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/lit/ - Literature

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3116773 No.3116773 [Reply] [Original]

Is Hitchens to be taken as a seriously as a thinker, and, dare I say it, philosopher?

I haven't studied much philosophy in school, but I read a lot of it on my own, and comparing some of what I've read (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant) most of Hitchens thoughts/ arguments just seem really amateur to me. Those that know a lot about the principles of philosophy/logic/etc. is this a legitimate opinion? Or am I missing something wonderful about him?

>> No.3116783

>>3116773
He is writing to a different audience. He should not be considered a "philosopher" in a true sense because then the extension of the term would be so large it would begin to include people who we did not intent to be called "philosophers".

>> No.3116788

Post 9/11 Hitchens should be ignored. And Hitchens is by no stretch of the imagination a philosopher, just a sharp and eloquent speaker and writer.

>> No.3116797

>>3116783

Okay.

So why do so many people praise him, and who is his target audience?

Are his arguments good? I find them to be pretty bad, personally.

>> No.3116801

I much prefer his brother, a man hate and reviled by far left morons

Peter is the true intellectual

>> No.3116808

Hitchens is a pompous, self-important, and narrow-minded individual.

His arrogance with regard to metaphysical reality is contemptuous in my mind.

>> No.3116813

>>3116797
All of those you mentioned were aiming high, high, high.

Hitchen is a journalist thinker, he is contemporary as fuck. He is there to create an itch and provoke a reaction and he is successful at that.

But of course, he won't blow your mind like those you mentioned earlier.

>> No.3116816

>>3116797
His arguments are worthless and fall into the categories as follows:
1) "Religion is illogical". This is a ridiculous argument because religion has never fell into the domain of scientific reason/logic.
2) "Religion causes evil". This is just... silly.


>>3116808
<3


His target audience is teenage atheists

>> No.3116830

>>3116816
You shouldn't read him on religion or why we should exterminate all the brutes. Some of his older journalistic work is pretty nice, though, like his books on Mother Theresa and Kissinger.

>> No.3116847

>>3116816
>This is a ridiculous argument because religion has never fell into the domain of scientific reason/logic.
We respect logic and evidence over subjective experience when answering any other question pertaining to reality, but we shouldn't when it comes to religion?

>> No.3116849

He's a fantastic essaying and journalist, but he's far from a philosopher.

>> No.3116856

>>3116773
>denouncing hitchens as 'amateur' philosopher
>studies philosophy recreationally

Don't be so full of yourself. Hitchens was indeed a good philosopher.

>> No.3116866

>>3116856

Huh? I know my opinion in regards to philosophy has little weight, thus why I made a thread asking if it was a silly one. I don't think i'm at all full of myself in that respect.

Anyway, the general consensus so far seems to be that he was a good speaker/journalist but by no means a philosopher.

>> No.3116875

he's definitely not a philosopher. He was a very well articulated and eloquent rhetorician. He was arrogant, although he had reason to be; he had talent, and his goal was to emulate religious insolence. His arguments were a lot more sophisticated than the shit you guys wrote^

>tfw /lit/ tries too hard to dissent from the taste of redditors and young atheists and fail to give credit when its due.

>> No.3116894

He's pretty shit. A couple of his articles are decent and there's really nothing bad about the writing itself, but most of his attempts to analyze things like religion and international politics were extremely amateurish, hamfisted, silly, etc. I think he's definitely one of those writers that fans should "grow out of" after a certain (and fairly early) point in their intellectual development.

>> No.3116895

he was an obnoxious cunt. i'm glad he's dead.

>> No.3116906

>Is Hitchens to be taken as a seriously as a thinker, and, dare I say it, philosopher?

>using Christopher Hitchens voice while questioning his work

You sicken me.

>> No.3116911

>>3116866
>he was a good speaker/journalist

I have to disagree with the journalist part. And, come to think of it, the speaker part as well since nearly all he did was bluster.

>> No.3116928

>>3116797
Because people today have no idea what philosophy is about and don't know what the status of ideas and research in intellectual circles really looks like.

Hitchens deals in little ideas, the kind of half-assessed ideas that compose most opinion pieces on middlebrow journals.
He manages to thrive just because people have no former preparation or studies.

To explain myself better: to say that hitchens is philosophy is like saying that gossip magazines deal with history.

And I'm an atheist.

>> No.3116944

>>3116928
He had debates with philosophy professors and theologians, and either held his own or performed better.

>> No.3116959

>>3116928
The existence of God, justification for the 'war on terror', and the state of Bosnian Muslims during the genocide a 'little ideas' to you?

>> No.3116970

>>3116773
He didn't really have someone take publicity shots where he's pretending to be a film noir protagonist, did he? Only Mishima could get away with something as stupid as that.

>> No.3116973

>>3116944

If you want to debate with Hitchens you are already a Hack.

And not because he is wrong, he is right when he says that there is no proof for the existence of god and that rational thought can be useful. No one disagrees on those sentences today, not even continentals.

The problem is that his arguments are at such a basic level that they are not the interest of philosophers. Hitchens did not get invited to the APA nor to the SPEP because what he was saying was of no interest to philosophers. He published mostly on magazines and not in journals. He is not in the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.

I don't think that any theologian, who is not a religious nut, would have any interest in debating him because he has nothing to tell us on matters of religious scholarship. Which mind you, todya's religious scholarship in universities is not based on faith but only on rationality.

>> No.3117016

>>3116959
The existence of God has been philosophically settled since the XIX century. The verdict is unanimous: there is no rational reason to believe in God. So if you think that rationality is your only guide in the world you are a non-believer, and if you want to believe in god you have to limit rationality.

