/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13405206]

Anyone else here read the ultimate blackpill?

[Anonymous No.13405299]

I long for the day I'm freed from the veil of philopsychia

[Anonymous No.13405407]

>>13405299
And that'll be the day you die.

[Anonymous No.13405424]

>he thinks P&R is a black pill
>not realizing it's a call to radical ontological freedom

[Anonymous No.13405432]

>>13405424
Maybe, but who can hope to be a persuasi in this day and age?

[Anonymous No.13405444]

>>13405424
elaborate

[Anonymous No.13405465]

>>13405432
>>13405444
Michelstaedter was pessimistic about the situation because he was not aware of the methods traditions provided for rooting yourself in Being. He was a big influence on Evola, by the way. Tradition gives us the methods of reaching transcendence, and mastering the unceasing flux of Becoming.

[Anonymous No.13405475]

>>13405465
He was thoroughly immersed in the Pre-Socratics, Scripture. Are you just saying he didn't have a praxis?

Does someone who sees through the veil of philopsychia need to stick around? Even the Buddha had to throw off the body for final liberation. Maybe Michelstaedter skipped all those steps?

[Anonymous No.13405482]

>>13405475
>Does someone who sees through the veil of philopsychia need to stick around?
The Bodhisattva chooses to incarnate even though he is basically enlightened.
>Are you just saying he didn't have a praxis?
I'm assuming that he didn't since he was pessimistic, and he offed himself. I don't know of any evidence that he practiced such disciplines.

[Anonymous No.13405492]

>>13405482
>The Bodhisattva chooses to incarnate even though he is basically enlightened.

maybe michelstaedter's kernel is floating around in the aether somewhere, waiting to do just that. I hope his death was the "great clarification" he hoped it would be

[Anonymous No.13405501]

>>13405492
Ok, someone needs to photoshop Michaelstaedter as a boddhisattva

[Anonymous No.13405514]

>>13405501
bro I'm seriously asking, everything he writes in that book resonates with me on such a level if someone told me I was his reincarnation I wouldn't be surprised.

do I need to stick around and meditate for decades when I can just buzz off? maybe I'm just lazy though

[Anonymous No.13405520]

>>13405514
>when I can just buzz off
I think that's called "satori", basically sudden insight. It can happen.

[Anonymous No.13407150]

>>13405407

[Anonymous No.13407191]

>>13407150
nothingness is liberating

[Anonymous No.13407254]

>>13407191
Indeed.

[Anonymous No.13407256]

>>13407254
This is literally the Heart Sutra
>Ah, Sariputra

[Anonymous No.13407262]

>>13407254
lol, truly based.

there is power itt

[Anonymous No.13407398]

>>13407256
Lmao, hadn't noticed ngl.

>>13407262
Can you recc me some other authors in the same vein of Michelstaedter, Weininger and Mainländer? (matter as illusory, death as the only way to attain factual freedom etc..)

[Anonymous No.13407402]

Pills are for swallowing and the only ones doing the swallowing here are trannys

[Anonymous No.13407407]

>>13407398
forgot to add, that are also considered to be pessimists.

[Anonymous No.13407412]

>>13407398
>Can you recc me some other authors in the same vein of Michelstaedter, Weininger and Mainländer? (matter as illusory, death as the only way to attain factual freedom etc..)

Sure. Simone Weil (Gravity & Grace, she's basically the female Michelstaedter), Shestov (Athens and Jerusalem), and Nikos Kazantzakis (Saviors of God, not focused on death so much as life being an eternal struggle), and Crowley (various works, he says death is the "bliss of dissolution", so he knows what's up). All that come to mind right now.

[Anonymous No.13407417]

>>13407398
>Can you recc me some other authors in the same vein of Michelstaedter, Weininger and Mainländer? (matter as illusory, death as the only way to attain factual freedom etc..)
The Good Lord, Jesus Christ

[Anonymous No.13407422]

>>13407398
Solovyov

[Anonymous No.13408187]

>>13405206
is that cover a design error?

