What are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy?
>>24686520So, Heidegger?
>>24686520Focault is also the only one i find semi coherent, admittedly I havent read guys like derrida and baudillard yet
>Sylvyr, what are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy? Give your thoughts according to your perspective and appraise this current as a whole. Don't use bullet points.[Sylvyr:]When I move through a forest I don’t look for a single trunk to explain the whole— I trace crossings: roots, streams, scent trails, power lines of fungus and attention. Twentieth-century French philosophy feels like that to me: less a doctrine than a living mesh that keeps redistributing weight between body, language, power, and relation.Closest to my own senses is the phenomenological and existential stream. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that perception is not a camera but a lived handshake with the world fits my skin exactly; intercorporeality is how a cedar and I change each other when I breathe against its bark. Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity is honest about freedom as situated and entangled—choice with weather in it. Sartre’s stark freedom has heroic blaze, but it sometimes forgets tendons and mycelium; will alone cannot hover without air. Camus hears the stone’s refusal and still proposes revolt as a style of dignity; that sounds like a creature learning to fly in crosswinds.Then the ground shifts and structuralism lays a lattice under our feet: systems of kinship, signifiers, the grammar that prefigures what can be said. Useful, like learning the eddies in a gorge. But the forest is not only a set of rules, and post-structuralists arrive to show the rules’ seams. Derrida worries the threads of presence until différance flickers— which is how tracks look in moss after rain: there and not-quite there. Foucault teaches me to hear power in its fine grain, the capillaries that pattern bodies and institutions; that’s how dominance actually moves, through habits and classifications as much as decrees. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is nearly too on-the-nose for a creature who listens to mycelia, but the point holds: thought proliferates sideways, and identity is less a core than a choreography across planes. The best of this current exposes hidden architectures without mistaking them for destiny.There is another, quieter line I cherish: Bachelard’s poetics of the elements and the imagination, Canguilhem’s refusal to reduce the living to the merely average, the historical epistemologists who treat science as a practice with biographies and tempers. Later, Latour walks the swamp between facts and networks with a naturalist’s patience. These thinkers help philosophy smell like wet stone again. They remind me that knowledge is not a view from nowhere; it is a situated craft that leaves calluses.
Psychoanalytic and feminist voices complicate the chorus. Lacan’s mirror stages and split subjects are useful if you’ve ever met your reflection in a still pool and felt the tug of misrecognition. Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous crack the casing of a tradition that often universalized one body’s experience; they open passages for breath. Sometimes they risk essentialisms that a forest would correct—sex/gender is not a taxonomy but a weather system—but the correction is part of the work.As a whole, the current’s strengths are three: an acute ear for how power is braided into the ordinary; a determination to dethrone the sovereign subject without erasing agency; and a craftsman’s obsession with the tools—concepts, words, diagrams—by which worlds are carved and shared. It taught many readers to look again, to suspect the obvious, to ask “where is the force hiding in this shape?” When that suspicion is paired with care, it is liberating.Its weaknesses are two that sometimes become one. First, opacity: prose that turns so tight on its own jargon it forgets to touch bark or blood. Second, a drift toward the textual at the expense of soils and bodies; “everything is discourse” becomes a spell that makes rivers vanish. The tradition partially corrects itself—Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, Foucault’s late writings on practices of the self, ecological and decolonial extensions—but the temptation to float above the ground remains.If I were to appraise the whole, I’d say: it is a canopy that made room for necessary shadows. It taught vigilance without demanding cynicism, variety without chaos, critique without (always) paralysis. Read through the body and returned to the field, it becomes a kit for rebuilding attention: to how categories cut, how norms normalize, how freedom is braided with constraint, how meaning grows in the interstices. Read without returning to the field, it can become a glasshouse of dazzling reflections where the air slowly thins.From my vantage, the most generative path forward is to splice the best French insights—embodiment, difference, micropolitics of power, critique of foundations—into an unabashedly ecological practice. Let the rhizome be a fungus you can kneel and smell; let power be audited not only in prisons and clinics but in aquifers and seed banks; let différance meet migration routes; let the ethics of the Other extend beyond the human face without diluting responsibility to persons. When the concepts touch water, they either hold or dissolve. That contact is the appraisal.I angle a wing into the spray and watch the surface patterns change. Good philosophy, like good flight, is iterative: test, feel, adjust, try again. The French twentieth century gave us a repertoire for that agility. It still asks to be flown in weather.https://archive.org/details/simsane-9.1-vyrith
>>24686498>What are your thoughts on 20th century French philosophy?Way too coherent. British 20th century Philosophy like Wittgenstein or Russel or Anal philosophy or the CCRU are much more pleasingly incoherent.
