/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14835325]

How do I learn to wrap my head around philosophical texts?
Whenever I had to read anything philosophical back in secondary school or try reading something philosophical that was posted here, I just never really could and can get to the deeper meaning of most texts.
It always just seems like walls of text I read, but never really understand the abstract concepts the authors were talking about.

[Anonymous No.14835446]

Someone recently described math to me as being like a language, and it made a lot of sense. We sometimes think of math as a completely even, level, self-consistent domain of interlinking concepts, but it's not really, it's a giant fucking barrel of monkeys, if all the monkeys were differently shaped and historically contingent because they were created one-by-one by people who had different priorities at different times and only a vague notion that the whole thing has to hang together in the end. So the monkeys more or less all link together, you can more or less make a chain of monkeys "work" for you, once you are familiar with most of the barrel, but the wonkiness is systemic, the monkeys fundamentally are irregular and require practical know-how to hang together.

The upshot is that to learn the language of math, you can't learn a set of perfectly logical rules following from A to Z, you simply have to spend a lot of time working with the barrel of monkeys and seeing what weird shit you can do with it, in the context of real-world applications (since usually you'd like the monkeys to hang from something, not just each other, although some people only do the latter).

Philosophy is a lot like that, except instead of just being just a uniformly non-uniform wonky bundle of sort-of-related concepts variously useful for various purposes at various points in history (and then reappropriated as necessary, usually while assuming you know the history and understand the recontextualization), philosophy also has a dual aspect, in the sense that there are two entirely different classes of people who take themselves to be "speaking" the "language of philosophy." The first group is made up of dilettantes, and the second group is made up of actual philosophers. The dilettantes massively overwhelm the real philosophers, to the point that dilettantes either will never meet a real philosopher and learn that there is actually a distinction between dilettante pseudo-philosophy and real philosophy, or if they do meet a few, they won't notice.

The dilettante group breaks down into two groups: everyday dilettantes and professional dilettantes. The former group is made up of people who vaguely think "I want to learn about philosophy I guess," but who never get past reading a little bit here and there about quietist pseudo-philosophies and pop-psychology masquerading as philosophy, like "absurdism," or modern appropriations of stoicism and epicureanism. The kind of shit Martha Nussbaum or Robert Brandom writes, just pap for a very restricted audience of deracinated bourgeois people. The outermost emanated ring of this audience being "college-aged guy on the internet who dabbles in 'philosophy' for a while by aimlessly watching some Youtube videos, never quite gets it, and ultimately gives up."

[Anonymous No.14835449]

>>14835446
The professional dilettantes are the Nussbaums and Brandoms. They are much more dangerous, because while the everyday dilettante is held back only by his being drowned in junk material, and having no guidance on how to separate signal from white noise, the Nussbaums and Brandoms have made entire careers out of substituting white noise for signal. They will spend six decades "writing about Aristotle" or "writing about Hegel" while never understanding or saying a single meaningful thing about Aristotle or Hegel, and much worse, they will fill the airwaves with yet more worthless garbage that some future you will have to wade through on his short-lived quest to figure out whether he is interested in philosophy or not.

So picture yourself swimming in a sea of horseshit trying to learn a semi-arbitrary, semi-dead language of concepts, kept barely alive by a minority of esoterics, most of whom don't even know that they are esoterics, and most of whom are eventually dragged down into the Nussbaum muck because even if they somehow manage to survive as a real philosopher they rarely meet other real philosophers, and very very rarely have the experience of actually recognizing another real philosopher and going "wait, you're a real philosopher too?! I thought I was fucking crazy or something with all this Nussbaum shit!," more often being drowned in enough Nussbaum shit that they eventually become a demi-Nussbaum themselves and accept (at an unconscious level) that Nussbaum's mediocre white noise pap is somehow higher than them on some hierarchy of "what philosophy is, I guess."

Then picture yourself swimming to the shoreline, where Plato, Kant, Husserl, Wundt, Schelling, and Hegel are standing, shouting at you not to give up and not to lose sight of the fact that the shoreline is ontologically distinct from the water that is constantly trying to drag you under it and drown you. If you get drowned, the best case scenario is that you become a tenured academic pap-writer who thinks s/he's a big deal for being parasitic on a guild structure that lost its soul a century ago. The worst case scenario is you become some random guy who occasionally reads some stupid book or article about pseudo-Aristotle and Aristotle's exciting new applications for a pragmatics of liberal secularism in the 21st century. Or a LARPer posting on /lit/ about how Peirce or Whitehead or Deleuze or Guenon or Land while not really understanding anything. Actually the worst case scenario is that you try but fail to reach the Nussbaum level, getting a PhD in Nussbaum Studies with not even a meaningless but well-paying job to show for it, which Nussbaum and her most fortunate meta-epigones at least have.

[Anonymous No.14835452]

>>14835449
You just have to wade through all this bullshit for 5-10 years and somehow avoid mistaking pyrite for gold, despite the fact that every single step of real progress you make on your journey will exponentially increase the potential payoff in pyrite you will receive for giving up and accepting whatever step you're on as the final step of actually knowing philosophy. At least math encourages you to use the barrel of monkeys, so you are forced to shit or get off the pot and you can be an engineer or whatever. Philosophy gives you 500,000,000 illusory monkeys mixed in with the real ones and tells you to sort out which ones are real, but you need real monkeys to sort out which ones are fake monkeys in the first place. So you just have to be demented enough to keep playing with the monkeys, and eventually your reward for this is that you'll go insane in the specific way that makes you capable of reading Schelling's Berlin Lectures and not bullshitting your way through them like a) a Nussbaum, b) a demi-Nussbaum graduate student or adjunct or small-time professor, or c) a LARPer on /lit/ lying to himself that he understands Deleuze (while possibly never even really reading Deleuze).

The best method is to set up objective hermeneutic points outside yourself to make sure that you never become a pleb. You need to be really honest with yourself about whether or not you understand those Schelling lectures. Even if you want to be a Deleuze guy: do you understand Deleuze or not? Can you summarize Deleuze? Or are you jacking off in Deleuze meme shitpost threads pretending to be a "Deleuzian" because it numbs the pain of not understanding Deleuze? But when you actually understand Deleuze and can read Deleuze, it's nice. If actually understanding Deleuze is analogous to actually understanding French, then at that point you look around and you think "wow, for every one person who actually simply 'knows French' in the sense that any average French child knows his own language properly, which you would think is the goal of language acquisiton, there are two hundred thousand people walking around going 'ahhhh, oui... le, c'est vrai, le et oui et mais non', which is not actually French, it's a series of sorta-French words and fragments chained together, but somehow these people have built entire industries and institutions out of doing this?" tldr: The goal is to actually learn French.

[Anonymous No.14835477]

>>14835452
was this thread an entire setup for you to post your writings