/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1784785]

/lit/, when it comes to classic (famous, well studied, educational, deeply philosophic) books do you:

A) Read it on your own and take what you get from it
or
B) Read it and find lectures on it from highly regarded professors/experts

[Anonymous No.1784791]

With Henri Bergson, I had to find other writers who could explain it..Uhm in general, I go with my own intuitions though, so ultimately the opinions of others are not as important.

[Anonymous No.1784802]

>>1784791
It's not so much the opinions, it's more about people who are more well versed in the field and better read being able to make connections to/bring material in from other important work that you literally could not have made.
And it's also about the opinions. Really, reading a book, developing an opinion on it, and saying "well, that's that" is just inferior to having opinions presented to you which you can compare to your own.

[Anonymous No.1784811]

>>1784802
I guess it is inferior--I don't follow that principle myself, though. I think even if someone is better read, more educated, etc. it is not possible for that person to really transfer their perspective to my own, and ultimately i wouldn't benefit from their greater intellect..no matter what, all is opinion, and your opinions are your own--no matter what.

[Anonymous No.1784816]

>>1784791
I wasn't really trying to single out Bergson. It was just all I had on my computer because I've got a total mancrush on him I mean just look at that fucking mustache HOT DAMN

[Anonymous No.1784854]

>>1784816
i lol'd really he is not hot man come on.

[Anonymous No.1785265]

>>1784785
OP can you give a couple of examples please? Because I have found with a lot of the best philosophy books, the texts about them tend to either be oversimplified, miss at least some of the points, or are even more difficult to read than the original text. Examples: Wittgenstein, Sartre, Nietzsche, even Plato.

[Anonymous No.1785315]

You can do both, but sometimes doing B is just as important as doing A. For example, when reading a literary work I'll do only A, unless I want to better understand some aspect of the text, because B will yield only opinions I usually don't care to debate.

When reading philosophy, I'll do both A and B: A because I need to decided for myself whether the author's argument has any merit, and B to see if I've overlooked possible supporting arguments or counterarguments.

[Anonymous No.1785341]

I don't read books for the philosophical or symbolical content, so usually A. I might read about them and some analysis about them anyway, but that's more random. Only once in a while do I actively find stuff like that. I.e. Ulysses is interesting to read about.

[Anonymous No.1785411]

>>1785265
yeah I tend to agree that philosophy supplement texts are usually not so great. I was talking about contemporary lectures from berkeley, oxford, even youtube sometimes... but those are usually not so great too
like, Heidegger is hard to digest, so Dreyfus' lectures (available by webcast... every class) are awesome

[Anonymous No.1785443]

>>1785411
Yeah urgh, being and time is not even readable, I got to page 10 and gave up. All that Dasien and all all those other made up German words.

[Anonymous No.1785469]

I know this is the wrong place to say it,because /lit/ is sickeningly pretentious, but works of philosophy prior to about the middle of the 20th century are pretty much always over written. I used to try and read unabridged texts without any help, but I was just left with a very nicely written series of words that I had to drag out sentence by sentence to fully understand.

They all get lost in clever prose or even go full on retard and write in poetic or parable form. There will be several unneeded examples and just reams of bullshit rhetoric.

And I don't know which supplements you guys are reading, a graphic guide or something? The ones I read to take what is my crappy grasp of the original text and elucidate it for me, without all the bullshit. Then they usually take it further and bring in counter opinions and other works.

[Anonymous No.1785492]

These "Introducing" books are really bad however