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  • eleven crows
    Senior Member
    • Mar 2011
    • 546

    I would like to lump literary theory in there as well.

    edit: Reading Nabokov's Dozen. Even when he's upbeat (rarely) he's drenched in nostalgia. So far, so good.

    Comment

    • BSR
      Senior Member
      • Aug 2008
      • 1562

      Originally posted by Faust View Post
      I just realized something. Philosophers are the new tax lawyers. They create an artificially esoteric world delimited by a purposefully obscure language and become its self-appointed experts. Their expertise does not necessarily rest on their superior intelligence but on stamina and perseverance to slug it out through mountains of dead language.
      and what are your thoughts re psychoanalysis?
      pix

      Originally posted by Fuuma
      Fuck you and your viewpoint, I hate this depoliticized environment where every opinion should be respected, no matter how moronic. My avatar was chosen just for you, die in a ditch fucker.

      Comment

      • viv1984viv
        Senior Member
        • Feb 2008
        • 194

        Originally posted by Faust View Post
        I just realized something. Philosophers are the new tax lawyers. They create an artificially esoteric world delimited by a purposefully obscure language and become its self-appointed experts. Their expertise does not necessarily rest on their superior intelligence but on stamina and perseverance to slug it out through mountains of dead language.
        Or tax lawyers are the new philosophers... and capital is the new God?
        Notes from the Vomitorium - The Nerve Of It -

        Comment

        • Faust
          kitsch killer
          • Sep 2006
          • 37852

          Originally posted by BSR View Post
          and what are your thoughts re psychoanalysis?
          I thought better living through chemistry has solved that problem.
          Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

          StyleZeitgeist Magazine

          Comment

          • MJRH
            Senior Member
            • Nov 2006
            • 418

            Originally posted by BSR View Post
            and what are your thoughts re fashion?
            Originally posted by Faust View Post
            I thought better living through chemistry has solved that problem.
            couldn't resist

            ---

            i burned through most of hesse's stuff last year, but over the last month finished goldmund and narcissus, the glass bead game, and his autobiographical writings, in that order. i found the discrepancy between the narrative voice in his later works and his writings on his own life fascinating. he always struck me as such a wise old little guru (see below), and it turns out he's as doubtridden as the rest of us! a really charming man, it pains me he thought of himself as somehow a lone wolf.

            ain't no beauty queens in this locality

            Comment

            • klangspiel
              Senior Member
              • Apr 2007
              • 577

              Originally posted by rilu
              And Borges is always nice :)
              i finally had a chance to pick up macedonio fernandez's the musem of eterna's novel just the other day. if the name sounds unfamiliar, well... fernandez was something of a formative figure to borges and a good crop of the younger generation of argentina's aspiring intelligentsia and literati of the time. here's a young borges in awe of fernandez:

              "I imitated him, to the point of transcription, to the point of devoted and impassioned plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence."

              and from borges' "the witness":

              "What will die with me when I die? What fragile, pathetic form will the world lose? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a roan horse in the vacant lot at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulphur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?"

              on a cursory first reading, the book reads like a hyper-cerebralised borges at his most sagely, playful, beguiling and baroque, if indeed that's even remotely possible (then again, i've just contradicted myself there, haven't i?). on the surface, there's a considerable flourish of meta-fictional enactments (self-referentiality, self-reflexivity, self-consciousness, self-critique, self-irony, the intentionally dialogical moments with the reader, etc.) rife throughout the book as a strategic and conceptual armory against the dread of novelistic pretension, lest the presumption is such that a novel is an absolute given, for the reader as well as the author. however, far from being resolutely an anti-novel, or a "post-novel" as it'd seem to have usurped and transcended the conventions of a novel, it'd be better to think of it as a "pre-novel". not so much in the way of a canvassing or a template, but a naveity tout court. simply as such. not even as a prelude to its very genesis. not even as a thing to be read or as a thing to be written. but just something... a conscience? :)

