/lit/ - Literature

Philosophy in university is obnoxiously easy. My last phil exam is tomorrow, I have barely gone to one third of the class this term and studied for maybe 5 hours yet I will still get at least a 3.0 on the exam.
Unfortunately, I still have the overwhelming feeling that I am completely wasting my money. As my ambitions to learn have gone down I find myself regretting not majoring in STEM or business and being equally miserable in luxury.

Adam & Eve

So, if the ultimate felicity of man does not consist in external things which are called the goods of fortune, nor in the goods of the body, nor in the goods of the soul according to its sensitive part, nor as regards the intellective part according to the activity of the moral virtues, nor according to the intellectual virtues that are concerned with action, that is, art and prudence—we are left with the conclusion that the ultimate felicity of man lies in the contemplation of truth.

Indeed, this is the only operation of man which is proper to him, and in it he shares nothing in common with the other animals.

So, too, this is ordered to nothing else as an end, for the contemplation of truth is sought for its own sake.

Also, through this operation man is united by way of likeness with beings superior to him, since this alone of human operations is found also in God and in separate substances.

Indeed, in this operation he gets in touch with these higher beings by knowing them in some way.

Also, for this operation man is rather sufficient unto himself, in the sense that for it he needs little help from external things.

In fact, all other human operations seem to be ordered to this one, as to an end. For, there is needed for the perfection of contemplation a soundness of body, to which all the products of art that are necessary for life are directed. Also required are freedom from the disturbances of the passions—this is achieved through the moral virtues and prudence—and freedom from external disorders, to which the whole program of government in civil life is directed. And so, if they are rightly considered, all human functions may be seen to subserve the contemplation of truth.

However, it is not possible for man’s ultimate felicity to consist in the contemplation which depends on the understanding of principles, for that is very imperfect, being most universal, including the potential cognition of things. Also, it is the beginning, not the end, of human enquiry, coming to us from nature and not because of our search for truth. Nor, indeed, does it lie in the area of the sciences which deal with lower things, because felicity should lie in the working of the intellect in relation to the noblest objects of understanding. So, the conclusion remains that man’s ultimate felicity consists in the contemplation of wisdom, based on the considering of divine matters.

From this, that is also clear by way of induction, which was proved above by rational arguments, namely, that man’s ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God.

>>7093875
show me any other generation that had memes this dank

>>7052801
>I call it reverse-Solipsism

You mean msispilos?

Post a god tier poet and a shit tier poet, we need to weed out the pleb's from the intellectual patricians.

God tier
>Lord Byron (6th Baron Byron)

Shit tier
>William Carlos Williams

>modern philosophers did away with final causes (teleology) so that they could focus exclusively on material causes in order to advance technology
>now we have advanced technology but no meaning or purpose in life because teleology has been banished

GOOD JOB LMAO

>lend complete stranger the only copy of Pythagoras' Numerica Mysteria
>it's the personal writings of Pythagoras himself
>it contains physics that won't be discovered until at least the next millenium
>you can use it to summon black holes, create mini universes and travel to any time and place you want
>I don't see stranger for at least 5.°9 flux cycles
>see him last week
>ask him about my copy of the NM
>receive it back
>it's covered in jizz and shit
>his face when

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZD4ezDbbu4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P6-V7J5S-0

So this is the famous "new sincerity"

>tfw the glory of this world is just a dim orange that lights upon the heads of men at random and fades to nothing in time
>tfw all glory belongs to God
>tfw the glory of God is a pure and excellent light that does not just hover above the heads of a few fortunate men, but penetrates to the very bottom of the soul of all men of good will and clean heart
>tfw happiness is not glorious achievement but meek surrender to the will of God and mighty love for your heavenly father and those neighbours made in his image
>tfw God pours his wisdom and grace on all men constantly, as he pours the light of the sun, moon and stars on the earth from the beginning of time
>tfw the only reason for not having the wisdom and grace of God is from hiding yourself from it, like those who hide in the dark from the sun
>tfw if God is silent, it is because he wants us to imitate him in his silence, so that we will not listen to our own desires and vain speech, but pay loving attention to him
>tfw we could have spent eternity walking side by side with God in paradise, but we fell, and that though we fell not only did God abandon us to misery, but he came down to our level and suffered every one of our sufferings as though he had fallen himself, so that his love could be fulfilled and father and son could be joined together ever more gloriously in the charity of the holy spirit

The motto of New Sincerity is "gas the Jews, race war now", because New Sincerity is an essentially kike-aware movement, just as Postmodern Irony was essentially a kike blindfold.

>tfw you couldn't just slap her and tell her to remember her place because muh feminism
>tfw chivalry only makes sense in the context of the Christian lady who is willing to humble herself without having to be told to
>tfw it's time to return to rough "barbarian" manners with women, because they don't respect weakness and softer manners with women only makes sense in a Christian society where people are united by charity

dump her
next time, get a girl that is 1. below your social station, 2. depends on you, 3. is afraid of you (this is important), 4. still has some basic womanly instincts of affection and maternity

>>6548693
Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

Argentinians Caucasians

Start with the Greeks.

Reminder that neither "fine literature" nor "high culture" will save you from nihilism.

Reminder that art is not a substitute for religion.

>I worship the Christian church, same as my ancestors did

What's wrong with neo-paganism? Most of it is more about community and identity than actual belief in norse gods. A friend of mine is a professorial MMA fighter who fucks bitches and reads patrish books, and is a neo-pagan. If it's because some neckbeards on the internet are also neo-pagans, that's fucking retarded, they're be weird neckbeards regardless of their beliefs/habits, not because of them.

>>6082604
That's one sweet-ass overcoat

My books.

I've been looking at the New Atheists as the epitome of anti-intellectualism that /lit/ says they are, and I'm starting to realise that I commit many of the same mistakes they do

I'm trying to figure out the patterns, and it goes more or less like this: Instead of starting ab ovo, they pick a particular tragedy and work backwards. For them, Islam is not meant to be understood by its historical context, its philosophical sources and its subsequent theological advancements, it should be understood as the reason behind 9/11. A similar pattern of thinking is used to deal with Christianity and all other religions.

Second, they see any attempt of deeply understanding religion as pointless, because the best you can hope to achieve with that is either returning to the place of original dismissal or go to their camp. Since no one wants to be a member of the church or islamist, they refuse to even give it a shot. As a result, they're very anti-intellectual regarding that: Hitchens was proud of saying he has never read the Quran, Harris loves dismissing all religious debate and any philosophy that can lead to it, and so on.

The problem of that if you follow this you will, invariably, end up believing that the ruling ideology is the best one: If we were living in early 18th century Europe who'd you rather be? One of those dirty republicans with liberal ideals who seem so harmful to our pretty institutions, or a member of the rich, clean aristocracy and clergy? You'd dismiss all values we now cherish with the same easiness.

So I think that for there to be a genuine natural selection of ideas, we must follow a similar logic in judging all of them. If you're a really inquisitive and skeptical person, you don't open "exceptions", you follow the same train of thought with everything you face.

I'm trying to break it down to a coherent process, but I can't. I'm sure people who are actually smart have written about this, so I'm interested in what /lit/ has to offer.

At what point can I safely dismiss new theories, even those who seem evidently horrible to us nowadays? At what point can I say with certainty that Stalinism and Qutbism should be fought? How many books do I have to read? How deep should be my understanding of them?

why are depictions of barbarians and bloodthirsty, savage, uncivilized people still prevailing today?

Apart from polytheism, what are the upcoming big philosophical movements?