/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17502973]

/vlit/bros, is this actually true? Have gamers been memed into thinking Caesar actually read Hegel's works and knew his stuff?

[Anonymous No.17502999]

>>17502973
I thought the point of his character that he was a pseud retard bullshitting about shit he knew nothing about in an attempt at shrouding his desire for psychopathic destruction and sex slaves as some sort of process in a higher ideal.
Did people genuinely think he made sense????

[Anonymous No.17503019]

>>17502999
>shrouding his desire for psychopathic destruction
Kek
I mean that's what the real Caesar did. As soon as he was stationed in northern Italy he sat there waiting for an excuse to invade, eventually manufactured one, and then "defended romes honor" with the largest genocide the world had seen at the time

[Anonymous No.17503112]

Sorta, whoever wrote this isn't much better though. Not a very deep understanding of the relationship between Fichte and Hegel. Just the usual "ummm thesis antithesis synthesis is Fichte" thing, which is itself a simplistic distortion produced by trying to reduce philosophers to soundbites. The Unruhe mention also indicates that a discord tranny or /leftypol/ user made it. The structure of the joke is well taken but it would have been funnier with some real substance behind it. Wouldn't it be an Int check, though?

Caesar's conception of "Hegelian dialectics" is vulgar but still kinda interesting. I don't think the devs meant him to be a Hegel scholar. As a Follower he probably had access to fragmentary overviews, but not the time to master anything. Caesar's idea doesn't make much sense within a strictly and properly Hegelian interpretation of history, but the idea of the potential avenues for survival and (re)construction in the wasteland generating an antinomy in the form of mutually exclusive but manifestly valid (according to the premises of the wasteland anyway) forms of political organization is interesting.

Caesar doesn't seem to believe the military might of his society is necessary evidence of its superiority. He specifically mentions melding the austerity of the Legion with the society and economy of the NCR, to eliminate the shortcomings of both. His goal is not simply to perpetuate the Legion, or Legion culture, which he admits is arbitrary and factitious (that's the point), but to sublate both Legion and NCR to create a fully autonomous, self-relating organism, a proper historical subject which can survive and ultimately transcend the conditions of the wasteland, rather than surviving through economic parasitism and colonialism (NCR) or like a snowballing steppe confederation conquering everything in its path but unable to maintain it.

[Anonymous No.17503125]

>>17503112
The Legion can't survive on its existing economic base, the administration of which was only a trial run for NCR territories once acquired. It's an "army without a state." The NCR is stagnant and decrepit because it lives in the shadow of the old world. It's a "state without an army" (in the true sense of a citizen army possessing elan vital). Its economy is barely mature and it already has parasitic robber barons recapitulating the patterns that caused the apocalypse in the first place. It can't produce an army with good morale even in an existential crisis. Its citizens are docile consumers, half drug addicts, highly vulnerable to socio-cultural dead ends like New Vegas. It's like the late Roman empire, living in the tatters and husks of the real Rome and sucking on the dregs of past pleasures.

The Legion is like the Germanic peoples, bringing a warrior culture full of piss and vinegar and radical self-legislation for their own sake, but nothing to anchor them and thus a tendency to scatter and dissipate when focus is broken even momentarily, to a culture with a nascent (but overbearing and stagnant) state form, a decadent and depleted Rome. Hegel's discussion of the Germanic invasions of the old Roman territories and the origins of the early modern state (pic above) is fairly analogous, although not completely. The question is whether Caesar has correctly identified the dialectical forces in play, the antinomy of the wasteland, and whether he was right to "accelerate" the process by preparing the NCR's assimilation of the Legion's tribal constituents by annihilating their particularities first. Hegel said the Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.

[Sage No.17503128]

>>17502973
So what you’re saying is the one thing that makes Hegel famous actually was started by fichte?

Fuck Hegel. Long live fichte’s thesis, antithesis, synthesis

[Sage No.17503145]

>>17502999
...?

Keep beating off and judging history for being what it must be. Faggot

[Anonymous No.17503162]

>>17502973
more like int 10 because no man with the gift of gab gives a fuck about hegel
>>17503145
what? sound like you need a beating froot loops

[Anonymous No.17503163]

>>17502999
I feel that way about House. House is a joke ending, it's slavery for humanity to one guy (however brilliant he might be). Yes Man shouldn't have been in the game, you can tell they only included it for whiny fags who didn't like having to make hard choices.

The real choice of the game was laissez-faire (with almost certain decline and further stagnation) vs. trying to steer history (at the cost of war and the destruction of a lot of contingent ways of life that had accumulated in the NCR). Is progress and "greatness" worth killing a lot of people and socially engineering a lot more? Is decadence/degeneration the "default" state, to which people should be left is the only alternative is to re-make their way of life?