              Originally posted by trentk View Post
              Charles Sanders Peirce
              bertrand russell has yet to be proven wrong when he once proclaimed peirce the greatest american thinker ever. it's a shame that he registers naught on the cultural and historical consciousness of america, much less regarded amongst its pantheon of the mythic and iconic rightfully befitting him (unlike say, descartes for the french). there's much to admire about peirce - his prodigious intellect, the radical laterality of analytical and creative thought, the detailed meticulousness and systematic rigour of his work, the boldness and originality of insight, but not least of all, his extensive erudition and polymathic vigour, which almost always seemed insatiably boundless as much as it is pathologically restless, and therefore immensely productive. he was no ordinary polymath, that's for sure. certainly not a mere dabbler of a multitude of disciplines, nor a multi-specialist slavishly compartmentalised and confined by the dogmas and boundaries of his/her fields of expertise, however many they may be. by contrast, he fluidly straddled the many boundaries, defined and redefined the parameters, and push them to the very edge, even at the cost of appearing eclectic and esoteric, notwithstanding occam's razor. in other words, less the dogmatic minder and keeper of established knowledge, and more the revolutionary and frontiersman always on the cusp of novelty and genius.

              Originally posted by Faust View Post
              I just realized something. Philosophers are the new tax lawyers. They create an artificially esoteric world delimited by a purposefully obscure language and become its self-appointed experts. Their expertise does not necessarily rest on their superior intelligence but on stamina and perseverance to slug it out through mountains of dead language.
              mate, stick to the fast and fury of fashion. :)
              while you're at it, please notch one up for reductive thinking, why don't cha? :)

              indeed, philosophy has always been a dead language, but no more dead than a zombie or a spectre liminally existing between the dead and the living. socrates never quite perished now did he? sorta like an odd confluence of antigone and the resurrection (the gnostic version of it but paulinian is just as fine as well :)).

              but yes, philosophy is indeed dead, at least insofar as the masses are concerned. always have been, and very likely, always will. since as far back as antiquity, it has invariably always been at incommensurable odds with doxa, no less as an impenetrable corpus (corpse?) of inquisitions that shake and undermine the very hallowed foundations of man himself. all that is sacred is profanable. or better phrased injunctively: all that is sacred ought to be made profane. no wonder that philosophy's very essence is indissociably that of the defiant image of the eternal pariah, outcast, heretic or outsider. the archetypical punk rocker, yes? perpetually out of joint, as it were. corrupting, festering, and deviating. there has never been glad tidings, only the plague. good times.

              bring on the dead.

              Comment

              • Faust
                kitsch killer
                • Sep 2006
                • 37852

                Originally posted by klangspiel View Post

                mate, stick to the fast and fury of fashion. :)
                while you're at it, please notch one up for reductive thinking, why don't cha? :)

                indeed, philosophy has always been a dead language, but no more dead than a zombie or a spectre liminally existing between the dead and the living. socrates never quite perished now did he? sorta like an odd confluence of antigone and the resurrection (the gnostic version of it but paulinian is just as fine as well :)).

                but yes, philosophy is indeed dead, at least insofar as the masses are concerned. always have been, and very likely, always will. since as far back as antiquity, it has invariably always been at incommensurable odds with doxa, no less as an impenetrable corpus (corpse?) of inquisitions that shake and undermine the very hallowed foundations of man himself. all that is sacred is profanable. or better phrased injunctively: all that is sacred ought to be made profane. no wonder that philosophy's very essence is indissociably that of the defiant image of the eternal pariah, outcast, heretic or outsider. the archetypical punk rocker, yes? perpetually out of joint, as it were. corrupting, festering, and deviating. there has never been glad tidings, only the plague. good times.

                bring on the dead.
                Reductive thinking - I like that term. I wonder where it comes from!
                All intellectuals are out of joint. Kafka was out of joint. Dostoyevsky was out of joint. Bulgakov was out of joint. But they didn't have to write enormous mountains of unreadable pages to prove that they are philosophers. They wrote stuff that is relevant to life, not some esoteric circle-jerk bullshit. I'll say it again (with Rorty, if you want me to drop names too ) - all philosophy worth reading is found in literature. End of story. Case closed. PM sent. Mate, don't try to make me out into some anti-intellectual hoi polloi. While you are at it, why don't you stick to posting esoteric youtube clips - you are better at it.
                Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                Comment

                • Faust
                  kitsch killer
                  • Sep 2006
                  • 37852