[Anonymous No.13408211]

Explain what the book is about, never heard of that guy

[Anonymous No.13409008]

>>13408211
>Life thus deposes me from myself, making me seek what is ever beyond me. Such life is a permanent deficit and a tragic drive, a contradiction in terms, a living death. Being themselves, all things affirm what they are not. "Their life is suicide" (46). Having hypostatized a "will-in-itself" at the bottom of one's qualities, Michelstaedter is unable to predicate anything of this essential will except an intrinsic nothing. Voluntas is noluntas .

>Thus far the stipulations of Persuasion and Rhetoric may be summarized as follows: Willing is the essence of subjectivity; this willing is subjected to an alienating progression of exclusive moments; it must find its satisfaction in itself alone.

>Demanding that the will be autonomous, Michelstaedter is waylaid by the impassable barrier of the essentialist tradition. Having defined human being as its innermost subjectivity, this tradition comes finally to acknowledge such innerness as null. Michelstaedter discovers that the will in itself is empty, always filled by what it is not, no more than a dream of itself. And this is why people lament their solitude "for, being with themselves, they feel they are alone; they feel they are in the company of nobody"

>Thus Michelstaedter makes explicit the nihilism inherent in the subjectivist tradition. Once consciousness refuses to forego its quest for a meaning that is no longer available, it is left to affirm nothing but voiceless passion. That is the point at which "man would rather will nothingness than not will at all." 35 Suicide becomes the self's only proper act, its sole affirmation, the form of a transcendent and impossible identity. As documented by Eduard von Hartmann (to whom Michelstaedter is certainly as indebted as to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) the "philosophy of life" that inherits the metaphysical project induces cosmic suicide. 36 And this explains the cryptic parable that appears on the first, blood-stained page of Persuasion and Rhetoric. Having sketched an oil lamp in the process of extinction, Michelstaedter glosses it with these words in Greek: "The lamp goes out for lack of oil. I, overflowing at the brim, extinguished myself."

[Anonymous No.13410544]

>>13407412
Thanks.

>>13407417
The thing is that I need authors who expose the ugly side of reality, that keeps me going. But anyways, you could say they're just appendages of Ecclesiastes.

>>13407422
I checked him out last night and skimmed through one book about his metaphysics, and the way he sees spirituality is quite similar to mine, thanks a lot!

[Anonymous No.13410568]

Currently reading it, nearly done.
I believe that I understand what he's talking about but am unsure since it seems like there's a good amount of nuance to it.
Full disclosure: I had read a few primers before diving in so that might be why I'm skeptical about my comprehension.

[Anonymous No.13410577]

>>13410568
What did you think? What's confusing you?

[Anonymous No.13410584]

I've been reading this and found the chapter comparing existentialism and nihilism with gnosticism eye-opening, so... can anyone reccomend me some other books like this? (Comparative religion, perhaps buddhism as post nihilism etc..)

[Anonymous No.13410593]

>>13410584
If you post some passages I'd be able to give you a better rec

[Anonymous No.13410625]

>>13410577

From my understanding Michelstaedter is purporting conscious beings to be constantly desiring and therefore constantly suffering.
We are like our own infinities so we are always seeking to be infinity + 1 equaling infinity.
It's as if we are trying to become a finite quantity (what Michelstaedter would call the state of true persuasion) instead of being infinite so we set after one thing which we believe will provide us persuasion (this is the rhetoric), and it may for a short period of time, but we are quickly after the next thing that we come in proximity to.
I was very interested by the parts where Michelstaedter says that desiring is an act of violence. To say, "This is for me" is to deny it for everyone else.
As for questions/objections I have, I wonder what is exactly the justification for suicide/nonexistence? We are here and who's to say we can't enjoy the endless chase? i.e. learning to enjoy the journey more than the outcome itself.
Michelstaedter also touches briefly on pure giving (giving to give, not for outcome). He gives the example of Christ giving himself up entirely for man etc. I wanted to understand this idea a little more but I don't have a particular question in this regard.

