/lit/ - Literature

I'm leaving lit and 4chan in general.

Sorry if I've shitposted posted too much, and I'm sorry to you and to the authors of literature and to God for arrogantly spouting idle opinions that I held solely because I thought they were clever. Not just under this trip but under any other name I've posted under (and no, I was not and have never been Feminister, if you are curious. I was another trip a few years ago and believe I namefagged for a few days a while ago).
4chan and the anonymous nature of the internet in general present too many opportunities for weak men like myself to fall into the pride and vanity of broadcasting thoughtless opinions and engaging in useless arguments for the sake of them. It's harmful to myself and to others, because in doing this kind of thing I implicitly encourage others to do so. My fear is that I mislead others by spouting an opinion as though it were seriously considered and well researched when I came up with it on a whim, and thereby planted false ideas in another's mind.

I haven't learned much from this board except how to make myself appear more learned than I am at times and above all how to be idle. If I could make one criticism of the board while I am humbling myself, it would be that there is a nasty attitude prevailing here that encourages not the love of reading, learning, and discussion, but the vanity of appearing "well read" with all the talk about patricians/plebs. This board can be useful when you have in mind a topic that you want to discuss but lingering here idly is harmful.

I'm sure most of you don't give a shit about this post and others don't even recognize me or wonder why I'm making such an issue of this. Well, console yourselves that I'll be gone after this and accept my apology: this post is more for myself than for others, so please suffer my writing it for my own sake. Let the thread die replyless and that will be fine, I just want it on record that I'm leaving so that I'll be better able to prevent myself from coming back by being reminded of this statement.

I won't be replying to this thread. This is my last post. If any of you would like to talk to me you can email me at xmcfiggly@gmail.com. Not because I expect anyone wants to talk to me, I have no reason to expect that; it's because I remember one guy on here who called himself the French version of myself (about my Catholicism I think, which I am sincere about by the way, I haven't been intentionally misleading you as to my beliefs) and just on the off chance that there is some anon out there that has been taking an interest in my posts I would feel rude just to leave abruptly without giving him the chance to communicate with me.

That said, goodbye m8s.

- a 4chan tripfag

Yeah I know mate, it's just a bad habit. I notice it but I haven't changed my ways due to apathy. I see that you deleted your post but you made a valid point.

There's more to it than one being more "aesthetically appealing", whatever that means. When people substituted Freud's terms for the older ones it was part of the change taking in place where people were beginning to see humanity more as mechanical biological units / animals than as being "a little less than the angels". My disapproval of Freud's terminology is that I see it as rhetoric that obscures the spiritual nature of man; just as Marx I find to be a rhetorician that fills men's souls with vain utopian hopes and an awful dis-contentedness that fosters rebellion and bloodshed.
The vanity and hypocrisy in what I am saying is that I am accusing Marx and Freud of false rhetoric when I'm engaged in it myself, I know (though I'm less skilled than they were). I'm fighting rhetoric with rhetoric which is vain.

>>5384878
> It doesn't mean they didn't develop interesting tools.

Interesting tools, sure, they are interesting, curious. I don't think they've been put to any good use though, and they've often been extremely harmful.
I hear that sociologists today borrow a lot from Marx, which would sound like Marx must have developed something of lasting worth; but to me it would seem only to suggest that his sophisms have had lasting popularity. I don't see how meditating on such things as "class warfare", "class consciousness", "alienation", "the materialist conception of history", do anything beyond make people discontent, bitter, and angry at "society".
Same with Freud. I don't see how using terms like "ego" or "subconscious desires" are an improvement on words like "soul" and "desires of the flesh". On the contrary, I think we are worse off. "Superego/ego/id", "the subconscious", etc., this to me is just psychology with a macabre, ugly, pseudoscientific aesthetic; superego/ego/id is no more valid than St. Paul's spirit/soul/flesh, but St. Paul's has the superiority of being more aesthetically appealing. Why "big ego" rather than "proud soul"? why "bruised ego" rather than "bruised soul"? why "unconscious desires" rather than "concupiscence"?
>So what?

They do harm to themselves and to others.

I like Socrates because he had something of the "anti-intellectual" in him. He and Cato weren't that far apart, I imagine. If Cato was as surrounded by pompous sophists as Socrates was perhaps Cato would have felt the calling to be an ironist exposing the emptiness of the sophists.
Plato can be quite profound. He makes a lot of good points. A lot of the sophisms that Plato deals with in his works are sophisms that are popular today. The Socratic/Platonic method which amounts to training yourself to beware of being bewitched by rhetoric is good and useful because it saves you from being manipulated and dominated by demagogues and poets.

>>5384856
>I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views about things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. 'When I was a young man,' he said, 'I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: 'Jew! Get off the pavement!' 'And what did you do?' I asked. 'I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,' was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big, strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I had contrasted this situation with another which befitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies.

From Freud's Interpretation of Dreams.
Hegel was a promoter of the Prussian State as the culmination of World History.
Marx was a demagogue who wanted to see bloodshed.

>>5384861
I don't think so. I can tell by listening to them that they are tragically convinced of their own sophisms, and they take their idle babble seriously.

>>5384839
Philosophy is not what I meant by literature, but even then "Philosophy" is full of sophisms and idle babble. I'm reminded of the pragmatic Cato denouncing Socrates for being an idle chatterer. Not that philosophy is illegitimate; I think it can be good, but it can easily be corrupted so as to be deceiving rather than enlightening. I think a lot of modern philosophers and thinkers were more shrewd politicians, demagogues, and legislators than "lovers of wisdom".

>>5384818
>and the vision of Luther just silently creating a list of complaints is a bitch move.

You mean the Protestant have falsely cast Luther has a saintly character with a humble list of complaints in contradistinction to the stubborn politician that he was?