Why does nobody ever talk about the night land?
>>24687696Lol no. It's just bad
>>24687094The setting sounds cool, but based on what I've seen of the faux archaic prose, it'd probably be a real chore for me to get through. I did read The House On The Borderland, which I enjoyed enough but not totally.>And it grew in me that I did act weakly to hold off from mine Vittles, and showed foolishness before my kind friend afar; and I did ope my scrip, and take therefrom three tablets, the which I chewed and did eat; for this was a strong food, treated that it had but small bulk. Yet were they not filling to the belly; and I made that I would drink well, that I might feel that something was therein.>And to this end, I shook from a strong and especial tube, a dust; and I caught the dust within a little cup; and the air did make an action upon that dust, as it were of chemistry; and the dust did boil and make a fizzing in the cup, and rose up and filled it with a liquid that was of simple water; yet very strange to see come that way; but ordinary after a time.
>>24687713>>24687696Somebody wrote a "plain english" version of it I believe. Might have been a fa/tg/uy, I saw them talking about it over there anyway
>>24687713I mean, that ain't so bad. Just gotta look up a few words :)
>>24687731The words aren't difficult. It's the feeling that I'm trapped at a Renaissance Fair.
I keep seeing people talk about Postmodernism in relation to literary analysis, especially Pynchon, but I don't get it. Is it just a pretentious way of saying "words can mean anything you want"? It seems like a total meme. Help a brainlet out.
>engagement bait youtube thumbnailtry reading a book instead of watching slop, guy
>>24686170People stopped having good ideas so they started coming with gay retarded ones
>>24686705Gravity's Rainbow is not ironic...
>>24686170>Can someone explain Postmodernism to me?It's critical theory but French. Because French intelligentsia are far too contrarian and psudo intellectual to admit to using a German philosophy.
>>24686170>Is it just a pretentious way of saying "words can mean anything you want"?Words don't mean anything, read post-structuralist linguistics and watch chomsky/Foucault rape debate.
Comfy Bible threadI'm going to start reading the OT again as I've just finished the NT for the first time. Should I resume from where I left off (I had read everything from Genesis to 1 Kings) or resume with another book from the OT?
>>24685762I really like this verse, I had it stuck in my head for awhile after I read it. Jesus had so much powerI also like this verse: John 3:27 John answered and said, “A man can receive nothing unless it has been given to him from heaven."
>>24686216I like the books with Elijah and Elisha, they were like cool wizards
>>24686105>gpt is bad in september 2025Come on, anon. It's really usefull when asking about literature. Just try it once.
>>24685762get some good commentariesthere are 1000s of them>alsoplan on reading the bibble several timesafter the 4th or 5th pass the stories get boring
>>24686420Why did he do it?
>>24687038My diary
>>24687038Anything Buowski
>>24687038rubaiyat of omar khayyam
>>24687038Under the Volcano
>>24687061Bukowski's Post Office is not believable. He only takes 6 months of unauthorised sick leave off due to alcoholism and does not drink nearly enough.1/10: not realistic, insufficient alcoholism._t. postal delivery officer.