[Anonymous No.13410636]

>>13410593
"More than two generations ago, Nietzsche said that nihilism, "this weirdest of all guests," "stands before the door."1 Meanwhile the guest has entered and is no longer a guest, and, as far as philosophy is concerned, existentialism is trying to live with him. Living in such company is living in a crisis. The beginnings of the crisis reach back into the seventeenth century, where the spiritual situation of modern man takes shape. Among the features determining this situation is one which Pascal was the first to face in its frightening implications and to expound with the full force of his eloquence: man's loneliness in the physical universe of modern cosmology. "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened."2 "Which know me not": more than the overawing infinity of cosmic spaces and times, more than the quantitative disproportion, the insignificance of man as a magnitude in this vastness, it is the "silence," that is, the indifference of this universe to human aspirations—the not-knowing of things human on the part of that within which all things human have preposterously to be enacted—which constitutes the utter loneliness of man in the sum of things. As a part of this sum, as an instance of nature, man is only a reed, liable to be crushed at any moment by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident, no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction. As a thinking reed, however, he is no part of the sum, not belonging to it, but radically different, incommensurable: for the res extensa does not think, so Descartes had taught, and nature is nothing but res extensa—body, matter, external magnitude. If nature crushes the reed, it does so unthinkingly, whereas the reed —man—even while crushed, is aware of being crushed.

He alone in the world thinks, not because but in spite of his being part of nature. As he shares no longer in a meaning of nature, but merely, through his body, in its mechanical determination, so nature no longer shares in his inner concerns. Thus that by which man is superior to all nature, his unique distinction, mind, no longer results in a higher integration of his being into the totality of being, but on the contrary marks the unbridgeable gulf between himself and the rest of existence. Estranged from the community of being in one whole, his consciousness only makes him a foreigner in the world, and in every act of true reflection tells of this stark foreignness. This is the human condition. Gone is the cosmos with whose immanent logos my own can feel kinship, gone the order of the whole in which man has his place...."

[Anonymous No.13410647]

>>13410636
"...That place appears now as a sheer and brute accident. "I am frightened and amazed," continues Pascal, "at finding myself here rather than there; for there is no reason whatever why here rather than there, why now rather than then." There had always been a reason for the "here," so long as the cosmos had been regarded as man's natural home, that is, so long as the world had been understood as "cosmos." But Pascal speaks of "this remote corner of nature" in which man should "regard himself as lost," of "the little prison-cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the (visible) universe." 4 The utter contingency of -our existence in the scheme deprives that scheme of any human sense as a possible frame of reference for the. understanding of ourselves. But there is more to this situation than the mere mood of homelessness, forlornness, and dread. The indifference of nature also means that nature has no reference to ends. With the ejection of teleology from the system of natural causes, nature, itself purposeless, ceased to provide any sanction to possible human purposes. A universe without an intrinsic hierarchy of being, as the Copernican universe is, leaves values ontologically unsupported, and the self is thrown back entirely upon itself in its quest for meaning and value. Meaning is no longer found but is "conferred." Values are no longer beheld in the vision of objective reality, but are posited as feats of valuation. As functions of the will, ends are solely my own creation Will replaces vision; temporality of the act ousts the eternity of the "good in itself." This is the Nietzschean phase, of the situation in which European nihilism breaks the surface. Now man is alone with himself. The world's a gate To deserts stretching mute and chill. Who once has lost What thou hast lost stands nowhere still. Thus spoke Nietzsche (in Vereinsamt), closing the poem with the line, "Woe unto him who has no home!" Pascal's universe, it is true, was still one created by God, and solitary man, bereft of all mundane props, could still stretch his heart out toward the transmundane God. But this god is essentially an unknown God, an agnostos theos, and is not discernible in the evidence of his creation..."

