>What is /phil/ Philosophy General?A general for readers, students, and armchair thinkers interested in philosophy, whether it be Western, Eastern, analytic, continental, ancient, contemporary. We discuss primary texts, secondary literature, online lectures, podcasts.>Why read philosophy?Politics, science, psychology, etc. all began with or were inspired by someone who thought philosophically. Basically, if you are interested in just about anything, philosophy will help you better understand that subject. Because it is at the foundation of every conceptual institution made or discovered by humans, it is in the underbelly of human experience, and so it is worth taking seriously.>Why study philosophy formally?Surprisingly versatile and undervalued. Phil majors consistently score among the highest on the LSAT, GRE, and GMAT. Strong pipeline into law, policy, ethics consulting, AI alignment, and academia.The server: https://discord.gg/uPvkn8Tcf6/phil/ guide: https://www.scribd.com/document/324425214/Lit-Philosophy-Project-1-2
>truth is inflexible and singular>however man is incapable of grasping true truth and then expressing it>but my truth is correct and anyone who disagrees is wrongExplain this phenomenon.
>>25589568Nietzsche is great; if you know Nietzsche it’s like you know all German philosophy prior to him too because he independently thinks his way into all of those positions and writes about them in a non-autistic way. He criticizes a strawman Kant and then actually covers much of the same ground; there are echoes of Hegel constantly even though he hardly read Hegel.>>25590080I would say most great philosophers do acknowledge this in one way or another, at least that truth is not exhaustible.>>25589937Ngl this is largely correct, there is a degree of charlatanism to Hegel. But he could be very insightful on specific issues and the PoS is a masterpiece.
The main problem with Hegel and all dogmatists is that he eliminates the ‘given’, what Kant ascribes to ‘sensation’. This tends to get expressed in pedantic, logical terms - how can I speak of a thing in itself ‘causing’ my experience? That’s how Hegel frames it certainly, by showing that thing in itself is itself an intelligible, rational category of thought. But Kant’s sensation is really about facticity, there is an aspect of experience that is not analyzable, that is uncanny even, and my intellection of the world actually needs this ‘sensation’ or it wouldn’t be thinking of anything. Content and form are NOT identical. This isn’t a logical position frankly it’s an aesthetic position. The dogmatist can explain every single thing down to its atoms, and explain truly - Kant does not deny this, he actually comes to the dogmatist’s aid and defends his knowledge. But it is because the world is uncanny and given that we can have faith in freedom and hope for the future. Someone like Hegel slams the door on this - he says that THIS modern, liberal world is the ultimate truth. And Marx (as much as I like Marx) is just toying within this same Hegelian paradigm. Logically speaking Marx denies the speculative moment at the end of the PoS as having been attained, he sees capitalism as still riven between the private (in PoS the sinner) and the social (the beautiful soul). Really though we need an entirely new paradigm, even if Marx accurately understands this antithesis. Marxism is not enough, socialism and communism are not enough.Besides just look at the fucking guy. He looks like a high school choir teacher who gets fired for sucking off his pupils.
I love how Hegel’s refutation of the Kantian/Fichtean infinite progress, i.e. the idea that the present never satisfies us and we keep moving forward, amounts to:>but then it never stops and I don’t understand that.Bruh that’s the whole fucking point. That there is something you can’t understand, the future, moral probity, the kingdom of ends, God, revolution, etc. These things don’t make any sense, if you insist on clinging to what makes sense then nothing ever changes. This is the entire point of the critical philosophy and Hegel doesn’t get it.
