is that you cannot say anything about the thing-in-itself in one of the greatest contributions to philosophy of all time
>open world as will and representation
>"dude, the thing in-itself is will, LMAO"
>ctrl+f: "I assert this without need of providing proof, as it should be obvious to anyone who has thought about it deeply"
>286 hits

[Anonymous No.11647382]

>>11647374
not them, but Schop's not wrong. he does piggy-back off of a good portion of Kant's ideas, it just so happens that the thing-in-itself isn't one of them.

[Anonymous No.11647390]

>>11647374
>he thinks he understands Kant

[Anonymous No.11647403]

>>11647374
>falling for the thing-in-itself meme in the first place
>causality is only in our heads
>also appearances are caused by the thing-in-itself

[Anonymous No.11647404]

>>11647374
spot on lad

[Anonymous No.11647418]

>>11647083
You realize you could've just paid $120 for an ebook reader and read those and hundreds of thousands of other books for free off of libgen right?

[Anonymous No.11647419]

>>11647418
I wanted physical books

[Anonymous No.11647426]

Anyone that thinks philosophy is relevant after the invention of the scientific method is a moron. If you want to expand your mind, read books on the physical sciences, don't waste your time on the ramblings of these philosophers.

[Anonymous No.11647437]

>>11647418
Physical books are better tbqh, screens have an implicit link to distraction, at least for me, and I always end up on here or something

[Anonymous No.11647457]

>>11647374

Nope. He acknowledges that knowledge of the thing-in-itself is impossible (and that it’s incoherent to even conceive of knowledge that departs from the subject-object opposition, as the thing-in-itself does).

He argues that we get closer to the thing-in-itself by understanding the inside of natural things, not the outside; the outside of things are their physical, spatial properties, while the inside of things are their individually separate wills. The physical actions of your body are the objective side of your will’s turbulations - they are one and the same thing, known doubly. And at a cosmic scale, nature is the same thing as the thing-in-itself.

Your knowledge of the physical world takes the form of space and time, but your knowledge of your own inner will only takes the form of time. Since your knowledge of your will sheds this excess form, and is immediately felt by you in correlation with the external actions of your body, your will most tangibly reveals what the thing-in-itself is, and this approximation is what justifies the term will-in-itself.

[Anonymous No.11647459]

>>11647426
someone post that pic comparing the /lit/erary early 20th physicists to popsci brainlets

[Anonymous No.11647465]

>>11647426
>>11647459

[Anonymous No.11647481]

>>11647465
>tfw einstein literally took a gap year and took lectures on kant he wasn't enrolled in and read kant, spinoza, cervantes etc for his own enrichment

[Anonymous No.11647484]

>>11647403

> Not understanding the thing-in-itself meme in the first place

It’s not a causal relation, kid.

In Kant, it’s a logical relation of ground/consequence. In Schopenhauer, it’s a metaphysical identity.

[Anonymous No.11647488]

>>11647374

Foolish last man, the old dog is correct-the thing-in-itself must be approached from the individual’s inner understanding

[Anonymous No.11647501]

>>11647488

Gayest post of the day.

[Anonymous No.11647508]

>>11647501
Sorry.

[Anonymous No.11647509]

>>11647481
He had a picture of Schopenhauer in his study.

[Anonymous No.11647554]

>>11647382

>it just so happens that the thing-in-itself isn't one of them.

But it is. He says himself that "Kant’s greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself". It's what will is for Schopenhauer.

>>11647390

I have a cursory understanding, but I am by no means a scholar. You can spend a lifetime reading Kant. Not that I would ever want to.

>>11647403

There's a whole host of literature that gives plausible explanations of this within the Kantian system, but suffice for now that this particular critique of Kant isn't relevant to the critique of Schopenhauer currently discussed.

>>11647457

I think Kant successfully deflates this entire line of reasoning in the paralogisms, something Schopenhauer apparently senses when he considers it incoherent to depart from the subject-object opposition. However, deferring that for now:

>He acknowledges that knowledge of the thing-in-itself is impossible

OK, so far so good.

>He argues that we get closer to the thing-in-itself by understanding the inside of natural things

Not very successfully I'd say - If he admits that it is impossible to know, how does he know that we're getting closer? This is like a man born blind who claims he is getting closer to what the color of the sky is in his head. It's a basic critique because Schopenhauer's metaphysics is really, really shoddy.

[Anonymous No.11647649]

>>11647554

> I think Kant successfully deflates this entire line of reasoning in the paralogisms

Interesting, but I don't see how Kant's paralogisms challenge the kind of metaphysical entity that Schopenhauer argued was the will-in-itself. Kant's paralogisms aim to dismantle the claim that a Cartesian-like soul can be known to exist - an entity that thinks apart from the body, is metaphysically simple, is immortal, etc.

>If he admits that it is impossible to know, how does he know that we're getting closer?