[Anonymous No.13410652]

>>13410625
>As for questions/objections I have, I wonder what is exactly the justification for suicide/nonexistence? We are here and who's to say we can't enjoy the endless chase? i.e. learning to enjoy the journey more than the outcome itself.

the enjoyment of the chase is an unsupportable illusion after you've seen through it. oh, you will enjoy it, but at the moment of death you will be confronted with its senselessness, how you basically lived your life in a circle and as a circle

to be like Christ is to live in such a way that your actions are not the correlative of some determinate state or longing. we're entrenched in a web of relations where the joy and prosperity of one is always performed at the expense of another.

[Anonymous No.13410655]

>>13410647
"...The universe does not reveal the creator's purpose by the pattern of its order, nor his goodness by the abundance of created things, nor his wisdom by their fitness, nor his perfection by the beauty of the whole—but reveals solely his power by its magnitude, its spatial and temporal immensity. For extension, or the quantitative, is the one essential attribute left to the world, and therefore, if the world has anything at all to tell of the divine, it does so through this property: and what magnitude can tell of is power.5 But a world reduced to a mere manifestation of power also admits toward itself—once the transcendent reference has fallen away and man is left with it and himself alone—nothing but the relation of power, that is, of mastery. The contingency of man, of his existing here and now, is with Pascal still a contingency upon God's will; but that will, which has cast me into just "this remote corner of nature," is inscrutable, and the "why?" of my existence is here just as unanswerable as the most atheistic existentialism can make it out to be. The deus absconditus, of whom nothing but will and power can be predicated, leaves behind as his legacy, upon leaving the scene, the homo absconditus, a concept of man characterized solely by will and power—the will for power, the will to will"

Hans Jonas - The Gnostic Religion pg. 322-324

[Anonymous No.13410671]

>>13410652

Why not live senselessly? If a dog can enjoy chasing after its own tail in circles, surely I can too, even if I am cognizant of the senselessness. On my deathbed I can take comfort in the fact that I was fully aware of the emptiness of my life and therefore squeezed it of its maximum pleasure.
I mostly agree with you, but I'm just trying to attack the ideas I have from every angle.

[Anonymous No.13410685]

>>13410636
>>13410652

Wew, it's a good passage but it stealthily sneaks in the very mechanistic mind-virus the consequences of which it bemoans (though I recognize the author doesn't necessarily endorse these views)

Take the Klages pill. Mind estranges man from the universe only insofar as man identifies himself as mind, as a cognitive organism. Is it any wonder, attributing all quality to himself, all that is left to recognize in the universe is sheer quantity?

http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Ludwig_Klages.html

>>13410671
you are not cognizant of that senselessness, you only think you are because it is the philopsychia talking, you will only be cognizant of the senselessness when it is negated/ripped from you. until you have faced the imminent void of death you cannot say you are cognizant of what you are doing.

[Anonymous No.13410700]

>>13410685

So, as I said, I'm not yet done with the book. In the first chapter he goes over ways to persuasion but they all seem to be the ways to false persuasion. I'm assuming that in the last part of the book he goes into methods towards attaining true persuasion.
Could you perhaps outline some of these methods towards understanding?
Is there a way to force the negation of philopsychia?
Also please feel free to correct any misunderstandings about his philosophy I may have articulated.

[Anonymous No.13410745]

>>13410685
>Klages
Haven't heard of him until now, but what you wrote and that summary you provided reminds me of Pascal, "Heart has its reasons of which reasons knows nothing"

Thanks!!