bump
"Caught a fish THIS BIG" editionPrevious: >>25573088/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.Discuss the written works below 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.Expect critique, not praise.Shitposters should be ignored and reported.>Beginner guides on writing:Comment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>25591197But boxers do have to follow the boxing rules. That's the point of boxing, it's not a street fight to the death. There is a referee and everything. And they DO learn to punch with one hand, that's called a jab. No one is saying that making up bullshit rules like "oh only write on tuesdays" is going to improve you. The rule should have some merit on its own. I think you're mainly taking issue with the "inherently" and "sometimes" part. Which is agreeable. >If you have to speak in metaphor and compare two completely different mediums to make sense, it's not "common sense."But comparison is a beautiful thing. Pattern recognition helps people learn, and it's just meant to demonstrate a universality. It's great when knowledge from outside subjects can help in a different one. And come on, what kind of writer hates metaphors?>you're using your intelligence to talk yourself into a retarded set of opinionsSophistry is definitely dangerous, and that post might be guilty of sophistry, but I at least wouldn't call it retarded
>>25590350You write bathos
>>25590232You know how comedians are always suicidally depressed? It's probably like that.
>>25591243true
>>25591898>>25591898>>25591898
What does /lit/ think about the Nouveau Roman? Was it simply a failed 20th century literary experiment that should be forgotten, or did authors like Robbe-Grillet, Butor and Simon manage to innovate the novel form beyond the stagnating conventions of plot and character?
I've read a bit of Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute and enjoyed them a lot. Maybe the nouveau roman authors didn't achieve a total revolution of literary form, sure, but just taken as a unique movement, they contributed more to the novel than many others in the 20th century. I prefer them by a lot to Oulipo authors like Perec who just seem like a lame dead-end joke to me (Queneau is very good though). T
imagine someone today having an opinion on some new way to write a novel like no one would give a shit
>>25586542>how much they relied on the negative space of the traditional novelCould you elaborate on this? I’m not entirely sure what you mean.>>25589195I think it was a lot more influential than most people realise, especially given that many of these books are out of print and hard to find. Hard disagree on Perec, I loved Life: A User’s Manual personally.>>25589203Anyone still interested in innovating the novel form today is basically just scrabbling around in the dilapidated ruins of modernism for an audience of maybe 3 people. That’s not to say there isn’t interesting art to be found though, I recently read a pretty good article on what the author terms “Necromodernism”:https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/necromodernist-architectures-in-contemporary-writing/
>>25589195The bulk of Queneau's writing is not Oulipo, he move on fairly quickly.>>25589685>Could you elaborate on this? I’m not entirely sure what you mean.They write around the traditional narrative methods and often imply them, essentially writing what happened off the page and was implied in the traditional novel. >I think it was a lot more influential than most people realiseWhat would you say that influence was? I don't see any development of their techniques and ideas, lots of writers were definitely influenced by them but they don't seem to use that influence directly, it is just some literature they liked. Other than getting the occasional novel that is blatant about its nouveau roman influence and is essentially nouveau roman, I just don't see much influence. The primary influence I see is that to write a piece from the perspective of an inanimate object has become a staple in creative writing classes.
What exactly happened in the end?
>>25590468The Kid didn't know Spanish either. Learn it or don't look it up is what I say.
>>25588012>There's a possibility it might be Walter De Maria's Lightning Field art installation, at least according to the recent biography.wut? Lightning feild wasn't created until the 1970s. I'm confused.
>>25589469This. Stop turning books into clue hunts. Books aren't symbolic mysteries to be unlocked. Take it for what it is. If it is unclear that is intentional.
>>25590686If I say to someone that I find it very unlikely that the judge raped the kid at the end of the book it doesn't mean I think that's the most important part of that passage. You don't have to scale your attention to how important something is to the overall narrative, even. Also, if something is large and clear in the book there's not a lot of point in discussing it. Everyone knows already. Most of the things you see discussed with vigor are going to be secondary or vague to begin with. It's part of what makes them discussable.People do get up their own ass hoping some difficult to discern small element they've dumped hours into parsing will turn out to be pivotal. But I don't think anyone thinks that's what they're doing here, other than that "judge doesn't kill kids" red yarn on a corkboard retard.
>>25590672This is how I read it.Next time I go through it I plan to actually look up all the plants and animals and minerals he talks about that I don't recognize.