Frankly I think the Legion is the only option. The whole point of the NCR, to me, was to show that the future had to be new and vigorous, but that meant uncomfortable and different, and it meant breaking a lot of eggs. The NCR was killing and enslaving everyone too, just more slowly. It would be a neo-feudalism within the next 50-100 years.

[Anonymous No.17503171]

>>17502973
While this criticism is true I think that's what the writers were going for, Caesar had a fairly unique upbringing and was able to have access to the information and formal teaching the followers of the apocalypse provided as well as self educating from pre war books he found. The important thing to note is that all the books he had access to would almost certainly not be in great condition which likely is what gave him such a warped view of Roman history and Hegel philosophy / fichtes dialectic. He's never presented as someone who particularly knows what he's talking about but his obvious intelligence and education sets him apart from most of the NPCs you meet in the Mojave. Also I hate how that image is wrote I've seen in a few times now and every single time it just comes off as another try hard pseud calling out another pseud.

[Anonymous No.17503173]

>>17503163
>House is a joke ending, it's slavery for humanity to one guy (however brilliant he might be).
So? Not that I hate the legion or anything, they're my second pick.

[Anonymous No.17503200]

>>17503163
But under NCR slavery I still get to have sex and gamble
I know where my loyalties lie

[Anonymous No.17503204]

>>17503112
>I don't think the devs meant him to be a Hegel scholar
This is more true than you probably realize. He probably read a tertiary source book, one of the few that was left from the pre-war destruction, which gave a brief and simplistic example with respect to Hegel, and then Caesar took this as fact. There may have been no surviving books of Hegel's left, at least none that Caesar could get his hands on. The fact that there seem to be people who get legitimately mad about this just demonstrates their own autism and/or lack of general intelligence.

[Anonymous No.17503215]

>>17503204
>There may have been no surviving books of Hegel's left
imagine this utopia

[Anonymous No.17503311]

>this video game is well-written because politics!!!!
What kind of pseud nigger enjoys this sort of superficially didactic crap?

[Anonymous No.17504282]

>>17502973
Obviously Caesar wasn't an academic but you don't have to devote your life to philosophy to extract useful concepts. The core of the rant is also basically nitpicking; he uses Fichte's terms (like everyone else except fucking Hegel scholars) but his concept of history is also explicitly Hegelian and he even acknowledges sublation as a consequence of the Legion assimilating the NCR.

>>17503163
>Frankly I think the Legion is the only option. The whole point of the NCR, to me, was to show that the future had to be new and vigorous, but that meant uncomfortable and different, and it meant breaking a lot of eggs. The NCR was killing and enslaving everyone too, just more slowly. It would be a neo-feudalism within the next 50-100 years.
The problem with the Legion is that its entire existence is predicated on Caesar. If he dies before consolidating his holdings and establishing a new order that will survive him (which could take years) then it will all have been for nothing because the current form of the Legion is, at its core, a cult of personality and to change that that is a massive undertaking.

[Anonymous No.17504426]

>>17502973
>studying Hegel at Harvard for 7 years
Cringe
>uniting 86 tribes through conquest
Based

Shut the fuck up loser.

[Anonymous No.17504482]

>Dude I just love Fallout: New Vegas it references philosophy and Rome and is a post-post apocalyptic (hate when people can't differentiate between that and post!) wasteland in 1950s America!

[Anonymous No.17504488]

>>17504426
/thread

[Anonymous No.17505023]

>>17504282
>Caesar wasn't an academic
He was the closest thing to one before he became a warlord. He was a member of the followers of the apocalypse sent to study the languages of the surrounding tribes when things went to shit. It's also the only reason he knows enough about the Roman empire to attempt to emulate it, most wastelanders probably can't even read and aren't aware of pre-war history.

[Anonymous No.17505465]

>>17502973
>studying philosophy for 7 years

What a waste, lol.

[Anonymous No.17505490]

>>17502973
>Studying philosphy at shillvard for 7 years
Both of them are pseuds

[Anonymous No.17505491]

>>17503019
>with the largest genocide the world had seen at the time
na

[Anonymous No.17505503]

>>17504426
This

[Anonymous No.17505504]

>>17503019
Bullshit. The Assyrians were way more cruel and would burn down, skin alive and rape entire cities just to set an example.

[Anonymous No.17505569]

>>17503204
this

[Anonymous No.17505594]

>>17505023
yeah the followers are the closest thing but they still have fragments to go off