>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
>>25579932>MalfoidNice.
bump
>>25579932Has anyone read any of these books? Thoughts?
The state is the ultimate expression of man's will and ideals
>>25580416I prefer Kolakowski as a historian of ideas, you know, Main Currents.
>>25580416No, but Kuhn is always worth reading.
>>25580423Man can only flourish when free
>>25580535Does not follow. You've not demonstrated that the necessary ontology of man. Stop spouting aphorisms like Nietzsche and start shitposting properly like Kierkegaard.
>/phil/ - Philosophy General #14
Time to get started on Fichte. Any good secondary reading or is Kant enough? I’m more interested in his take on Kant’s noumena than anything else.
>>25580793It’s a pretty radical reframing. Kant’s noumenon turns into a posit of the will, a goal. There are of course substantial hints in this direction in Kant himself. Assuming you read the Grundlage the second foundational principle is about noumena, he doesn’t explain it properly til part 3. His full theory does not make perfect sense without his account of the intellectual world and the summons in other works. Whenever I read Kant now it’s always “damn, Fichte got even *that* crazy idea from old Kant!”My report is just that after reading idealism for a substantial period of time everything else feels comfy and easy. It’s like training with weights for running. I’m just basking in my pseudness and reading psychology but I will reread the main idealist works soon. Freud talks about how in dreams there are nodal points which branch off infinitely in their associations and I feel like this is the place idealism has in modern philosophy. It’s like thousands of years of development in a single generation. We’re all gonna make it lads.
>>25580793Fichte is so goddamn punishing that secondary literature is not as valuable as you would think. I feel it’s important to sweat over the original texts and make up your own mind. Fichte felt very strongly that his readers should engage actively with his books and exercise their own understanding, though tbf he also thought that none of his contemporaries succeeded in this. It’s not like there’s only one right answer in the reading of truly deep works anyway, there are multiple valid vantage-points - Fichte as political revolutionary vs Fichte as transcendental psychologist vs Fichte as theologian, etc. He is a real looking-glass experience and seeing is believing. I like the picrel quote because it illustrates his dynamism contra Hegel - for Fichte, aufheben means outright destruction and surpassing.>Sapere aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen!
I've written 700 words this morning on paragprahs 358-366 on the phenomenology of spirit
Fichte? Fich dich!
>>25581964Man I slept with an old girlfriend last night or rather she jumped on me and did not use proper protection and for you this is study but for me it is a nightmare reality. Maybe if I focus real hard I can bust through to Spirit. Hegel had a bastard son, it can’t be ALL bad. But I know Fichte would severely disapprove.
>FichteOnly on 4chan lls
>>25581901>GrundlageNot yet, but that’s coming first. It’s good to know from what you have stated that Fichte is so closely tied to Kant that, you will see an evolution of Kant’s ideas in Fichte, if I’m understanding you correctly. Though as you also said, he turns the noumenon into a posit of the will. By this do you mean he takes that unknowable thing in itself and transforms it into something that we can know because it is already a part of our consciousness, the I? I did think Kant would veer in that direction sometimes, but would stop short like when he said we can only think through theoretical reason (despite it affecting how we experience anything).Yes, idealism is very futuristic (even today) and dense, generally and I don’t see things getting any easier, since I’m new to it all. Thanks.>>25581937I often agree with this, that you should judge their work by their own merits; I feel as if some secondary reading can muddy your own view on the actual text. I suppose I should just follow his advice then and see what interpretation I have of him by the time I’m finished (which will probably be never) thank you for your post.