I thought it was pretty boring for the most part. There were a few more interesting parts, where Aristotle brought in metaphysics and talked about the soul, but the very detailed discussion on the virtues was really boring.I'm pretty much only interested in Aristotle for his Metaphysics, but I thought that I might as well read the Nicomachean Ethics too.
>>25586108You are a person so wrong and misguided it is unlikely any person can set you right. You are doomed to a perpetual misunderstanding. Another anon quoted Aristotle directly to refute you, but I have no doubt it will pass by you leaving no trace. You have my pity, but you will no longer have any of my time.
>>25586540>Another anon quoted Aristotle directly to refute youThat quote didn't refute me. More to the point, my own quote, also from Aristotle, which you failed to recognize, makes my claim verbatim.
>>25581296interesting
>>25584553>>25585218>>25585233>>25586108>>25586172>>25586218>>25586540>>25586592I had a hard time understanding what this dispute was even about, even as someone with a robust understanding of Aristotle. Is this one of those arguments where we nitpick over what a "consequence" or "dependence" is? Because if we go that broadly, then every moral action is consequentialism, even deontology, because it has the moral good as an end and thus is "consequence"-oriented. Not a good way to start a debate. In any case, eudaimonia is tied to the fulfillment of a being's essence, its energeia-entelecheia which can be broadly construed as its own continued existence while also maintaining harmony with its environment or "place", for this moment and many moments to come. It's a way of grounding the good in what is natural, which if you're willing to accept naturalistic arguments for the good, is about as good as it gets, no pun intended.
>>25581296What did you think of the characters and the plot?
If you want, feel free to write a few words explaining why.
>>25589755No he isn't stop slandering.
>>25588767Also, Heracles, the real “Hercules” is a true story of tragedy. Heracles wasn’t a clean cut good guy like Perseus who went on epic adventures and used his wits, talents, and magic charms to survive and ended living happily ever after in the stars in the night sky with his beloved wife. Heracles was a violent brute who murdered people for insults and shit and was driven mad and then slaughtered his entire family like one of those guys on the news. Then his second wife accomplished him and he died in agony. For some reason modern pop culture decided to pull a switcheroo with the names and personalities
>>25590244>accomplished *Accidentally poisoned*
>>25590244He also genocided the amazonians.
>>25586715>He’s the guy everybody thinks Heracles was.Herakles is a latecomer to the Greek myths, and a terrible one at that.By his name you can tell he was Hera's little runt, and some misogynist invented the trash stories about him. Those writers took from older myths. It's garbage though.
It's pink and written by a Kiersten which aren't good signs. Never heard of it.
More recommendations for Arthurian legends, or is Mort D'Arthur really the end all be all?
this was excellent
>>25588973Epub?
>>25585495https://metseditions.org/read/KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97ZlBasically the English Iliad but no one outside of tumblr Arthurheads and Middle English scholars knows about it.
https://archive.org/details/layamonsbrutorc02maddgoog/page/384https://archive.org/details/layamonsbrutorc00maddgoog/page/144
>>25585495Read Chretien's Perceval and was not impressed. Too silly and meandering, died before he could finish it. Maybe the poetry is good but that's lost in translation.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is excellent. Very deep thematically, elevated above "Sir X and Sir Y crashed like boars etc." but still rooted in that tradition. The best Arthurian work. Read it with a facing translation so got the poetry and the meaning.Malory's Morte d'Arthur is the final, definitive telling of the tradition but the writing is mediocre and story often incoherent. Still an achievement to bring hundreds of years of literature all together.Tennyson's Idylls are enjoyable but lose something from being written long after the age of chivalry. The final meeting of Arthur and Guinevere was a highlight.I don't think any work really got the Holy Grail story right. The themes are all there but nothing really brings it to a satisfying conclusion. I haven't read Parzival but my impression of Eschenbach's humour doesn't give me much hope.
Just finished this book. What do I think about it?
>25588409>25588411boring and pretentious
Capslock schizo is a fucking faggot. Kill yourself immediately
>>25588440He's shat up /wng/ too, no telling how many other threads. Granted /wng/ is already a shithole but hey so is the entire site nowadays.
