/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18352398]

How did an author who has been dead for 200 years managed to write a book perfectibly describing my thoughts?

[Anonymous No.18352407]

Your thoughts are not original.

[Anonymous No.18352430]

>>18352398
There is a continuity of human experience that some can articulate.

[Anonymous No.18352442]

>>18352398
It's almost as if you are both... Human

[Anonymous No.18352445]

Humans were exactly the same 200 years ago, anon.
Evolution is slow.

[Anonymous No.18352448]

>>18352398
Because literature is astrology for people that like more words than a horoscope will offer.

[Anonymous No.18352450]

>>18352398
Which author?

[Anonymous No.18352454]

>>18352398
Your soul was on this Earth 200 years ago.

[Anonymous No.18352458]

>>18352445
>evolution
kys atheist

[S10241875 No.18352461]

>>18352398
Perhaps you've been dead for 200 years?

[Anonymous No.18352462]

>>18352398
There is nothing new under the sun.

[Anonymous No.18352464]

>>18352398
People aren't as different as you may think.

[Anonymous No.18352480]

>>18352450
Tolstoi

[Anonymous No.18352487]

>>18352430
>>18352464
I used to think that the way people think is related to their era conditions and when a single generation changes, many feelings and impressions are lost forever.

[Anonymous No.18352493]

>>18352445
>evolution
No.

Even if this were true, social darwinism is a retarded philosophy, so any sort of artificial evolution in humans is very far removed from having any sort of meaningful difference in intelligence through generations.

In fact, it may be that humans are getting dumber.

[Anonymous No.18352511]

>>18352398
Times change but people all walk the same road. There is nothing new under the sun anon.

[Anonymous No.18352529]

>>18352398
The real question is, why wouldn't he? We've been brainwashed to believe that old necessarily means outdated.

[Anonymous No.18352559]

>>18352529
Because the world changed and so changed the way of thinking

[Anonymous No.18352576]

>>18352559
That doesn't necessarily mean that every single facet of human beings changed. We don't even know what OP is talking about in the first place, so this conversation is purposeless.

[Anonymous No.18352577]

>>18352445
Evolution is literally an unprovable theory by its own field's standards.

[Anonymous No.18352624]

>>18352445
>Humans were exactly the same 200 years ago, anon.
Yes
>Evolution is slow.
It's not so much imperceptibly slow as rather non-existent.

[Anonymous No.18352629]

>>18352576
Things like a man in love with a woman feeling inferior to her and going to her to ask what she loves in him, and that she should break up with him, because he doesn't understand how she ended up with him
Or an artist trying to see his work through the eyes of others, forgetting the process of creation and feeling pleasure on this
Among many other passages I already forgot
Also the way of describing how these thoughts come to be, sometimes randomly, sometimes because of interests the person doesn't understand he/she has

[Anonymous No.18352788]

>>18352458
>>18352577
>>18352624
samefagging is illegal

[Anonymous No.18353259]

>>18352788
>wtf people disagree with me?! It must be a trick!!!
Embarrassing, get over yourself anon.

[Anonymous No.18353266]

>>18352788
Evolution is a doubtable theory. It's not flat earth or whatever other kind of bullshit the dumbasses are coming out with these days.

It's inherently non-observable. The only thing you can observe is artificial selection, which necessarily exists.

[Anonymous No.18353313]

>>18352407
If you read history of philosophy, you realise there are no such thing as original thoughts. Every philosopher, except for a few early philosophers like Parmenides, have borrowed from other philosophers or improved upon their concepts.
For example, we attribute "I think therefore I am" to Descartes but the truth is that such thought can be traced back to several centuries earlier.

[Anonymous No.18353597]

>>18353266
It os observable on a microscopic scale. And we have genetic evidence.

[Anonymous No.18353709]

>>18353313
And yet new objects are created by men. How?

[Anonymous No.18353813]

>>18353709
The forms of those objects have always existed.

[Anonymous No.18354425]

>>18352559
the world never changes.

[Anonymous No.18354453]

>>18353813

[Anonymous No.18354472]

>>18352398
Perhaps because our society now is at a later point in precisely the same stage of development as that society two hundred years ago, such that the same general range of possible answers and ideas is both intelligible and independently derivable for people such as yourself. The test is for you to read until you find an author whose ideas you find genuinely alien within the same period.

[Anonymous No.18354537]

>>18354472
This is a great answer. Shakespeare looks like an alien. Thanks

[Anonymous No.18354546]

>>18354472
>>18354537
retards

[Anonymous No.18354572]

>>18354546
Why do you think I am a retard?