>>25583480Yeah imo which you should take with a grain of salt as a mere pseud/amateur Kant is hampered by trying to effect this radical realignment in thinking by means of old, even scholastic concepts - “category”, “apperception”, “phenomenon”, etc. Part of the genius of Fichte is that he grasps the spirit of Kant and manages to reframe it in appropriately novel language/concepts - and then he revolutionizes even this over and over again, so it’s like an evolving and deepening fractal pattern of idealist philosophy over the various iterations of his Wissenschaftslehre. Plato talks in the seventh letter (if it IS by Plato - Kant had doubts) about the light being kindled by dialectic; so far in my life Fichte is the only philosopher who really has given me something like a Platonic “buzz” or enlightening almost psychedelic feel, to put it in retarded and crass terms - he is that far out. The critical, Kantian philosophy is about freedom, not epistemology. I feel this gets lost by people who focus on the first critique which for all its brilliance is merely a propaedeutic. But Kant preserves this perfectly balanced skepticism that all the other idealists lose. I think one of the lessons of Kant is that we are “condemned” as it were to be dogmatists, we have to fill this empty space left by reason’s innate transcendence. And Kant’s complaint against people like Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling is that they are “mystics” - they begin FROM freedom, indifference, etc, or if he had known Hegel from the I=I, and proceed downwards, rather than proceeding in an overall analytic mode as does Kant, from the given nature of experience. But again I feel Kant’s own great insights drive us toward this very “mysticism” and I think Kant’s own practical philosophy is mysticism b/w a logical superfetation. It gives me the feels even today to think that Fichte loved and respected Kant so much that he named his son after him and Kant still publicly condemned him. Ill likely write more if you can tolerate my pseud rambling it just makes me overjoyed to think anyone is reading Fichte.
>>25583480>By this do you mean he takes that unknowable thing in itself and transforms it into something that we can know because it is already a part of our consciousness, the I?Yes this is precisely what it means. Hence Fichte’s “mysticism”, his abandoning of skepticism. But Kant himself speaks of the thing-in-itself as an “Aufgabe”, a task, even in the first critique.>I did think Kant would veer in that direction sometimes, but would stop short like when he said we can only think through theoretical reason (despite it affecting how we experience anything).Yeah, Fichte just explodes this theoretical/practical distinction. He would say that even “merely” speculative thought is ultimately practical, you are thinking for some reason or goal, implicitly or explicitly. Imo Fichte’s stance is like “yes you can be skeptical; you can stand on the threshold of idealism and dogmatism; but once you do choose idealism, once you accept the demands of freedom, the Wissenschaftslehre alone can make this intelligible.” It’s a characteristically bold brash move really and Hegel’s attacks in PoS are strong. Hegel revivifies the Kantian skepticism - “how do you even KNOW your conscience is leading you aright, Fichte? Your private conviction or what?” Hegel thinks Fichte’s idealism turns into egotism for this reason. But the Hegelian alternative (“liberal totalitarianism”) is a total hell imo. I don’t have an answer here, but I think it is Kant who really framed the problem so precisely that his successors were forced to assume these impossible positions to say anything new at all. Like Kant is the frame of the spectacles and all post-Kantian philosophy is putting differently colored lenses in those Kantian spectacles. Fichte is my favorite though. And again I feel we are condemned as human beings to take up these impossible positions. Fichte’s vision of human freedom is imo more attractive and human than Hegel’s. Hegel thinks in terms of grand socio-logical dynamics, Fichte writes about your concrete relations to the people around you, and was an anarchist and so on.
>>25582046what is 'lls'? and what's wrong with fichte?
>>25580793why are you got into fichte?
When the hell did Fichte become a thing on 4chan of all places?
>>25584188“I see absolutely no way of giving the Jews civil rights, except perhaps if one chops off all of their heads and replaces them with new ones, in which there would not be one single Jewish idea.” - Johann Fichte, 1793
>>25584196oooohhhh nazi. Ok I get it. Carry on chudlings.
>>25584201Nooooo you don’t get it. Nothing is simple with Fichte. He hated the Jewish religion and the Jewish mentality but went out of his way to protect and aid individual Jews. He even gave private lessons in philosophy to Jews. There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish - *in and of itself*.
>>25584179NTA but he cute :)
>>25584188Redditors and troons stole Hegel from us.
Have you ever known a girl who could read Latin and also spent months in jail? I have, she is the female version of me, a hyperintellectual pseud with severe psych and substance problems. I’m so afraid I knocked her up. She jumped on me, I actually said “no we shouldn’t do this” and she was insistent as hell. I wish I was dead lads. I’m being torn between deep love of her and terror and I just wish I was dead. She’s so fucking fickle anyway. Everywhere I look I see her smiling face and big intelligent eyes with heavy brows just like Kant. It seems like coincidences follow her like when we first met I was talking to her on the phone and a stray cat tried to push his way into the house and also a bird. And this time she took a shower and somehow broke it so it sprayed water nonstop, I had a dream of this days before. I wish I was dead I don’t know wtf to do. I am going mad.
