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/lit/ - Literature

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2288146 No.2288146 [Reply] [Original]

>he thought Anathem was too long

>> No.2288147

>they think reading Facebook and cosmo is reading

>> No.2288148
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2288148

>>2288147

>> No.2288153

god all neal stephenson's novels are so fascinating, to me

i agree, tho, it really does need most everything that he puts in

here's a question for you: the our-world version of the oldest savants, the our-world protas and thelenes, were plato and socrates and aristotle. the most significant difference between the our-world version and the arbre version however is that, in addition to science, the our-world versions dealt seriously with ethics and political philosophy. however, there's almost no mention of this in anathem. why? also think about erasmas' dialogue with cord about politics, where he uses the metaphor of the stove. despite the absence of explicit political theory from most of the novel, here stephenson casually includes a dialogue which is basically entirely about political theory. wtf is up with that.

>> No.2288176

>>2288153
Politics/ethics diverged from the "natural sciences" earlier in their history and so those things are almost entirely the realm of saeculars. People interested in those things (law, politics, etc) may spend some time in a consent to finish their education but they don't end up doing the real work of their lives there.

>> No.2288184

>>2288176
maybe i've read too much leo strauss or maybe i think that stephenson is being cleverer than he is. but he doesn't even have the earliest avout-types, before the concent system is created, dealing with ethics or political theory at all. is that because this is a more perfected world? is that his opinion? it also seems to me that the concent system has to be considered as a political arrangement, which really it is, and political issues come up in relation to it (wrt stuff like the erasmas / orolo dialogue about whether the saeculars "imposed" changes on the concents after the sacks, and the politics within the concent). the ending of the book is also on this theme - it ends with a fundamental change in the political relationship between mathic, that is intellectual, and saecular society, a fundamentally new political system. and like i say there's a dialogue which treats the fundamental question of the political role of theoretical knowledge in the middle of the book.

i don't know. maybe there's nothing going on there. but it seems just to me to say that one of the central themes of the book is the fundamental relation between the intellectual/theoretical and the practical/political - which is a recurrent theme for stephenson imo & also a central question of political theory. along with all the cognition stuff obv. so idk.

>> No.2288185

>she reads a singe page three times faster then me
>can't remember what she read

True story

>> No.2288280

>>2288184
It's also possible that since the story is told from the POV of Erasmus, an Edharian, that politics and ethics aren't very interesting to him and he leaves that part of the history out simply because that's not what the book is about, and/or it's taken for granted that most people are familiar with those aspects of the ancient theors.