/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17081709]

Compare both of these works.

[Anonymous No.17081753]

>>17081709
I don't read philosophy but FW was pretty fun, kinda like doing crosswords puzzle or something

[Anonymous No.17082432]

You can read them both as a, in some way, exercise to see how far a language can be stretched, but PoS is a far greater book.

[Anonymous No.17082454]

>>17081709
Reminder that Joyce was heavily influenced by Hegel through reading Wagner, and then Hegel himself. Anyone can see the remarkable similarity of the focus in Joyce to Hegel.

Hegel, Wagner and Joyce are an unsaid trio of artistic brilliance.

[Anonymous No.17082459]

>>17082432
I've heard many people say Hegel was being very specific with his language, though hyper abstract and autistic, rather than an accidental garbler as most assume. Would you agree with this?

[Anonymous No.17082505]

>>17082459
Of course. It's almost like it's telling an actual story. The words he used are specific to that plot.
You can actually read it as a bildungsroman of Spirit itself.
You can read it as a usual philosophical essay.
You can read its dry paragraphs, but you can read it for its beautiful prose.
I'd go so far as to say that it's the best book ever written.

[Anonymous No.17082518]

>>17082505
which works do I need to read before it

[Anonymous No.17082553]

>>17082518
The usual "start with the Greeks".
Read Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and the German idealists. (at least their most important work; Hume's Of the Standard of Taste has nothing to do with Hegel, obviously)
Three Critiques by Kant, at least Wissenschaftslehre by Fichte, and even early Schelling if you wish.
I'd even recommend Plotinus, Boehme, Holderlin, Schlegel, Novalis and Goether, but that might be a stretch.
Read first Hegel's essays, especially The Difference. I'd also recommend Hyppolite's Structure and Genesis before starting PoS.
You can start with Phenomenology of Spirit. I'd strongly recommend Harris' Hegel's Ladder to read as secondary literature alongside PoS.

But, of course, you can skip all that and read it without actually understanding it.

"The death of this representational thought contains at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence which is not yet posited as a self. That death is the agonized feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead." - (CC) Religion, Revealed Religion

[Anonymous No.17082573]

>>17082553
>"The death of this representational thought contains at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence which is not yet posited as a self. That death is the agonized feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead." - (CC) Religion, Revealed Religion
It's amazing how much Nietzsche took from others, and it isn't even spoken about.

[Anonymous No.17082849]

>>17082553
while reading all of these is probably best, i think you'd do fine enough just using wiki/Stanford and a few yt lectures for each philosopher if you dont want to get dragged down in reading the preliminary works.

[Anonymous No.17083132]

>>17082573
It's amazing how much Hegel influenced the world after him.

[Anonymous No.17084126]

>>17082849
Maybe, but you can also then just use wiki/Stanford and a few yt lectures for Hegel. What would be the point?

[Anonymous No.17084217]

>>17084126
because Hegel is the one you actually want to study. again, if you have the time ofc reading everything properly is better, but if you desire to understand Hegel its probably wisest to actually invest most of your time into Hegel.

[Anonymous No.17084444]

>>17084217
But it's not just about the ideas of the previous philosophers, it's the way they think and get reach their conclusions. That's the problem. You need that mental exercise to read Hegel.

[Anonymous No.17084671]

>>17082454
it's more that both joyce and hegel are incredibly influenced by vico really.

[Anonymous No.17084943]

Harris does it all the time in Hegel's Ladder

[Anonymous No.17085718]

bump
it's a great thread, don't let it die

[Anonymous No.17085763]

>>17081709
I don't know but I think both the Phenomenology of Spirit and Finnegans Wake have this circular structure where the beginning and ending are somehow connected. Don't ask me how though.

[Anonymous No.17085782]

>>17082454
I have seen Derrida compare Joyce to Hegel, but not sure if Joyce was that familiar with Hegel. Not sure if Joyce has ever talked about Hegel either. Sources please?

