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WTF is going on?
It was only 6 or 7 years ago that everyone was talking about Atheism, and reading atheist books. Now everyone, and I mean EVERYONE is into religion/spirituality and identifies as sort of theist or agnostic or pantheist, and actual atheism is seen as a form of autism and idiocy.
Please tell me what books to read. What did I miss?
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>>10030713
/pol/ got memed into accepting Christianity as the West's last best hope and /lit/ gets a ton of /pol/ spillover
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Maybe stop trying to follow internet fads, for which 6 or 7 years is actually a very long stretch, and instead focus on learning.
As for your request for books, why don't you try some Robert Anton Wilson? He will show you the third way you did NOT mention: complete and utter ontological and psychological agnosticism.
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>>10030720
it's funny how much /pol/ hates the middle-east while simultaneously worshipping a middle-eastern religion.
I have just finished 2 Nietzsche's biographies (I have studied his entire ouvre as an auto-didact), and apparently Nietzsche did extensively drugs for 3 decades: opium and chloral hydrate, mostly.
Of course he used to take them for his ailments (opium for headaches, chloral hydrate for insomnia), yet he ended up abusing chronically all of them, and apparently he was extremely influenced by it. His entire imagination (as in "mental visualization") was coopted by drugs (he used to suffer from closed eyes hallucinations that troubled him deeply, the most famous account has him seeing flowers multiplicating extremely fast everytime he closed his eyes), and his poetic sense was, self-admittedtly, shaped by his opium use.
Now, so far I have always read Nietzsche as an essentially sober philosopher (I might have been tricked by him rejecting alcohol in Ecce Homo), but apparently this is not the case. I've started to think about it, and about my (very sparse, especially compared to his) drug experiences. The link between said experiences and his philosophy seems to be the mysterious, almost mystical, outlook on reality that is sometimes accompanied to these drugs, which resembles (to mention a unaltered experience) derealization: that feeling when one is able to loom at reality in a completely unadultered way, being this able to "almost" (keyword) grasp at something, as if the truth is just there and you're one step from understanding it.
I've started to think about his main concepts in this optic, which is completely removed from the usual human experience. Let's take for example the concept of übermensch.
The common understanding of this concept is still fairly traditional: the übermensch is usually seen still as a human with perfected istincts, but still essentially human. We already know what he does: he says yes, he says "I want" instead of "I have to", he looks from above, he creates and so on.
This figure has almost seemed recognizable to me, but suddenly I've got the impression that for übermensch Nietzsche meant instead something downright incomprehensible: a man whose thoughts simply can't be understood, who, on the other hand, has a full understanding of everything that stands beyond him. To try to imagine the übermensch thought process is like trying to understand the thought process of a fish: it's simply something else, no amount of contemplation will get you there. The cognitive jump is inhuman. The models that are usually used to define übermensches (Nietzsche used often Goethe as an example) are merely a metaphor, in the same way a man can be a metaphor for a überAffe (overmonkey).
My strongerst impression (of which I'm not sure, hence why I am putting it in this incomplete form here on /lit/) is that drugs lead Nietzsche to think mostly in mysteries, in concepts that were meant to be grasped only barely.
What's your opinion on the matter, and what details and tendencies have you (yes, you anon) noticed in his writings?
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Drugs will make you Ubermensch? Nah, they will just turn you into a street hooker.
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>>10030732
>Drugs will make you Ubermensch?
Nice reading comprehension.
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>>10030755
>The link between said experiences and his philosophy seems to be
Anonymous
When does T. Pynchon get good? 2017-09-16 09:44:42 Post No.10030458
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When does T. Pynchon get good? 2017-09-16 09:44:42 Post No.10030458
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When does T. Pynchon get good?
Anonymous
2017-09-16 09:44:42
Post No. 10030458
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I have read Inherent Vice twice and just finished V and both were disappointments of which I got nothing out of.
What book should I choose for last chance?
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>>10030458
>of which I got nothing out of.
Go for Mason & Dixon next. It's the only Pynchon novel I like.
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>>10030509
how so? different anon, but i have struggled with finding humanity in Pynchon's work thus far. Some sort of beating heart on the other side is missing for me when I have read him, so carefully hidden behind gags and heavy engineer jargon. I keep wishing for something more than gimmicks to relate to, and oddly enough the word sincerity flows through my mind.
Have you read other works of his than MD? do you get what i'm saying, and does MD solve that problem? if not, I may postpone his work until I have read some of the others I have lined up. I am currently stalled on GR, just fucking around before i decide to nut up and finish it off. I just stopped enjoying the rhythm, stopped even giving a shit about the rocket. I wonder if Pynchon is just not for me.
