Archived threads in /lit/ - Literature - 2293. page

I listened to part of the audiobook narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It was okay, never finished it though.
It made me want to cuddle Maggie Gyllenhaal. She's got a damn good voice boi.

>>8853040
It reminds me of Girl, Interrupted. Its not this greatest novel of all time, the most interesting part is that it is real and she offed herself as the result of this shit. 7/10 "classic" lit desu

>>8853040

It's slammin' and funkadelic. Would recommend.

>>8853026
Holy.... I want more....

>>8853026
WAM.. A PANCAKE

>>8853026

Why would that make morality subjective?

From what you've said, all that follows is that different people accept different views of morality. This doesn't entail that morality is subjective since it is perfectly possible that all but one moral theory are false.

It is another question as to what kind of proof is sufficient for a demonstration of the correct moral view to someone else, too, since what will psychologically convince them isn't what ought to convince them.

tl;dr: your screed isn't evidence against objective morality

also:

>posting to reddit for any reason

>>8852983

I once took a modern philosophy course (rationalists, empiricists, later tying together with a little Kant), and the professor's personal interest was philosophy of science. He was a reasonable guy, and it was a pretty good course.

At one point in the course the professor addressed this exact issue as it relates to later/modern philosophers (who include two of the people you just mentioned, to be clear). The professor simply gave his own opinion that many philosophers are not good writers, and that as a result a reader ought to be willing to a little digging at times to get to the actual ideas under the poor prose.

File: 1481777340780.jpg (434KB, 1700x960px) Image search: [Google]

434KB, 1700x960px

Because they're writing for all time. In a regular conversation people can ask questions, rephrase, try again, and so on. But some philosophers really are trying to write in such a way that they're saying gets communicated to everyone, everywhere, forever.

Maybe it sounds retarded. Philosophy often seems like enlightened retardedness. Maybe it is. But it comes out in the writing. The point is for you to understand it. It will only seem like "meandering and masturbatory language" until you understand it. And then when you do you'll be glad that they were specific, because it's not like they're about to write any more books and you don't know when the next time a philosopher that good is going to come along again.

The guy in your pic is one of the most difficult people to read ever. I've read shitloads of philosophy and he is to me no joke the hardest. Easily. But it's not like I would want his writing to be easier if it meant his ideas were less profound.

The fact is that what you are calling genius - brilliant ideas expressed clearly - is simply rare. There are lots of good stylists with nothing to say, and lots of serious thinkers who can't write for shit. Sometimes you get lucky and get Nietzsche, who was both. More often you have to just work with what you got.

Good luck anon.

>>8853018
This is a good post. Thanks, anon.

>>8852926
The Gulag Archipelago

>>8852926
The Stranger
Notes From Underground
The Metamorphosis
Bartleby, the Scrivener

>>8852993
>>8852987
thanks

>>8852924
Listen to Soft Cell.

>>8852924

>the profiteering of youth revolution

Stop approaching it from a Marxist slant.

You could look into Human Traffic and Control, stuff like that. Night clubs are best shown on camera, not in writing.

>>8852921
I read about the first 100 pages.
Can't stand the way Wallace describes things.
Read some of his shorter stuff. One thing was about puberty and he was describing wet dreams and talking about sticky spasms and warmth. Fucking get away from me Wallace!

It's clever enough to make pseuds feel smart without actually being clever or interesting.


Also le tragic depressed genius thing so many people engage with.

>>8852946
Reddit

Red Rising or something? How the fuck should we know? Just have a look at what's popular on reddit.

Everything in the trash filled scifi and fantasy generals which plague /lit/.

>>8852922
>How the fuck should we know?
Well it is a literature discussion board.

>>8852917
you're seriously finding it difficult to find fiction on middle-aged men?

>>8852928
If I don't want to read YA novels does not mean I want to read about middle aged men. I also don't want novels with female protagonists because I can't relate to them,just like an average girl wouldn't want to read Jack Reacher novel.

>>8852938
same person, Person by Sam Pink?

>>8852873
The 'burned on a fire at the end of my garden' version.

>>8852880
I tip my hat to you, fine sir.