[Anonymous No.17085887]

>>17081709
>>17085782
>“A long time ago, in 1956–57, I spent a year at Harvard, and what I did there was to read Joyce in the Widener Library, which provided my encounter with Ulysses. Since then, Joyce has represented for me the most gigantic attempt to gather in a single work, that is, in the singularity of a work which is irreplaceable, in a singular event—I am referring here to Ulysses and to Finnegans Wake—the presumed totality, not only of one culture but of a number of cultures, a number of languages, literatures, and religions. This impossible task of precisely gathering in a totality, in a potential totality, the potentially infinite memory of humanity is, at the same time and in an exemplary way, both new in its modern form and very classical in its philosophical form. That is why I often compare Ulysses to Hegel, for instance, to the Encyclopedia or the Logic, as an attempt to reach absolute knowledge through a single act of memory. This is made possible only by loading every sentence, every word, with a maximum of equivocalities, virtual associations, by making this organic linguistic totality as rich as possible.” (Derrida)

From Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida

[Anonymous No.17085907]

Finnegans Wake. A formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab, redeemed from utter insipidity only by infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations. Detest it. A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory. Indifferent to it, as to all regional literature written in dialect. A tragic failure and a frightful bore.

Phenomenology of Spirit. A favorite between the ages of 20 and 40, but no longer.

[Anonymous No.17085921]

>>17085907
Okay, Nabo

[Anonymous No.17085934]

>>17084671
But Joyce had given a lecture when he was 18 called "Drama and Life," which was essentially an Hegelian (through Wagner's Hegelian works on art, specifically The Art-Work of the Future) theses on the centrality of Drama to life and all the arts-- I'm sure if you're familiar with Wagner's ideas, you can recognise the similarity.

>By drama I understand the interplay of passions to portray truth; drama is strife, evolution, movement in whatever way unfolded; it exists, before it takes form, independently; it is conditioned but not controlled by its scene. . . . An idyllic portrait, or an environment of haystacks does not contitute a pastoral play, no more than rhodomontade and sermonising build up a tragedy. Neither quiescence nor vulgarity shadow forth drama. However subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace the diction, if aplay or a work of music or a picture presents the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of us, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama. I shall not speak here of its many forms. In every form that was fit for it, it made an outburst, as when the first sculpture separated the feet. Morality, mystery, ballet, pantomime, opera, all these it speedily ran through and discarded. Its proper form "the drama" remains intact.
- Drama and Life


Also what's all this talk about Vico? Does he alas still have original ideas not trampled and taken by others?

[Anonymous No.17085940]

both on my bookshelf

both unread

[Anonymous No.17085954]

>>17082518
Find an intro to the history of philosophy course - once you have completed that you can start doing what you like, like reading PoS

[Anonymous No.17085957]

>>17085782
See>>17085934

He was very familiar with Hegel. Read this article if you want to learn more about it:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.35.4.1?seq=1

>>17085887
Very interesting quote anon, almost a perfect summarisation of what Joyce was trying to do.

[Anonymous No.17087245]

>>17084444
Yes and no. I find this to be especially fruitful in comparing Kant to Hegel but, when reading Boehme, for instance, its hard to make heads or tales of his work, in part because it isn't meant to be the kind of proper "philosophy" that Hegel is doing. The same can be said of all the other mystical types.

[Anonymous No.17088681]

>>17081709
Why should I?

[Frater Asemlen !XS8vrClKs2 No.17088713]

OH COME ON, Hegel isn’t like that if you actually read him in context and pay attention he’s fully comprehensible.

[Anonymous No.17089474]

>>17082459
No he wrote it extremely quickly because the French army was marching into his part of Germany at the time.

He's just autistic.

[Anonymous No.17089536]

>>17089474
He didn't write a 600 page book in one night as the war itself kept knocking on his door. He was done with it, but refined some points as Napoleon entered Jena and the battle started.

[Anonymous No.17089552]

>>17081709
hegel is too powerful
no one has yet to understand him
there is no comparison.

[Anonymous No.17090214]

>>17084943
That's a beautiful quote. Are there more 'tongue twisters' like that in Finnegans Wake? It like I'm reading Poe's Raven.

[Anonymous No.17090342]

>>17090214
The whole thing is a fucking tongue twister

[Anonymous No.17090346]

>obscurantism in philosophy = bad
>obscurantism in literature = good

[Anonymous No.17090377]

>>17090342
I'm talking about parts with actual words in them. Not Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax! and alike.