Because given transcendental idealism (defended on different grounds), if we think away appearances, we're left with the thing-in-itself. So the more forms of appearance we can escape, the less the thing-in-itself that appears is distorted by our forms of knowledge.

A better analogy would be a colorblind person who is convinced, for independent reasons, that the sky has a color, and who approaches an understanding of this color by organizing the different shades of light and dark they can actually see, while understanding that they'll never have an adequate understanding.

[Anonymous No.11648296]

>>11647649

>Interesting, but I don't see how Kant's paralogisms challenge the kind of metaphysical entity that Schopenhauer argued was the will-in-itself. Kant's paralogisms aim to dismantle the claim that a Cartesian-like soul can be known to exist - an entity that thinks apart from the body, is metaphysically simple, is immortal, etc.

I'll have to give it some more thought, but considering this:

>Your knowledge of the physical world takes the form of space and time, but your knowledge of your own inner will only takes the form of time. Since your knowledge of your will sheds this excess form, and is immediately felt by you in correlation with the external actions of your body, your will most tangibly reveals what the thing-in-itself is, and this approximation is what justifies the term will-in-itself.

it seems to me that it is a similar movement of objectifying the subject which is impossible, since the subject must be presupposed in any objectification. Kant is adamant that we do not have direct epistemic access to our noumenal self, something Schopenhauer seems to claim here. The idea of "two sides of a coin" which I believe is what you express with "knowing doubly" is challenged by this basic argumentative strategy as well, namely that the hypostatizing of this kind of self-consciousness is illegitimate. But again, I'll readily admit that these are somewhat half-baked thoughts, and I'd definitely need to reread the paralogisms to either support it thoroughly or realize it doesn't make sense.

As for the analogy, I'm not so sure. In your take, I think you're supposing that space and time are so similar as to be in the same domain so to speak, meaning the abstraction from forms of appearance are in a way quantitatively cumulative, meaning that if you can imagine without space it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine without time as well - I'd say that there might be too great qualitative differences (though we cannot know, which I think is still a strong point in itself) for the kind of quantitative analogy of colorblindness and shades of light and dark to work.

[Anonymous No.11649529]

>>11647437
My Kindle cost me like $40 bucks and I leave it in airplane mode and deleted the file that connects it to the ad server. I can do nothing with it but read books and look up words in the dictionary.

[Anonymous No.11649602]

>>11647083
>diving into the Critique raw
What works are needed to read Critique of Pure Reason? I was thinking of reading it in the next year or so

[Anonymous No.11650929]

>>11649602
Read kants lectures on logic and his Prolegomena first.

[Anonymous No.11651174]

>bothering with Immanuel "no action has moral worth if you derive pleasure from it" Kant
Not worth it bro

[Anonymous No.11651424]

Are his aphorism books worth reading?

[Anonymous No.11651439]

>>11651174

Kant doesn't say that - he says that if you act while believing that your action will have a pleasurable outcome, then you can't be sure if you were motivated merely by the desire for pleasure, or if you acted without regard for pleasure and thus morally. His argument is that the moral law is *especially clear* in situations where ethical action is incompatible with pleasure (such as refusing to be the pawn of a tyrant, even at the expense of your own life and the lives of your loved ones) - he doesn't say that morality is incompatible with pleasure.

If I'm missing some part of his system, please correct me.

[Anonymous No.11651451]

>>11647374
i love this

[Anonymous No.11651764]

>>11649602
>>11650929
Greg Sadler recommends 'Prolegomena' and 'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals' as a starting point for Kant.

[Anonymous No.11651832]

>>11647374
>Finally come to an understanding of the thing-in-itself's total ineffability
>Realise you've been thinking about the thing-in-itself for hours
>Realise you've come to an understand of it through reading Kant's text

[Anonymous No.11652143]

>>11650929
>>11651764
Thanks!

[Anonymous No.11652241]

>>11647457
Great summation!

[Anonymous No.11653695]

>>11648296

> it seems to me that it is a similar movement of objectifying the subject which is impossible, since the subject must be presupposed in any objectification

Schopenhauer acknowledges that one's own will, as an object of introspection, cannot escape all the conscious subject's forms of knowledge - otherwise it wouldn't be knowable to the subject (and this is why the thing-in-itself is unknowable). One's will is known temporally. But just as for any other object of knowledge, the subject's experience of the object isn't just the experience of the subject's own cognitive forms - there is additionally a contribution made by the thing-in-itself, which leaves its stamp on the nature of the object. This stamp of the thing-in-itself's character is manifest in outer objects as the unsatisfiable restlessness of all matter, the constant striving and feeding and excreting and decaying of organisms, the infinite purposelessness of space. One's own will, as an inner object, manifests the character of the thing-in-itself even more intimately, revealing not what it looks like to want and urge and suffer, but what it *feels* like, what it *is* to be a manifestation of the thing-in-itself. But for the reasons I've mentioned, Schopenhauer did not argue that this intimacy allows for direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself, or even allows for an indirect inference that would allow for us to fully imagination what the thing-in-itself is like. We can at best acknowledge that our closest approximation must still fall short.