>>8852880
get off my board and back to plebbit

>And when the allied bombing raid started we all hid in a slaughterhouse which was called Slaughterhouse-5 or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

Why does reddit worship this guy?

>I sat down and ate my breakfast. Breakfast was the first meal of the day. A meal is what a regularly scheduled eating of food is called, and a day is 24 hours (hours are 60 minutes(minutes are sixty seconds)) which is the amount of time, roughly, that it takes the earth to spin around one full time. It was good. Some might even say it was the Breakfast of Champions. Breakfast of Champions is a book by the author Kurt Vonnegut. An Author is a person who has such great and well respected ideas and stories and insights, that they are paid to put them onto paper and sell them to other people in an effort to obtain money. Money is green, usually.
Jesus Christ Vonnegut chill out.

I liked Slaughterhouse 5, it was fun and easy, but why do Reddit love him so much? I honestly cannot figure it out. He's not ground-breaking in any way, shape or form. He's funny and 'quirky' in some cases, but surely they can't just like him because he's such a 'quirky' and 'funny' author?

Am I missing something?

Middle C? What's this?

>>8852765
>Middle C? What's this?
William Gass' latest novel.

Sorry, I don't read fat people. They can't be artists.

>>8852758
I fucking hate this

Rolling did this a lot in HP in some of the more cringey passages

>fooly

>>8852758
Is that... moot?

> God is the 'transcendant' or what lies beyond the grasp of human comprehension.

Got it. I do believe there is a fundamental truth of the universe that humans can't grasp, that lies beyond our knowledge. I just don't see how this justifies belief in a personal God, represented as a man.

> We should represent 'the transcendent' as a man because human beings are the most complex entity in the universe.

This makes sense on a literary level but goes absolutely nowhere beyond that. It doesn't even attempt to make an empirical claim about reality, it's basically just saying "we should represent God as a man because man is the wisest/smartest/etc thing we know." It's essentially a rhetorical point, not a philosophical one.

> Religions deal with knowledge in a pre-scientific state and formulate insights that science will later refine.

This is entirely true, but how does it actually justify believing in a *particular* religion, a particular theology, a particular concept of God? It would almost seem to recommend a sort of religious eclecticism where you just immerse yourself in all the various traditions trying to get their best bits and discarding the stuff you know to be wrong. This certainly doesn't justify any kind of strict dogmatic adherance to a religious tradition.

> Science is about ‘what is the case,’ religion is about ‘what you should do.’

This is the one point where I think he just dropped the ball and disagree entirely. Religion makes plenty of claims about ‘what is the case’; huge chunks of the bible deal with how the world was created, what happened at various points in history, etc. A Priest or Theologian certainly wouldn’t drop these empirical claims without some reticence; debates over the nature of reality have been a huge feature of religious discourse forever. Likewise, science has normative elements and does prescribe “shoulds,” for example in the case of medicine or engineering.

> Religious truths are ‘archetypal,’ revealing values and concepts that are deeply held subconsciously by humanity.

I definitely think there is something to the idea of Jungian archetypes. But this seems to clash with the claims made by most organized religions that their founder was some sort of unprecedented historical figure. If archetypes are ‘discovered’ in the subconscious and not ‘made,’ then can Christ or Buddha be said to have made anything that didn’t already exist to begin with?

Much of contemporary Christian philosophy, following Girard, emphasizes the ’transvaluing’ quality of Christ, arguing that he ‘flipped existing morals on their head’ by voluntarily taking on the sins of the world in his Crucifixion. The idea is that prior mythologies condoned ‘scapegoating, seeing the execution of an innocent as a valid way for society to discharge its vengeful impulses on a perceived enemy; while Christianity rejects the scapegoating, seeing the persecutors as sinners and the scapegoat as a sinless ‘God in the flesh’.

>>8852705
Calm down dude.

>>8852705
You seem to believe a society beyond the individual ought to exist. Strange.

>>8852705
prove us

you need some Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and Murakami

if I'm gonna reccomend you one book it's Invisible Cities. real short, real good

>>8852624
problem child 2

dunsten checks in

>>8852668
I already read Kafka and Murakami. I'll take your book recommendation, thanks.