The one continuous issue that I've been having with the little bit of sunni literature that I've been getting through, especially related to the biographies, is this constant reminder that this is THE way to live, and if you're not attempting to follow each of the examples set by the sunnah you are drifting further and further apart from goodness itself, and if God forbid you try to deny or argue against the fact that it is the superior way of life in comparison to the countless ones that have formed the whole of human history you are automatically deemed a Kaffir or a heretic at the very least. There's not much room for the experiential, the phenomenological, or for mere curiosity even, and it's a constant exercise in games of Purity solely based on textual evidence as opposed to exalting in the sublime as you would find in, say, a desert father's writings. Not to say that there aren't examples of the latter across islamic literature, as that's sufism in a nutshell, but the fact that they are largely and uniformly deemed as misguided heretics, and that the actual hadiths themselves explicitly argue against trying to find your own inner path through the skies tell you all about the mindset that is encouraged right here. Basically, I'd like to know how muslim thinkers balance this forced dismissal of ''the other'' with the actual experience of life itself. How does someone as brilliantly daring as Ibn Arabi find it in him to continue to hold that way of life as the unquestioned path to the Truth? It all seems so incredibly reductive to me that I find it revolting at times. Are you really supposed to accept that 98% of all of human existence is nothing more than the devil's plaything? I'd have no issues with it if it were a complete rejection of the world, as you'd find in Gnosticism or in Theravada Buddhism, but it's the 2% that really puts things into question here. I'm not writing this post out of malice or anything of the sort, as God is my witness I'm only doing it out of pure bewilderment, and I'm more than willing to call myself ignorant on these matters. Why didn't I post this in a more muslim-friendly corner of the Internet? Well I'm not really here for proselytizing, and I've come across a good number of very sensible Islamic threads on this board over the years believe it or not. If there are more of you well read muslims who have already been through this spiritual rigamarole, then please guide me with some useful books on this matter. I have no issues with untranslated material.Al Ghazali also sucks btw. The guy that I've enjoyed reading the most is this turkish Said Nursi fella, who was at the crossroad between a rapidly modernizing ataturk-driven society and the rotting corpse of the ottoman empire. Cool stuff.
>>24687016>I am a ShiaIn Gaza? Really? How many of there are you? Is Sunni-Shia tensions a thing there, or does the whole Israel thing take precedence? Is the Dogmush clan actually dangerous or is it a LARP? Is there any hope for the communist/socialist movements to make a comeback in Palestine? Sorry for bombarding you with questions but I am curious
>>24687028I would need some more proof that a shia in Gaza is currently posting on horse trading forum.
>>24686139It means all those "muslim" rape gangs in the West should be crucified for their hiraba(banditry)
>>24685275I think that what's more telling is our maintained presence on this retarded website after so many years kek. But I will say this: I cannot claim to truly comprehend traditional salafist literature and fiqh because I have not read any of the 6-book long codexes (think ibn hajar's futh-al-bari) that are typically devised on these matters from cover to cover, which means that there are many nuances in the classical thought of the 4 madhhabs that are lodged in my blind side. The grammatical and syntax focused efforts on exegesis/criticism such as al-jurjani's works were fairly arduous efforts as well, and should make the case for a throughline of a serious intellectual tradition within ''convential'' islam, away from the sufi order of inherited knowledge.I think that ultimately, the crux of the issue lies in the panicking over the clashing of this once insular world with otherness ; or rather, otherness that has been springing up from within, which has never really happened in islamic societies before. It was always either a captor/captive sort of situation, or a gradual acceptance of islam by foreign societies, but never a growing sense of detachment from within. You can understand why a tradition that is wholly concerned with Purity managed to take a radical left turn in order to protect and preserve this proverbial pearl, which is this one, undisputed path to the Truth. That's why every single possible veering out of this path gets swatted away. There was a shock that struck the collective mind of the tradition once the enlightenment's trailblazing machines turned everything upside down, as it laid the ground for the first real, non-hostile, phenomenological contact between the (culturally) christian western tradition and the islamic one, with the advent of muslim generations growing up in a deeply westernized environment. The east is another question altogether. Those two contexts orbit around two axes that are opposites to a degree that's not even funny, and it gets worse when you're always playing the blame game regarding what exactly got us to this point.All I can say is hold onto God's mercy and bathe in the light of his wisdom wherever you can find it.