>>25588440his reddit spacing is just the shit icing on the rotting cake
Please continue.
i’ve read a lot of books but i never read a book that really blew me. can you recommend any books that will really blow me?
>>25589706Unironic answer, Don Quixote
>>25589706i think your expectations of what a book can and should be able to do for you are set way too high, anon.
malcolm lowry under the volcano
>>25590089well i think its just that by heart is cold and black and made of stone. i want to feel something again. i got close with dubliners. “a painful case” resonated with me most because i actually related to the main character a lot. i felt something stir, but its all very fleeting.
>>25589706Anna Karenina did it for me.
When Nietzsche said “God is dead” he meant that God is not necessary for our morality anymore. He meant that we had been lying to ourselves about God, using him to create an artificial system of morality that is no longer viable.When he says we killed God, he means that our science, skepticism, education, and technology have pushed us past the point where believing in miracles is possible; but as a consequence of this murder we are lost, have no goals, no aspirations, no values. Christianity was a made up morality, but it served a kind of purpose.The resulting nihilism results in despair, or requires us to look deeper within us and find a new source of human values.That’s what Nietzsche hoped would happen, but that is not what happened.The modern twist to Nietzsche is that we didn’t kill God after all: we enslaved him. Instead of completely abandoning God and embracing a will to power, or taking a leap of faith back towards the “mystery” of God because the angst was too great to bear; instead of those opposite choices, God has been kept around as a paid-for judge. They accept the “morality” but secretly retain the right of exception: “yes, but God knows that in this case…”Atheists do this just as much but pretend they also don’t believe in “God”. “Murder is wrong, but in this case….” But of course they’re not referring to the penal code, but to an abstract wrongness that they rationalize as coming from shared collective values or humanist principles or economics or energy or whatever. It’s a “God” behind the God, not a Christian God but something bigger, something that preserves the individual’s ability to appeal to the abstract, the symbolic.”…but in this case…” Those words presuppose an even higher law than the one that says, “thou shalt not.” That God, the one that examines things on a case by case basis, always rules in favor of the individual, which is why he was kept around.But the crucial mistake is to assume that the retention of this enslaved God is for the purpose of justifying one’s behavior, to assuage the superego. That same absolution could have been obtained from a traditional Christianity, “God, I’m sorry I committed adultery, I really enjoyed it and can’t undo that, but I am sorry and I’ll try not to do it again.” Clearly, Christianity hasn’t prevented people from acting on their impulses; nor have atheists seized their freedom and become hedonists.The absence of guilt is not the result of the justification, it precedes the justification. Like a dream that incorporates a real life ringing telephone into it seemingly before the phone actually rings, the absence of guilt hastily creates an explanation for its absence that preserves the symbolic morality: I don’t feel any guilt…………. because in this case…
>>25589696Nietzsche saw intelligence as the will to power made conscious: the courage to question every value, overcome oneself, and create new meaning. Learning it isn’t collecting facts—it’s forging the strength to reject herd morality and become who you are. Without that, no Übermensch.
>>25590094Fair play, you know the ancient matoran lore better than I. I was just making a dumb superficial parallel, forgive my ignorance
God is truly dead in most of Europe, just a descriptive fact, might be different in parts of America.I don't appeal to objective moral standards. My moral standards are very normal, but I ground them just in my values and my very limited power.
>>25589754I think one of your biggest problems is that you haven't truly explored other positions that are similar to your own.Even if you reject naturalism, there are so many people who don't believe in anything like the monotheistic God.
>>25590072That would be fine, if He allowed an exit, i.e. annihilation for those of us that hate Creation and don't want to reincarnate. From what I can tell, He left no exit, leaving us stuck in His mistake.
Also is fascism Nietzschean?
>>25590101I honestly don’t know. Nearly all of his stuff reeks of classic nazism but then again he shat on nazis irl. Idk was his problem.