>>25584299what was she in jail for tho?
>>25584310Assault. She beat someone quite badly badly and I’m sure she deserved it. I’ve been in jail for passing out on the local trails.
>>25584212he only liked jews insofar as they stopped being jews and denounced judaism and completely assimilated with the germans. only in their potential germanheit and not their actual judenheit.
>>25584299does she have nice tiddies?
>>25584212i mean i actually don't mind him being a nazi. heidegger was a nazi. hitler was a nazi. a lot a great people were nazis. amazing people. some of my best friends were nazis.
I'd like something on Arete. I've just finished Nicomachean ethics and it didn't go into it as much as I'd like. Short, long, I don't care, but arete as performative excellence is what I'd like to read about.
/lit/ loves malfoid!
>>25580793A.W. Moore's chapters on Kant and Fichte in his Evolution of Modern Metaphysics.
>>25584064>>25584122>Yeah imo which you should take with a grain of salt as a mere pseud/amateurWhich I most certainly am>and then he revolutionizes even this over and over again, so it’s like an evolving and deepening fractal pattern of idealist philosophy over the various iterations of his Wissenschaftslehre.This is interesting. I’m familiar with Kant doing exactly this when I first read the first critique I initially couldn’t keep up with these new concepts that one would consider fractal, especially in the Analytic.Fichte being the one who gives you that feeling that feeling that ignites one’s soul with insight (to put it ever so slightly differently than Plato like a true plagiarist) since I often found that in Kant, as though I the reader and him were in a dialectic ourselves throughout this text (as you put it, it’s propaedeutic, so it has that introductory quality to it) into and for the sake of his idealism, you consciously partake in an exercise by grasping the very core of your consciousness, the transcendental apperception, and working through each of the syntheses that follow from imagination, specifically the apprehension, reproduction and recognition of an object. But even this exercise, there is a goal which is to delve even deeper into this apperception. This I, which is the subject that determines all representations as my own, the act of positing oneself could be seen as an answer to ding an sich because it is already “there” as a condition for positing oneself. I’m pretty tired so, forgive the inarticulation.>Kant preserves this perfectly balanced skepticism that all the other idealists lose.Agreed. Which is why the “freedom” angle can’t be inferred by many. Sometimes I feel as though he was too concerned with avoiding dogmatism that he always maintained this balance. >Fichte’s vision of human freedom is imo more attractive and human than Hegel’s. Hegel thinks in terms of grand socio-logical dynamics, Fichte writes about your concrete relations to the people around you, and was an anarchist and so on.This is exactly why he intrigues me more than Hegel. It feels more focused on the subject similar to Kant, where Hegel does not, because he tries to account for every facet of history and humanity from what I understand. Though Schelling is someone else I plan to explore at some point. Him I know very little about though.>ill likely write more if you can tolerate my pseud rambling it just makes me overjoyed to think anyone is reading Fichte.Ah, honestly, I appreciate you taking the time to write all this. Thanks once again. I wish I could offer more with regard to Fichte in way of discussion, but I’m sure soon I’ll be able to.
>>25586275I‘m jealous of you and other readers who get so much from the deductions. I read it pretty cynically and likely superficially - “yeah yeah Kant, I know what you’re really doing, taking fundamental aspects of experience and mythologizing them, none of your labored intricacy can fool *me*. A few years ago this was a hard read but now I know *all about it*.” > I often found that in Kant, as though I the reader and him were in a dialectic ourselves throughout this textYes! People get turned off by Kant as if he’s stuffy and pedantic but he really demands active engagement. He says as much himself in the second part of the cpr. All philosophers worth reading are like this of course.> Hegel does not, because he tries to account for every facet of history and humanity from what I understandTo be fair Fichte ends up doing this too. But the main divide between them is that Hegel denies genuine freedom, he denies the infinite progress and the infinite dissatisfaction with reality. He wants to say - no, we HAVE in fact arrived, liberalism is the end. Fichte otoh was highly critical of liberalism. Hegel like you said thought he had all the answers and that’s the dogmatism that Kant and Fichte were both fighting.