I'm generally having trouble understanding your position mate.

>>5384805
>Well, the Dominicans are a good example. If you want to combat heresy, you give it a place to exist within the structure of the church, and you confine it there.

Are you saying that the Dominicans harboured heresies?

>It has always been okay within the Church to intellectually do what you want so long as you don't flaunt it and only discuss it privately with people who can understand it for what it is.

I'm not sure what is wrong with this. You say, "intellectually do what you want", which would imply that Catholics were allowed to preach whatever heresies they felt like, but then qualified it with "as long as you don't flaunt it and only discuss it privately with people who can understand it for what it is", which would imply that the Church did allow a certain measure of private "freethinking", but would not allow any heresies or errors resulting from that thought to be spread. I don't see what is wrong with this. Are you saying that the Catholic Church was "intellectually repressive" and only gave men an illusion of freethought? Well, I'm not a liberal, I don't think "intellectual repression" is evil and I don't think that "freethought" is good.

>An example of this is Erasmus and Luther

I suppose you mean that Erasmus was spreading Humanistic thought. Well, I don't like Humanistic thought and I think the Church had every right to repress it. Luther's heresies were diabolical; the Church should have been quicker to silence him.

>>5384794
To?

>>5384783
I'd be interested in knowing what they would mean by that.

>>5384775
What would they say?

>>5384764
Nah, that's not where I am. I can see how you'd infer that no. I have no investment in literature or the academy; I have never studied it formally.

I'm not too bitter. Maybe emasculated but not irredeemably.

>>5384710
Check out this quote from a certified Patrician, for example:

"Poetry is for faggots",
- Plato, The Republic, Book X.

And mind: Plato was referring to Homer and the tragedians, who were actually decent poets.

>Also, from the scraps of lit I've read and listening to people talk about it I've gathered that words like "culture", "class", "urbanity", "wit", "genteel", "refined", and so on, have been code-words for a certain effeminacy and softness of manners for a long time.

I think there are three levels to understanding literature.

There's the plebs that think it is for faggots.

There's the Bourgeois who think it is "civilization", "culture",
"learnedness" . . . "insight into the human condition" (lol), etc., etc.

Then there's the Patricians who think it's for faggots.

My grandfather had the same instincts. He bought a plot of land in disrepair and turned it into a cozy cottage home with an orchard at the back, and would tell his wife that he had a desire to be some kind of gypsy / itinerant.

As you've probably guessed guys, I don't think the semen-slurping literary life is for me.

>2014
>not wanting to get away from classrooms, offices, stores, and factories and live in the countryside

How can you have any "aesthetic sensibilities" and not want this?

Also, from the scraps of lit I've read and listening to people talk about it I've gathered that words like "culture", "class", "urbanity", "wit", "genteel", "refined", and so on, have been code-words for a certain effeminacy and softness of manners for a long time.

>>5381506
Apollo Belvedere's body is objectively more aesthetic than the Elephant Man's, get over it. Denying that objective aesthetics exists means denying that objective reality exists.

You can't reform art without reforming man first. Modern art is disgusting because modern man is disgusting. The preaching of good aesthetics cannot be separated from the preaching of good morals. As soon as good morals are removed from society, so will be good aesthetics.

>>5380846
That's what I expected. That's a tough audience. That's why I was suggesting you'd have to come across more as a prophet than as a professor to get through to them, because appealing solely to their reason will be difficult as their objections would be so numerous. There are just so many things you would have to address if you appealed to their reason to effect a conversion, but perhaps your friend isn't expecting conversions (it would be silly of him to expect that) but rather for you to convince them that there is a rational case to be made for Catholicism.
There are just so many deceptions in the air today it is difficult to know where to begin. Seeing as you expect most of them to be atheists I think your strategies ought to mostly consist of addressing their objections not just to Catholicism but to religion and belief and the existence of the soul generally. You'd have to talk to them about how metaphysical materialism is just one arbitrary position among many, and that it's ascendancy in the modern world is not because it is true but because of political reasons. But you'd have to dip into why Christianity and not Judaism or Islam, and why the Catholic Church and not any other, at some point regardless.
Maybe read Aristotle's On Rhetoric and other works of that kind.

>>5380843
I didn't recommend them as having read them. I'm saying that's what I'd read if I was in your situation for preparation. I haven't read them.

OP, how do you intend on opening? What are they? Are they secular atheists, Jews, Christians of various sorts, a mix of all?

Are you going to start by rigorously proving the existence of God and then proving that the monotheistic religions are the only viable ones, and that of these Christianity is the true one if any of them are true, and that of the Christian churches the Catholic Church is the true Church?
Or do you appeal to a modern ethos? Talk about the danger of modern secularism and doubt, about nihilism/unbelief, about how human's need some kind of spiritual consolation, and that if we don't have a church like the Catholic Church people in greater and greater numbers will succumb to pernicious New Age "spirituality"?
Or do you expect them to be Russian Orthodox and so you can talk about the great schism and the history of the early Church?
Do you appeal to their emotions, talking about death and eternity and about how we ought to live as though we are going to be judged for our actions just in case we are, and how of all the religions the Catholic Church provides the most consolation for souls and preparation for the Final Judgement?
Do you just get up there and say, "I'm a Catholic. Catholicism is the true religion. If you are outside of the Church you will not be saved. Ask me questions."

How do you intend on starting OP?

>>5380816
I'm still not following. Please be more direct.

>>5380787
I'm not sure what you are saying mate.

>>5380779
I mean this
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/

>>5380760
>Similarly, the understanding of God that comes from theology isn't much compared to the direct experience.

Aquinas said that all of his works (including the Summa) were straw compared to the secret things that God had revealed to him. He said it in a way that wasn't boastful; he was more or less expressing the vanity of his own works and the supremacy of God's.