/lit/ - Literature

>Criticism is irrelevant because it all comes down to personal tastes.
What about constructive criticism? Should we just tell everyone that everything they do is perfect the way it and can't be improved, anyway, since quality doesn't exist outside of your own perception?
>Why bother learning anything in schools when it's up to you to decide what matters and what doesn't?
Because social order is worth maintaining. Some things are closer to being objectively important than other things, but objective importance is asymptotic.
>What is relevant and what is irrelevant, it's all up to you
And it's also up to every other entity like yourself, i.e., every other thinking thing is also deciding what's most important. You should probably try to figure that out with your fellow thinking things. Otherwise, unresolvable conflicts will go unresolved when they could have not emerged at all, if only you had asked for a second opinion about an ethical matter.
>Why bother discussing things with other people when everything is subjective?
Because you have to involve other people in your actions at some point, and not discussing important actions with people who may be better informed about the facts of particular situations may lead you to make bad choices in those situations.

http://gwf-bagel.tumblr.com/
I wrote this in response to another tractate that /lit/ wrote a few months back, around the same time it wrote Legacy.
No idea where the thing I was replying to is, though. Also, this was a first draft, so it's very rough. I'm told it's too Continental, but I was aiming for that.

>>5619795
It was supposed to be vaguely free verse. Thanks.

>>5625410
Stop suggesting the worst Culture novel to people who haven't read Banks.

I don't particularly care.

http://gwf-bagel.tumblr.com/

gwf_bagel.tumblr.com

gwf_bagel.tumblr.com
I wrote this in response to a philosophical treatise /lit/ wrote.
Please, refute me. Let's get this dialectic going.

>>5621121
I don't think I'm even trying to make it. I just shitpost here.

>>5621061
I took an existentialist philosophy class last semester and we read one of his books. His theory of mind seems to be that what we call consciousness consists of images coming at us one after another without any apparent connection to each other. Existence precedes essence, etc. His ontological theory's foundation is basically that nothing is causing being, meaning that people/things that have consciousness exist in the world and can't find objective meaning or purpose in it because there's no essence to it except what they put and find in it.

>>5621075
This past spring I lived in a house with a few of my best friends after we nearly got kicked off campus at our university for being too rowdy. I wrote this on acid the last night I slept in that house.

Last Days In CanaanWe wandered in a desert
Of bureaucrats and billboards.
The light left us this year,
We few, diasporic sellswords

The music ceased to play,
And the wine refused to flow,
And the powers-that-be
Were laughing at me
And telling the band where to go.

A way was made in the desert
And a promised land was found.
Shepharded by our equal,
We were homeward bound.

Four months of pleasure,
Four months to treasure.
Memories of a golden time,
The product of a drunken Sublime,
A night in late November.

>>5621069
I'm trying to break away from irony.
My poetry is more sincere than my philosophy.

>>5621056
Irony is as irony does. I believe a lot of what I wrote in it, but I realize how immature the format is and don't particularly care about the ideas. I really did spend the last 2 years in a state of Cartesian doubt and it got to the point that I had to write something down.

>>5621051
Yeah, that's the one.

>>5621038
Almost entirely. It's partially a response to another, equally shit philosophical manifesto /lit/ collectively wrote sometime in the past two months.

>>5621017
Thanks

>>5620981
Heidegger's phenomenology and the tradition he was involved in is good.
The fact that Heidegger accused Sartre of misreading him is enough for me to reject Sartre.

>>5620982
http://gwf-bagel.tumblr.com/

>>5620975
I'm making a tumblr with the express purpose of posting the essay on it.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mha6_3CR9RzsW5FaJWINdT99T0u58orL4EmP-J1QNrM/edit

>tfw your 20-page philosophical essay is too Continental for /lit/

>>5619140
Because he outgrew the shitty movement he was intimately involved in, yeah.

>>5619060
>So is there any good-for-you existential literature?
There are existential elements in all the philosophers I mentioned.
>Stuff that isn't about dread or deals with the dread?
My critique of existentialism is that it's bad philosophy while being bad literature, not that it's depressing. The bad philosophy bleeds through in Camus in the form of absurdism. Fighting against the absurd as a way of finding meaning is absurd. Living in a universe without meaning while constantly reminding oneself that the universe lacks meaning is contrary to living meaningfully. The acceptance of non-meaning is the result of existentialism, but there are other ways to accept that.

>>5619042
France has produced good things, but existentialism is not one of them.

>>5619035
Compared to everyone he gets lumped in with, absolutely.