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>>10030549
If you struggled finding humanity in V., for example, that's probably partially because a major theme of the novel is dehumanization.
But Mason & Dixon is largely a story of friendship, so I doubt you'll have much trouble finding humanity in it.
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So what's the most efficient way to attract a female who shares an interest in literature? I'd like to produce offspring and teach my offspring about literature and how to be a good citizen, as that's a cause which will benefit humanity. She has to be attractive as well. I'll be able to support her with a decent career; I'm working toward a master's degree. Maybe I could go to the library with Ulysses in hand and approach an attractive female, ask her questions, and smile till she's comfortable enough to give me her contact information.
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>>10030132
obligatory: stop calling them females
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>>10030132
stop using female as a noun
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>>10030132
have you tried not referring to women as females?
Anonymous
2 sentence story thread 2017-09-16 03:55:21 Post No.10029615
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2 sentence story thread 2017-09-16 03:55:21 Post No.10029615
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After shitting, I look down and see corn.
I have not eaten corn in months.
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>>10029615
Bugs.. easy on the 357 huh huh huh huh huh
sign says Fudd Season doc nibble nibble
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>>10030058
eternal best
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Do you write your notes/essays in longhand? Why or why not?
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fuck no
my time has value
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>>10029524
cursive is the fedora of handwriting
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yes the quality of my writing goes up when its done with a pen. taking my time and mindfully writing each word engages my brain in a different way than typing.
Anonymous
ITT: Guilty Pleasures 2017-09-16 03:23:37 Post No.10029496
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ITT: Guilty Pleasures 2017-09-16 03:23:37 Post No.10029496
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Show me what you got.
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>>10029496
Man, that book sucked from start to finish.
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Warhammer.
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Just finished this today and I feel empty inside. I can't explain it, I'm just sad. Did I want Lo and Humbert to be together or am I a pedo now?
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I wouldn't say you're a pedo, OP, but if you like women and end up wishing for the best for Humbert at the end, perhaps you'd be best served by examining your desires and considering whether you've projected them onto Humbert instead of trying to understand the character.
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>>10029170
You're right to feel empty, this shit is a proper tragedy in the classical Greek sense. That is to say: relentlessly hopeless and intoxicating.
Lolita is, most of all, about obsession, and about how nihilistic the experience of being obsessed is. Even if you aren't a pedo, that experience of vice, of fixation, of powerlessness in the face of our desires isn't strange to any man. That's why Humbert is persuasive, not because he writes pretty words.
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Not totally /lit/ related, but Sue Lyon in the 1962 film version was a massive massive qt.
I wanted to have her too, but that's probably what Kubrick was going for.
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Who's /your guy/, /lit/?
That one author that just connects with you, and you never tire of?
Benjamin is mine, I shill him here all the time. It really does sadden me to think about his death, and that he was never recognized in his lifetime. Even today he is a bit of an outcast. His eccentricities keep him from being fully respected as a philosopher, but at least he's praised as a critic.
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>>10028922
Fuck off with this cuck shit. We're a right-wing board.
Evola
Hitler
Kevin McDonald
Read them and realize how terribly shallow and inferior this Jew is
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>>10028922
I'm glad you like Benjamin a lot, I was turned onto his writing by Susan Sontag's essay (I never heard of him before). But a lot of philosophers/theorists never knew their work would find new audiences - would Max Stirner be surprised we're reading him in the 21st century?
>>10028941
>>>/Bellevue/
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>>10028922
Probably Robert Walser. I just love his cheeky, ironic, joyous, melancholic, loving spirit.
Where should I start with Benjamin? I read an essay he wrote about Walser that I loved. I'm not so much interested in literary criticism, but philosophy, religion, and social criticism interests me heaps.
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What are some books about people who work shit jobs?
I'm tired of reading about sailors exploring the high sea and aristocrats inheriting mysterious country estates
I want a book about a guy who works at the local Shell or sells phones at a mall kiosk
pic related. Carver worked some shit jobs in his time and so did his characters
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>>10028915
George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (nonfiction) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (fiction) are bretty gud for this.
Also look into Bukowski, Houllebecq, maybe Celine (Journey to the End of the Night).
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>>10028926
The recognitions or J R
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>>10028926
>Houllebecq
he's a self-insert writer in like half of his books, but this is still a good suggestion
try Tropic of Cancer
The Pale King fits the bill too.