> Kant is adamant that we do not have direct epistemic access to our noumenal self, something Schopenhauer seems to claim here

It may seem like he claims this, but he doesn't. Our inwardly known will is not noumenal, since it takes the form of time, and also it contains many mysteries - we don't know by introspection what kind of moral character we have, for example, so we instead have to wait to see how we respond either ethically or unethically to certain situations.

> The idea of "two sides of a coin" which I believe is what you express with "knowing doubly" is challenged by this basic argumentative strategy as well, namely that the hypostatizing of this kind of self-consciousness is illegitimate

It's not a hypostasis, because Schopenhauer is explicit that the thing-in-itself is separate from all forms of knowledge, even the most fundamental form, which is the subject/object relation. We infer that there must be a thing-in-itself by reflecting on the ideality of space and time (as detailed in The Fourfold Root), but if this were all of the information we had, then we could only speak of the thing-in-itself by negation, and we would be helpless to have *any* hint, however vague, of what the thing-in-itself is like. But we have the additional information provided by introspection upon our own wills - so Schopenhauer uses the metaphor of seeing the thing-in-itself as not naked, but thinly veiled.

[Anonymous No.11653724]

>>11647457
Is will just a version of soul/psyche/ pneuma?

[Anonymous No.11653749]

>>11648296

Here's a different section where he details some of his argument for expanding the term "will" to include the inner aspect of all individual objects, living and inanimate. If a rock were conscious, then it would feel its own inner life as willing (Schopenhauer plays on Spinoza with this image) - but as it is, the rock wills unconsciously, and this will appears outwardly as gravitational and ricocheting forces.

But if the rock (or we humans) could introspect all the way through its inward will and reach the thing-in-itself, it would know that the same thing-in-itself is the common basis of every other individual will/body manifestation. More accurately, the thing-in-itself is not the basis of separate things, but in fact *is* everything - it is everything-in-itself, while the universe is everything-as-representation.

> I think you're supposing that... if you can imagine without space it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine without time as well

I understand that it may seem like that's how I'm describing Schopenhauer's arguments, but that's not what he in fact maintains. In introspection we cannot shed the form of time, so the best we can do is think meditatively on what a timeless urge of will-in-itself would be like, using the manifestation of such this will-in-itself (the inside and outside of the universe) as hints, without fooling ourselves into believing that such meditation actually provides knowledge the will-in-itself.

Maybe a point where you and I would agree is this: if the thing-in-itself is utterly unknowable, then we can't have *any* confidence that hints and approximations reveal anything about what the thing-in-itself is like, because there can't be *any* relation or similarity or affiliation between consciousness and that which is incompatible with consciousness. It would be like saying that oranges are distant from odd-numbers-that-are-even, apples are closer to odd-numbers-that-are-even, and pears most closely approximate odd-numbers-that-are-even; the stages of approximation can't give us any hints about what is not only utterly unlike them, but utterly inconceivable.

This is a point on which I lean away from Schopenhauer, but I think he would return to his overarching philosophical outlook and say this system provides the best interpretation of the universe without transgressing the limits of human knowledge - meaning that some unanswerable questions and mysteries will remain. So even if he were to admit that as a matter of logical proof, we can't approximate the thing-in-itself by shedding some forms of knowledge (though I don't recall him even conceding this), he could still say that the nature of outer and inner experience are better explained by thinking of the thing-in-itself as will-in-itself.

[Anonymous No.11654844]

>>11653695
>>11653749

I do see Schopenhauer's reasoning clearer now, thank you for that. And thank you for the effortposts, they're great and appreciated. It's posts like yours that makes the board worthwhile.

However, what you're pointing out here still rubs me the wrong way:

>Maybe a point where you and I would agree is this: if the thing-in-itself is utterly unknowable, then we can't have *any* confidence that hints and approximations reveal anything about what the thing-in-itself is like

We do agree on this point. And I think this is catastrophic to his entire metaphysical system. Given the above, how are we to recognize the stamp of the thing-in-itself's character? I apologize that I repeat myself, but I'm still hard pressed see it as anything but aporetic to simultaneously maintain the utter unknowability of the thing in itself and the notion that the thing in itself is will. However, I actually think I'd readily concede to your last point, that "the nature of outer and inner experience are better explained by thinking of the thing-in-itself as will-in-itself.". I don't think philosophy needs to be possessed by apodictic Kantian rigorism to be interesting. But am I understanding you right that you'd disagree with this potential response from Schopenhauer?

I'll give it some thought and see if I can articulate my issues with Schopenhauer's metaphysics more clearly.