The state of the Bosnian Muslims is not an idea and has nothing to do with philosophy. It can be an interesting journalistic piece, but is not philosophy.

The war on terror is a bit more thorny. From one side you have the respectable question of when pre-emptive war could be justified. On the other you have a person that takes seriously a term like "war on terror"m which is pretty laughable. But even more this is a question for policy makers and political scientists, not philosophical.

>> No.3117027

>>3117016
>there is no rational reason to believe in God
>implying humans have the metaphysical authority to determine whether or not a deity exists based upon a human conception of 'logic'
>height of arrogance

>> No.3117041

>>3116773
No.

No other "writer" allowed themselves to be soapy photographed in the shower. We laugh amongst ourselves. The other day Zizek said, "Remember Hitchens in the Shower in Late Capitalism? The square root of his -1 had a coefficient approaching delta over zero, which is what I call my lady's clitoris, which reminds me of a rape joke in Hegel AND SO ON AND SO ON {sniff}"

>> No.3117043

>>3116773
Accessibility

>> No.3117045

>>3117027
well said

orsonwellesclap.gif

>> No.3117046

>>3117027
Having no rational reason is different than deciding that there is no God.

You have an instrument which is rationality. By using just that instrument you cannot come up with reasons.
Then it's up for grabs whether you will just use rationality or you will limit rationality by using other instruments.

As for me I believe you do have authority as long as a higher authority stops you. If god has a problem with my grabbing metaphysical authority and stating that he does not exist he can stop me at any time.

In short: I'm the boss until the boss does not come.

>> No.3117057

>>3117046
That's what's arrogant about it. You have to believe that your version of rationalism or logic is infallible—to do so is to assume that the human mind knows all that can be known about the ways of the universe.

>> No.3117056

>>3117016
>"The verdict is unanimous"
Augustine, Aquinas, Ibn Rushd, St. Anselm, Decartes, Leibniz, Aristotle, etc etc etc.
>tfw

>> No.3117062

>>3116788
Post 9/11 Hitchens is Hitchens with cancer and a chip on his shoulder.

>> No.3117100

>>3117016
God is just a word, pal. If I say God is nature, no one would deny it. The idea of God, the humanoid in the sky, deliberate creator is what is dead. And mythologically he is just as strong as at any time, just with different names.

After all, people still believe in "law of gravity", that is, putting natural spontaneous occurences in terms of "laws". The words we use give away the way we think, really.

Religion as an institution is highly questionable and its place on society is being challenged all the time with controversy. But those who claim God does not exist in the sense that you are using are just talking about theology without accepting the use of the word God, but still not realizing the word game we play as we discuss subjects like this. It's not really philosophy, it's a debate that got popular around the internet and bizarre moments on dinner tables, when we live in a world in which is possible to seat next to a muslim, a buddhist, a scientific non-religious guy and a catholic on the same table. The dichotomy theist/atheist is really weird, because, for a start, it needs a definition of God and people usually use the bible or religious thinkers as a basis, thus, they interpret them, they are still discussing in terms of theology.

>> No.3117104

>>3116783
>He is writing to a different audience. He should not be considered a "philosopher" in a true sense because then the extension of the term would be so large it would begin to include people who we did not intent to be called "philosophers".

What? Philosophers are only allowed to write to philosophers. This is pants-off-retarded.

>> No.3117108

Not a philosopher, but a propagator of ideas. His writing and speaking had the goal of provoking thought and discussion and the questioning of beliefs. In that he was successful.

Despite being an atheist (oh boy here we go) I think his arguments for atheism (note; not against religion or the existence of deities) were bad in general. His logic was poor, but he could stir a crowd.

As a journalist, I personally love his writing, although admittedly I don't tend to read a lot of journalism

>> No.3117116

>>3117057
Only if you want to be an atheist.
Not even the believer can deny, and in fact they don't, that God is not a provable rational hypothesis. And the great majority of philosophers (all the big ones, even the catholic anti-scientific heidegger does) agree on that since the xix century.

Even Kierkegaard agreed that God is an irrational hypothesis.

As for me: I know what I know, and that's all I know. When I'll know more, I'll change my mind. Till then the authority is fully mine.
Also arrogance is a moral judgment. I don't think that morality has anything to do with knowledge.

>> No.3117125

>>3117116
>Even Kierkegaard agreed that God is an irrational hypothesis.

You still assume that a human conception of what is or is not rational is an objectively correct one. How can you prove that your version of rationality is in fact rational?

>> No.3117128

>>3116847
Who is this we, fucktard? Religion is what led to science, it has been around just as long as science and then some 10,000 years. Who the fuck is this "we"? There are things outside of "reason"-- the reason we pursue reason, for instance. The reason we pursue a reason for pursuing reason, for instance. Imagine if every child was a fucking logico-positivist, he wouldn't be able to learn anything because nothing makes sense to him.
Religion calls for a different reason, I believe. It isn't material.

>> No.3117129

>>3117116
Kierkegaard and most late German idealists agree that rationality is transcended in normal life as subjectivity. Even Marx does to the extent that the point of Marxism is to remove subjectivity from the rationality of social structures not under human control. The "full flourishing of man" includes, necessarily, counter-rational behaviours.

So the enlightenment project ended in the 19th century with the death of the possibility of reason itself—therefore God snuck back in.

Kierkegaard is my favourite for a defence of God in a proveably Godless world.

And this is why Hitchens sucks—his atheism is 300 years out of date.

>> No.3117130

>>3117100
Well words have a history or a tradition.
If you say that God has a nature you would be objected that our idea of God includes the quality of being a person, or at least of having an intellect. Nature does not have any of that, so you either give a will to nature (like spinoza does) or you don't call it God.