[Anonymous No.18354581]

>>18354572
Because you're impossibly wrong yet you're confident you're right. The second faggot is even more retarded btw.

[Anonymous No.18354586]

>>18354581
Would you care to explain why we're wrong?

[Anonymous No.18354600]

>>18354581
>>18354586
This. Explain it. I promise not to challenge you.

[Anonymous No.18354605]

>>18352398
Times change, people do not

[Anonymous No.18354612]

>>18354586
If you don't know why you're wrong yet, you're hopeless. Your answer is needlessly convoluted and OP's question is ridiculous, why wouldn't someone from 200 years ago express thoughts similar to your own?

[Anonymous No.18354627]

>>18354600
>our society now is at a later point in precisely the same stage of development as that society two hundred years ago
OP doesn't have such ideas in mind. He's talking about love and that shit. See:>>18352629

[Anonymous No.18354640]

>>18354612
They may not have expressed thoughts similar to my own, because they were working in an intellectual tradition that was at that time already moribund and has since then gone extinct. Papal encyclicals from this period, like the Syllabus of Errors, the writings of High Anglican absolute monarchists like Sir Robert Filmer, and even the Bible-based rebuttals to them by democrats like John Locke belong to modes of thought that are largely alien to us today. John Locke and Thomas Hobbes belong to the early period of the break with the prior tradition, which is why there are familiar elements in their work, but Sir Robert Filmer, for instance, is wholly alien.

[Anonymous No.18354647]

>>18354627
I suspect that changes have occurred in these areas as well. Why would a man feel inferior to a woman in a culture in which women are regarded as irredeemably inferior to men, for instance?

[Anonymous No.18354656]

>>18354640
What exactly do you mean by societal stages in your other reply? Do you have Spengler in mind or something like that? I'm curious because Sir Robret Filmer was a royalist.

[Anonymous No.18354663]

>>18354647
Low self-esteem is universal.

[Anonymous No.18354703]

>>18354656
I did not use the term "societal stages." I am referring primarily to the general direction of intellectual development over the course of the past few centuries. What I mean is that there was a "predecessor culture" in which the twin pillars of Biblical revelation and Greek thought undergirded all thought which was gradually eroded and then eliminated from at least the sixteenth century onward. By 1800, this process was entirely complete, such that the moral precepts of the predecessor cultured remained, but had no strong intellectual basis and therefore acquired the character of rigid, seemingly irrational laws. This is the meaning of the death of God. The condition of our political and moral life has since then continued to develop in the same direction, i.e. its character has remained unchanged. This is why we can read Tolstoy and understand him, but find St. Augustine entirely alien.
I do not yet have a fully worked out answer to these questions, but the work of Leo Strauss and Alasdair MacIntyre contain many insightful hints.

[Anonymous No.18354723]

>>18354703
Depends. Were you raised an atheist in the US or in some soulless country like modern Germany? I have no problem reading St. Augustine. One's worldview is greatly influenced by the way one was raised. Even though secular humanism has plagued the West, that doesn't mean everyone is the same.

[Anonymous No.18354746]

>>18354723
You read him, but I doubt you understand him. Do you think that the events of the Bible literally occurred, that the Bible is an infallible guide to truth, that Christianity, meaning that of the Roman Catholic Church, is literally and incontrovertibly true, and that Greek thought, particularly the virtues as described by Aristotle and Plato, are literally true? If you don't believe these things, you are not a follower of St. Augustine, and if you cannot see why anyone would hold these beliefs, then you cannot understand him.

[Anonymous No.18354794]

>>18354746
Well, I was raised Catholic. I didn't become Catholic in my 30s or whatever. The problem with absolutist statements is that they stunt one's perception of reality. Reality is complex and supposedly general rules might not apply to everyone. Frankly, the dogmatic godlessness of some countries in the West is more alien to me than St Augustine.

[Anonymous No.18354803]

>>18354794
How Catholic are you? I have met "Catholics" who fornicate and approve of indecent clothing, but never Catholics.

[Anonymous No.18354857]

>>18354803
Most of my conservative views I got from my mother. She believes in ideas such as thinking that a young unmarried woman shouldn't be inside a car with a man because that's indecent. Or that children out of wedlock are called bastards (recently, bastard is just a silly insult but not used literally). I think I'm fairly Catholic but that doesn't mean I haven't sinned like everyone. Nothing too bad, anyway.

[Anonymous No.18354879]

>>18354857
This is wonderful.