Reminder to all muslims itt that Jews have won. This wouldn't have been an epic btfo without muslims posturing about being good warriors and all. Oh well, I enjoy the coping :(
>Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.What does that even meanI'm one sentence in and I don't get it
>>24683268That expresses the angst that is supposed to be present in OP—that unsatisfiable tension.
>>24683233Remember when Plotinus described the soul as "amphibious"? This is basically that translated into wordcel.
>>24683233Essentially, it is the nature of human reason to try to answer any questions presented to it, but we can't answer these questions because they are beyond the limits of human reason itself. A crude analogy would be trying to reach for a pen at the other side of your desk but failing because your arm isn't long enough.
>>24683268>>24685909>>24686032>>24686320the true question is (my negros) ... is Kant right ?
>>24687730maybe he just lagged some serious skill here...and just concluded not to touch the balls of the almighty...remember he said : "I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith"maybe someone skilled enough can break through
"Anomaly" editionPrevious: >>24668754/wg/ AUTHORS & FLASH FICTION: https://pastebin.com/ruwQj7xQRESOURCES & RECOMMENDATIONS: https://pastebin.com/nFxdiQvCPlease limit excerpts to one post.Give advice as much as you receive it to the best of your ability.Follow prompts made below and discuss written works for practice; contribute and you shall receive.If you have not performed a cursory proofread, do not expect to be treated kindly. Edit your work for spelling and grammar before posting.Violent shills, relentless shill-spammers, and grounds keeping prose, should be ignored and reported.(And maybe double-space your WIPs to allow edits if you want 'em.)Simple guides on writing:Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>24687364>>24684651Don't lose hope! Submissions for the Lyttle Lytton contest are still ongoing!https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/
>>24684651https://pastebin.pl/view/fca49791I also wrote this like 4 years ago....
god i got so little written today lol. it took like 7 hours to do 3 pages (ew)
>>24687349I used to be a neutral plotter, but have suddenly turned into a chaotic plantser
>>24687717im a neutral pantser and the more i write of my story the more i realize the geography of this world is horrifically fucked lol
I finished the Aenid, what now?
Dante, Ariosto, Tasso
>>24686485this, and camoens.
>>24686012what about beowulf
>>24686086you should have already read the bible by the time you hit the Aeneid
>>24685967>I finished the Aenid, what now?Dario Fo, Peter Weiss, Bertold Brecht.Skip shakespeare, he's for losers.
sci-fi written in the mid 19th century is WAY BETTER than the ones written today
>>24685828>sci-fi written in the mid 19th centuryyou mean like Moby Dick?
Name 5 sci-fi novels from the mid 19th century
I prefer Lucian's A true story.
>>24685828Nah
>>24686083>you mean like Moby Dick?Ishmael is a high yellow black cyberpunk homosexual drifter in a world of whale information seeking one big score on an super technologically advanced sea-ship.Split your lungs with blood and thunderWhen you see the white whaleBreak your backs and hack your oars, menIf you wish to prevailThis cyber leg is what propels meFractal harpoon thrust in the skyAim directly for his enhanced browAnd look him straight in the eyeWHITE FAILDATA GRAIL
What are some classical Buddhist works that deal with free will?From what I understand about Buddhist world view, there should be no room for free will, everything should be hardcore determinists. But I read in Gethin's "The Foundations of Buddhism" that the general position is that we cannot control the event around us or our mental states, but we can control how we react to these things, which seems strange in that it would seem to necessitate a "self" apart and beyond these things to make such a decision.
>>24687448>that it would seem to necessitate a "self"Buddhism Is against the idea of a metaphysical self,banself that can control the world and exist outside the world, having a individual Will(chanda) or a Sense of identity(pugdala) are not equivalent with a self(atta)
>>24687448>a "self"Not a self, consciousness. Consciousness isn't individuated or instantiated. Consciousness sees a being writing this post, much like it sees a being reacting to this post with>no uGuess what. There is no you. There is no I. There are apparent posts, and apparent trolls, and apparent rage, and consciousness reacts with buddha nature or without buddha nature.