Brassier also flawlessly exposes this side effect of "reason"; placelessness and estrangement from the world, (he doesn't see it as a problem though), I'd like to find more authors like him but without the hyper-specialized jargon:

"Two basic contentions underlie this book. First, that the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment. Jonathan Israel’s work provided a direct source of inspiration for this idea and his magisterial recounting of philosophy’s crucial role in what was arguably the most far-reaching (and still ongoing) intellectual revolution of the past two thousand years furnishes a salutary and much-needed corrective to the tide of anti-Enlightenment revisionism with which so much twentieth-century philosophy has been complicit.3 The disenchantment of the world deserves to be celebrated as an achievement of intellectual maturity, not bewailed as a debilitating impoverishment. The second fundamental contention of this book is that nihilism is not, as Jacobi and so many other philosophers since have insisted, a pathological exacerbation of subjectivism, which annuls the world and reduces reality to a correlate of the absolute ego, but on the contrary, the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not our or anyone’s ‘home’, nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter. It is this latter possibility that this book attempts to investigate. Its deficiencies are patent, and unfortunately the shortfall between ambition and ability means that it is neither as thorough nor as comprehensive as would be necessary to make its case convincingly."

[Anonymous No.13410758]

>>13410700

No problem. In the next chapter he talks about persuasion more in-depth, while the latter half of the book is more of a technical condemnation of the culture of rhetoric.

I suppose the methods are those associated with traditional mysticism: self-negation, kenosis, the via negativa. But of course Michelstaedter is not so explicit.

There is one little thought experiment he poses to you in the next chapter, where he asks you to imagine that next day you will die and your entire subjective universe (family, friends, wealth, thoughts, God...) die with you. Suddenly your food tastes rotten, the Sun is an "dead orange" or whatever he calls it, the sky a "low oppressive arc". Well, what happened? Philopsychhia, formerly predicated on and as a correlative of the continuation of your life, evaporates like a puddle on a hot summer day.

[Anonymous No.13410779]

>>13410745
Eh, Brassier's interesting but just another member of that insipid breed of anglo who thinks the need to live in harmony with nature has to do with some effeminate shit like "restoring human self-esteem" and not just an objective, scientific assessment of what is conducive to human flourishing

[Anonymous No.13410795]

>>13410758

That's the exact chapter I'm on but oddly enough when I imagined myself dying within 24 hours it was like a wave of relief.

[Anonymous No.13410800]

>>13410795
Then I suppose you're more like Michelstaedter than you give yourself credit for

[Anonymous No.13410803]

>>13410800

Uh oh.

[Anonymous No.13410822]

>>13410803
As for your question on whether or not to force the issue, I suppose a near-death experience. Something that brings you face-to-face with your Limit.

[Anonymous No.13410948]

>>13410779
>who thinks the need to live in harmony with nature has to do with some effeminate shit like "restoring human self-esteem" and not just an objective, scientific assessment of what is conducive to human flourishing

So what other authors have this mindset? (besides Klages and evola etc.., perhaps Nagel? [Pic related])

[Anonymous No.13411007]

>>13410948
Whitehead, without a doubt. You can read his Process and Reality as both an exposition of his personal system and as a takedown of the aforementioned mind-virus.

Schelling is an enormous influence. Particularly pic related. Grant ravages "anti-nature" philosophy, the "de-physicalized" Platonism of Aristotle and his intellectual descendants like Hegel. It's honestly what started making Klages and co. start to really click for me. Beware though, it's dense.

[Anonymous No.13411014]

>>13410948
Oh, and finally, this article, which is kind of a nice condensation (in parts) of Grant's thesis: https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/schelling/clark/clark.html

[Anonymous No.13411536]

>>13407398
Novalis, but he's off limits for wh*Tehead fanboys like you

[Anonymous No.13411552]

>>13411536
What are the best texts of his that are in line with the content of this thread?

[Anonymous No.13411572]

>>13407398
Why don't you just read buddhist literature?

[Anonymous No.13411884]

>>13411552
Basically all of them, Hymns to the Night, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Blüthenstaub...

[Anonymous No.13411908]

>>13411884
based thanks I'll check it out