>>25590101Yes, he was. No matter how undermining and feeble you find Jewish lobbyists or Jewish bankers are, antisemitic groypers and school shooters and incel manifesto writers are astronomically more cringe, base, interchangeable, inept. >is fascism NietzscheanLots of things can become Nietzschean. Postmodernism and existentialism often becomes Nietzschean. Shitty fucking anime and manga can become Nietzschean. What makes fascists cute and conceited is that they often insist they are the one and true Nietzscheans. "REAL NIETZCHEANISM HASN'T BEEN TRIED YET" and similar mantras makes them morally equivalent (in terms of cowardice and paralysis more so than ideology or policy) to tankies, zionists, oligarchical centrist democrats, etc..
Sick of NEETzsche threads, man...
>>25590101>is fascism NietzscheanYes and no. "Nietzschean" means refusing to let society mindrape you. When you're surrounded by oversocialized antifa dweebs, fascism can be Nietzschean. When you live in a fascist society which wants to conscript you into a war, antifascism can be Nietzschean.
>>25590423I agree with the general sentiment, but in both cases it can only be a springboard.
>tfw write like a victorian author (not a good one) with every sentence having multiple clauses either bracketed or otherwise allocated by a semicolon (or even the much maligned em dash), each into its own textual compartment making the overall sentence abstruse and annoying to parse>as already evidenced, use pretentious words and obscure language to convey my ideas>I don't want to be a writer >I am a game designer and my poor technical writing constantly filters peopleHow do I stop this? This is literally just how I write and I hate it.
>>25585121>technical writingthis is the easiest type of writing there isjust accurately document whateveruse clear sentences avoid fancy structure
>>25588226you've clearly never written rules or procedures. We went years trying to avoid circular definitions before somebody, I think it was Luis Bolanos Mures, introduced the practice of having a definition of terms section before the rules would be documented. Its a lot harder than it looks to define things both efficiently and without ambiguity.
>>25585121There's a built-in prophylactic advantage to this species of writing: no one will assume it's AI. Perhaps you're too self-conscious; 'think too much'
>>25585121just pretend everything is greentext you idiot
>>25589571But I literally just put one of my convoluted sentences in a greentext
All 5 literary scandals of 2026 involving the use of AI have been non-white writers
>>25584952all they want is to be like white people, and to write like white people write. is that such a crime?https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kmJE0tqFBTw&ra=m
>>25584952Pangram has single-handedly given literature a stay of execution. It's a miracle it exists. The day a chatbot figures out how to outsmart pangram is the day ltierature dies.
>>25584952So the displacement of whites will continue at a faster rate?
>>25590438I don't get it. You can copy your AI-generated text into Pangram and then gradually edit it to the point where the detection rate gets low. Voilà, you have used Pangram to evade Pangram. It just takes a moderate amount of editing that could even be automated.
>>25590501In other words, no one knows how many published texts have already been to a significant degree generated with LLMs. Pangram might as well only show you the tip of the iceberg.
Finished Ulysses. Great book. Chapters ranked:>Circe>Ithaca>Proteus>Nestor>Hades>Telemachus>Scylla and Charybdis>Wandering Rocks>Penelope>Nausicaa>Cyclops>Eumaeus>Lotus EatersComment too long. Click here to view the full text.
>>25590121pseud
>>25590393sirens and nausicaa are based chapters. read them again and apply yourself next time.
>>25590414>thinking i shat on sirensyou're the one who should apply himself and improve your reading comprehensionalso, there is nothing based about nausicaa, it's an uninteresting chapter>b-but bloom jerks off to a womanwow!
>>25589790>complaining about people actually reading and using secondary resources to help improve their comprehensionEven though I wouldn’t do it myself (I’d save reading any crit until after I’ve finished the book), I can appreciate it’s a challenging text for most people. Be happy that people are still reading Joyce at all
>>25590428i meant chapter 8 not sirens>it's an uninteresting chapterno that's false, you're just a virgin and can't relate