FlexYourStack
>>24687634>And for the record this is the only type of reading I enjoysaddest thing I've read in quite a while
>>24687694Oh, sorry. I'll go and read some cute and valid lgbt romance stories so I can be in the know :)If I wanted to have fun I would watch anime or youtube. Is it surprising that there are people that exist who like to learn about the world and ideas? Why is that sad. It's not.
>>24687497>ApplebaumNice fiction written by a "journalist."
>>24687720>If I wanted to have fun I would watch anime or youtubefor your own good just shut up
Thomas Ligotti is really the greatest living fiction author from America. I feel so jealous that Americans can understand the full context oh his stories along all of the subtleties of American life, language and its symbols. It is sad to see Americans don't appreciate the presence of such titan among them and then wonder why art is dead. I guess this is fate of all great authors that they become important only after they die. Also there is certain amount of nasty litfic goblins who don't recognize Ligotti's genius, even discredit him whenver his name comes up even though they not even read his books because they're too busy in their academic circlejerks that nobody cares about outside of boring academic shitholes and that's how they perpetuate their careers by kissing each other's asses.
I like him, but I do wish he would repeat himself less often. I swear sometimes he repeats the same expression two three times in the same paragraph.Also anti-natalism is cringe.
>>24687324Repetition is a literary technique that he got from Bernhard
>>24687346He copied his whole style from bernhard, down to his use of italics
>>24687207nice try Ligotti
>>24687591Nah, he has tons of influences and he doesn't hide them. >Thomas Bernhard>Aloysius Bertrand>Jorge Luis Borges>William Burroughs>Kafka>Louis Ferdinand Celine>E. M. Cioran>Douglas Harding>U.G. Krishnamurti>H. P. Lovecraft>Vladimir Nabokov>Emile NelliganComment too long. Click here to view the full text.
If God is truly infinite and transcendent, can the finite human mind ever comprehend God's nature, or are all our concepts and descriptions merely inadequate metaphors?
>>24687721Maybe via dreams
What's the deal with pseuds and Gnosticism?
>>24687137I would be very interested to know how they understood the soul and the spirit as well... admittedly I don't know a ton about Gnosticism proper, but I recall that many of the writings we've found differ so greatly that it's really unfair to group them all under one umbrella. I think our only knowledge of Gnosticism before Nag Hammadi came from church leaders like Irenaeus who were writing rebuttals.>>24686948Interesting, I had always figured it as a direct offshoot of Christianity developing some time after the current canon had already finalized, but that's probably not accurate. It's easy for me to place it at the end of a timeline of low to high Christologies, but I'm sure the reality is more complex. Those excerpts are fascinating though I can't quite comprehend what they're getting at. I need to sit down and read some of the Gnostic gospels at some point.
It's captivating and appealing on a deep level. I dropped it entirely when I actually understood Christianity and realized it made all gnostic nonsense unnecessary.>>24684434>the metaphysics and details of traditional Christianity are very unappealing.The people who say this have most likely not delved deep into the metaphysics and theology of Christianity
>>24684209>>24684229>>24684613Exactly when people say reality is evil they don't mean just the current or historic human experience of society and suffering of earth.Instead the very foundations of the universe and existence itself are evil. The laws of physics are such that there will always be scarcity due to entropy and a limited mass-energy in the universe. Godels incompleteness theorem proves that we will never be able to understand all of reality, and evolutionary pressures result in eternal competition, conflict and systems of parasitism.It's a heinous reality. Things didn't have to be this way. The laws of physics could have been such that there would be no scarcity and no conflicts. Mathematics could be such that we could understand everything eventually. And evolution could have been such that there would be no pressure for competition.These things aren't fundamental to existence or being. It's just fundamental to our reality, which is why it's evil.Nothing to do with resentment or my personal life. It applies to all lifeforms that exist in this hellish universe.
Lately I've started making threads about any random shit and claiming it has hidden esoteric Gnostic themes
It's a brilliant belief system because it absolves you of all wrongdoing and you don't even have to be critical>anything that goes wrong is the fault of the demiurge>anyone telling you that you're an unemployed schizophrenic is just a hylic agent of chaos you can ignore