                  Just finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Amazing novel - highly recommended. Between that and The Corrections, he's become one of my favorite contemporary American writers.
                  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                  StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                  Comment

                  • Faust
                    kitsch killer
                    • Sep 2006
                    • 37852

                    Originally posted by rilu
                    you fail to differentiate literature from argumentative reasoning (as well as the latter from "esoteric circle-jerk bullshit"). but interestingly enough, the lack of providing arguments for your thesis just fits the same pattern of reasoning.
                    I fail nothing. Answer me, what is philosophy for?
                    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                    StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                    Comment

                    • Faust
                      kitsch killer
                      • Sep 2006
                      • 37852

                      The basic and most important answer, I think, is that philosophy is there to make sense of our lives, to put them in spiritual order, so to speak. Is it not? And that literature does a much better job than the type of philosophical writing I have described.
                      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                      Comment

                      • eleven crows
                        Senior Member
                        • Mar 2011
                        • 546

                        Klang, you have an Arts degree, don't you?

                        Comment

                        • trentk
                          Senior Member
                          • Oct 2010
                          • 709

                          Originally posted by klangspiel View Post
                          i finally had a chance to pick up macedonio fernandez's the musem of eterna's novel
                          I'm now inclined to pick the book up as well. Will get back to you once I get a chance to read it.

                          Originally posted by klangspiel View Post
                          peirce
                          So far, what most amazes me about Peirce is his prescience. Not only is he said to have introduced an "Einstinean turn" in general knowledge before Einstein himself, he exerts a subterranean influence on contemporary physics. For example, reading Peirce's writings on Tychism, I was struck by the similarity to Lee Smolin's Loop Quantum Gravity. Some online digging revealed that Smolin was in fact influenced by Peirce:

                          Originally posted by Lee Smolin
                          it seems natural to wonder if some kind of historical explanation might account for how the actual particles and forces we see were picked out of a large set of possibilities. Such an explanation would have to account for the fact that it seems that the present set allows a much more complicated world-in terms of the existence of a large variety of different kinds of atoms and molecules-than the average set. This makes possible galaxies, stars and, of course, life. Some people have tried to account for this with the anthropic principle, but a few of us have felt that it might be possible to do better and explain it through a genuine mechanism of natural selection whereby regions of the universe reproduce themselves, with some small variations in the properties of the elementary particles and their forces. [...]

                          This idea was anticipated by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce
                          "He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."

                          Comment

                          • Fuuma
                            Senior Member
                            • Sep 2006
                            • 4050

                            Originally posted by Faust View Post
                            The basic and most important answer, I think, is that philosophy is there to make sense of our lives, to put them in spiritual order, so to speak. Is it not? And that literature does a much better job than the type of philosophical writing I have described.
                            I prefer to read philosophy and essays or blurry mixes of the two, what gives?

                            Oh and reading in french is much more enjoyable than reading in english, if it applies to me it applies to everyone else. :P
                            Selling CCP, Harnden, Raf, Rick etc.
                            http://www.stylezeitgeist.com/forums...me-other-stuff

                            Comment

                            • galia
                              Senior Member
                              • Jun 2009
                              • 1719

                              philosophy is litterally love of wisdom and I think it's a good definition. I see it as the analysis of anytrhing that presents itself to the mind as an appropriate subject, in order to gain better understanding of said thing and therefore increase one's wisdom

                              Comment

                              • Faust
                                kitsch killer
                                • Sep 2006
                                • 37852

                                Originally posted by Fuuma View Post
                                I prefer to read philosophy and essays or blurry mixes of the two, what gives?

                                Oh and reading in french is much more enjoyable than reading in english, if it applies to me it applies to everyone else. :P
                                Russian > French > English

                                Well, I don't know, I don't read French. But I have come to appreciate the differences between Russian and English. Russian is very elegant, flexible like a yoga master, flowing like a river. English is more direct, but there is something of excellence in its bluntness that I love.

                                Will try to have another go ad Dr. Faustus, although probably not the best book to start before I leave to Europe for 18 days. Maybe I'll stick to Great Expectatinons instead. First book I will read on the iPad
                                Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                                StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                                Comment

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