>>25586275>SchellingI hope you understand him better than me and can school me a bit some day. I really don’t “get” him, to me he’s just playing puerile logical games to deduce fairly banal truths. I feel Hegel plays the same pseudological game and simply does it way better.Comparing Fichte and Hegel - they BOTH equate substance and subject. They BOTH see themselves as heirs of Spinoza as well as Kant; Fichte was actually a Spinozist before he was exposed to Kant. As he says in part 1 of the Grundlage:>Spinoza says what he says because he is forced to assume something as absolutely primary, a supreme unity. If that is what he is looking for, he should have stuck with that unity given to him in consciousness and would not have needed to fabricate a still higher one.And Fichte goes on to analyze psychologically why someone from this intellectual background would make the I into a not-I, as Hegel does. Hegel’s subject turns into a cannibal that devours the individual and makes him into a mere particular. Or to put it in plain language Hegel advocates for NORMIE consciousness, NORMIE work and play, and integration, and the abnormal and genuinely subjective implodes in “tubercular insanity” and learns to love normiedom. Fichte says “NO!” to all this, he’s a philosopher of rupture and he hates the enlightenment - he knows IT’S NOT ENOUGH. Hegel defends representative democracy, Fichte defends revokution and looks forward to postmodern primitivism. He’s just cool as hell. And he had a fat body DEAL WITH IT SHITLORDS.
You guys should focus on plumbing, now that AI can do philosophy we don't need you to do it.
>>25586399AI is the ultimate culmination of Hegel’s ideas, an inanimate superintelligence that controls every aspect of your life. As much as I hate Hegel I think he understood modernity better than anyone, better than Marx even.
>>25586413Claude can come up with combinations of writings that Hegel could never dream of due to his puny content window.Could Hegel read millions of books simultaneously and write theory based on that? He simply doesn't know enough.
>>25584299Anon it's BPD and nothing else, stop, don't follow the pixie. Please
>>25586465Dude she really does have that dx. She stalked me for years after we broke up last time, she would leave books on the porch and I had to change my phone number. I didn’t pay too much attention to the dx because of my contempt for psychiatrists. I’ve been trussed up like a turkey and shot up with haldol by psychiatrists. But ffs it’s real, bpd is real.
Been playing Deus Ex for the first time. Surprisingly elucidative on political philosophy for a video game.
>>25586493I'm starting to think that bpd is just the default female condition and its best to just treat them like cattle.moooo.
>>25586417Claude is such a gay name, who tf names their child Claude, some pair of faggots?
>>25586521The guy from grand theft auto’s parents I guess, and he’s a criminal. So you know they were bad parents.
>>25586515Eh I feel that way. Just jack off like twice a month and move on with life. I really hate hanging out with girls and have a bad time. People think it’s weird but they are pseuds.
>>25579932>semioticsis needed here kek
>>25579932ABOUT THE IMAGE:COMPARE THEIR FUCKING HAIR COLOURSTHOSE TWO HAIR COLOURS ARE NOT THE SAMEWHATEVER IS INSINUATED IN THE PICTURE, IT WILL NOT WORK OUTARE YOU GUYS THIS EASILY TEMPTED BY PROVOCATIVE MANGA PICTURES
>>25579932Malfoid acting like Nagatoro feels so off
We are all so afraid of AI. Kant is more important than ever. Theoretical vs practical reason will be so critical. Kant understood the meaninglessness of life and saw meaning anyway and he thought his way into it autistically, he didn’t just make some art. I am weeping, I will chug one more beer and go on a lovely walk. I wish I could be frens with you in real life.
>>25588898WHO ARE YOU TALKING TOO???
Aristophanes rules.>Socrates acks!.>Women are hags>Goethe writes>Hegels writhesTheatre kids>>>>>>>Philoniggers
So there's this meme image of a guy saying "You create a problem and then you offer the solution to the problem, it's basically hegelian dialectic", is that true? Would I have understood that if I had read Hegel?I'm trying to get into some philosophical works, Nietzsche is next. What to expect of that, what are his strong points and what are his weak points in his thinking?Aurelius was a great read, and I can see some immediate application into your everyday lifestyle - mainly the sentence "Why bother paying attention to other people's opinions of you, if they do not even have a good opinon of themselves?". Yes it's been said in many other ways, but in a sense, this specific view is also quite revelatory.
>>25589568That doesn't even make any sense; it's just an ad hoc rationalization. What terrible "philosophy."