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What languages are most important to learn if I want to read important literature in their original text?
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I assume you already know English, so you're already ahead of the game. Regarding contemporary philosophy, French is a nice second language to pick up, even if much of what you'll want to read in French will require extensive education. Even if English is the most important language now, German might also be a nice one to pick up for 19th century lit.
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>>10028785
The biggest chunks of fiction are written in French and English. If you want something alternative, German or Russian.
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>>10030109
This. Also, the greatest innovations in 20th century poetry were mostly a result of direct and indirect dialogue between Anglo-American and French symbolist poetry.
You study German for Goethe and philosophy.
You study Italian for Dante.
You study Spanish for Cervantes.
Greek for Homer, philosophy, theology and the Bible.
Latin for philosophy, theology, Virgil, Ovid.
But English and French open doors to a much vaster world.
Russian is not worthy of study because their novelists are not significant enough, while their theatre and poetry is absolutely backwards.
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>He defined post-modernism as the claim that there are no grounds for truth, objectivity, and meaning, and therefore conflicts between views are nothing more than contests of power, and argued that, while the West is required to judge other cultures in their own terms, Western culture is adversely judged as ethnocentric and racist.
>"The very reasoning which sets out to destroy the ideas of objective truth and absolute value imposes political correctness as absolutely binding, and cultural relativism as objectively true."
Is Scruton a Peterson on steroids?
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>>10028731
Why do these people not know what they're talking about?
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>>10028736
>a guy that wrote over 50 books on philosophy and specializes on aesthetics doesn't know about postmodernism; I do
easy, boy. this shit argument might fly with peterson, not here
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>>10028736
How do you know he doesnt?
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Americans of /lit/, who's your favorite writer from your state?
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>>10028621
Cormac McCarthy is from my city
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NY
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>>10028621
Or Hilda Doolittle.
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Is the a book where the author tackles the question of why we exist beyond "cuz biology bro"?
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>>10028116
The Bible
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you're retarded
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>>10028116
What's so unsatisfying about biology? Biology isn't even about "why", just "how".
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Can I get into Nihilism without being edgy?
I went to rehab for drug addiction and one of the therapists told me that I had a "nihilist look in life" but I've actually never read Nietzche.
Life doesn't make sense to me, it is meaningless. I'm also an atheist, got major depression, been to the psych ward for drug induced psychos and failed sudoku twice (blacked out in ER twice). I also hold a right-wing anarchist political view, or minarchist to be more specific.
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>>10024911
Almost literally me aside from the sudoku and faggy politics
I really don't know, I don't care about life being devoid of meaning and all the shit that is going on in this sick world when I'm feeling fine
When the depressive episodes kick in is all an endless cycle of despair and literal physical pain, blood feels dense, pure hell tbqh
I'm aimying to get into philosophy in the best uni of my country, but I need to take a test about all the HS shit you are supposed to know and I havent studied anything. Test is in two months. I only want to get there to go full autism into philosophy and use it to expand my vision on the cyberpunk-ish future that will come pretty soon, I have always been in search of some kind of truth and the lack of it has made me miserable from since I have memory. Maybe aldo write some cool autistic pomo scifi fiction and if luck is on my side, who knows, maybe get published. I don't care about partying and being the outcast virgin because I already did acid and other degenerate stuff on my teens and I'm not really interested in the childish bohemian college kid pose, will probably go on a bender from time to time tho and experimating with other substances very casually. But I really doubt I get in since I haven't prepared for the test because deep down I have zero motivation and I'm a lazy procastinator piece of poop
Are you on meds? If not get on them ASAP but do a research on what you are actually taking. I knew a lot about psymeds before I stared taking them because I had been obssesed with mental illness and psychedelic drugs since I was 14yo
You really have to be careful and informed about this shit
Anyways, my recs would be Nietzsche and brothers Karamazov. This is the typical "waa nihilism wat do" combo. I would also reccomend Don Quixote, Rimbaud and VALIS by PKD
Good luck, dont kill yourself! The world is going nuts and I think it is worth watching it, maybe soulcrushing too, but worth it anyways
The only edgy ones are the fakechristians that pretend to be conservative catholics just because it is too cool and mainstream to be atheistic now
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>>10025044
>Are you on meds?
Yeah mirtazapine, doctor will cut it and will make me take seroquel and fluoxetine.
Used to abuse lots of prescribed shit, with alcohol and weed. Also lots of illegal shit, mostly cocaine every 20 minutes and weed.
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>>10024911
This is going to be right up your alley unless you're particularly attached to capitalism.