/lit/ - Literature

I grew up poor in an... Urban environment, and as such reading wasn't really something I had a lot of time for growing up, but I've picked myself up and am finding free time and want to understand more, but a lot of it is running circles around my brain, specifically poetry. Where am I supposed to learn to read and actually comprehend some of this stuff. Allow me to provide an excerpt:
>O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
>Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
>When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
>Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
>Yet even in these days so far retir’d
>From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
>Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
>I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir’d.

Are there "beginner poets" or recommend resources for learning how to derive meaning from this kind of work?

>>18178694

>>14821389
>I want a stoicism/buddhism type of philosophy that ends in the conclusion of life being amazing and beautiful. Does that even exist?

>>14570341
>>14570352
It's almost as if our perception of change is comprised of two interdependent reference frames of relational change: instantaneous change in an ever-present and cumulative change through time, and that this dynamic precisely corresponds to calculus integration and differentiation as inverse operations of the same process.
https://www.religion-online.org/article/influence-as-confluence-bergson-and-whitehead/
https://imgur.com/a/ZtLDYJT

>>14553837
Try Whitehead, the philosopher of adventure, he was post-postmodern before postmodernity. The point to reading him is to learn a style of thought, not come to conclusions, and hopefully that style will lead you to further adventures as you begin to see this style expressed in many different contexts and subjects by others.

Get out of reductive monism
https://youtu.be/BHztIS9kdVY

Get out of reductive monism
https://youtu.be/BHztIS9kdVY

Take the aesthetics as first philosophy pill.

>>14231019
P R O C E S S

>>14112126
In short, Whitehead is a true process philosopher in the most literal sense, as he was concerned about the process of psycho-philosophical development and his entire work is an attempt to advance this conversation about psycho-philosophical development.

I have had the great fortune of reading the words of many of the greatest minds humanity has ever produced. They are more than mentors and role-models to me: they are contemporaries and colleagues, my closest friends who live on in the heart from the experiential DNA of their creative works. Among such giants Whitehead stands tall to me, giving a excited, daring smile and pointing towards future adventures of living experiences unimaginable.

There is no more fitting book or author for this meme. Many intellectuals have given me the same sense of orgasmic intellectual excitement, but none more than this man. It's been 16 months since I first began to stupid Whitehead and the romantic excitement is still just as intense as the initial meeting! No, the romance has grown even stronger!

I'm a really, really weird girl.

*ahem*

Processist

"In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute 'wisdom.' The final summary can only be expressed in terms of a group of antitheses, whose apparent self-contradictions depend on neglect of the diverse categories of existence. In each antithesis there is a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast.

It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.

It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.

It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God...

What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world... In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands."

Post Whitehead quotes
>"The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing.' Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling. There is a unison of becoming among things in the present. Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story. The nature of evil is that the character of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step towards another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil and the process of its evasion. It means the discarding the element of obstructiveness in fact. No element in fact is ineffectual: Thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony. The triviality in some initial reconstruction of order expresses the fact that actualities are being produced, which, trivial in their own proper character of immediate 'ends,' are proper 'means' for the emergence of a world at once lucid, and intrinsically of immediate worth.
"The evil of the world is that those elements which are translucent so far as transmission is concerned, in themselves are of slight weight; and that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fades into night. 'He giveth his beloved - sleep.'"

Birthday gift ideas for someone whose only interest is reading?

anime girls reading books thread. post em.

>destroys the subject/object dichotomy
>destroys the creator/created dichotomy
>destroys scientific materialism
>destroys idealism
>destroys substance ontology
>destroys universals
>puts abstractions in their fucking place
>reconciles being and becoming
>reignites wonder
>radical empiricsm
>inverts plato, spinoza, leibniz, hume, and kant
>destroys the bifurcation of nature
>revives aesthetics and romanticism
whitehead was a fucking madlad

>>13963185
Do it anon

>>13951132
Whitehead is king bloomer.
I made a memepunk anime about him teaming up with Bloomer Gang to destroy the frog god of 4chan: https://vimeo.com/364552986

>>13934504
>>13934587
the student. It is not necessary to elaborate the qualifications of these statements. Such a training must, of course, have the width requisite for its end. But its design should not be complicated by the consideration of other ends. This professional training can only tooch one side of education. Its centre of gravity lies in the intellect, and its chief tool is the printed book. The centre of gravity of the other side of training should lie in intuition without an analytical divorce from the total environment. Its object is immediate apprehension with the minimum of eviscerating analysis. The type of generality, which above all is wanted, is the appreciation of variety of value. I mean an aesthetic growth. There is something between the gross specialised values of the mere practical man, and the thin specialised values of the mere scholar. Both types have missed something; and if you add together the two sets of values, you do not obtain the missing elements. What is wanted is an appreciation of the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment. When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset. There is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality. We want concrete fact with a high light thrown on what is relevant to its preciousness. What I mean is art and aesthetic education. It is, however, art in such a general sense of the term that I hardly like to call it by that name. Art is a special example. What we want is to draw out habits of aesthetic apprehensIon. According to the metaphysical doctrine which I have been developing, to do so is to increase the depth of individuality. The analysis of reality indicates the two factors, activity emerging into individualised aesthetic value. Also the emergent value is the measure of the individualisation of the activity. We must foster the creative initiative towards the main- tenance of objective values. You will not obtain the apprehension without the initiative, or the initiative without the apprehension. As soon as you get towards the · concrete, you cannot exclude action. Sensitiveness without impulse spells decadence, and impulse without sensitiveness spells brutality. I am using the word 'sensitiveness' in its most general signification, so as to include apprehension of what lies beyond oneself; that is to say,_ sensitiveness to all the facts of the case. Thus 'art' in the general sense which I require is any selection by which the concrete facts are so arranged as to elicit attention to particular values which are realisable by them. For example, the mere disposing of the human body and the eyesight so as to get a good view of a sunset is a simple form of artistic selection. The habit of art is the habit of enjoying vivid values."

>>13931159
From experience, this kind of obsessive theoryposting doesn't take effort, it just flows naturally, almost like a form of automatic writing. Isabelle Stengers describes it in Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts.

>what is required by your hold?" such a question affirms and presupposes that others' dreams, like yours, are created according to the means of their own adventure, and to this extent this question constitutes a test: it is a question that beings of power will have difficulty tolerating, proceeding as they do in the name of an intangible right that must be satisfied everywhere, which recognizes no difference between here and there, other than that of the parasites to be eliminated so that they themselves may be confirmed. Yet it is a question that one dreamer can address to another dreamer, for dreams do not abstract from the means, but rather dissolve the dreamer's identity in adventures that restore to the "means" their mode of actual existence: that of propositions that posses individuals are more than individuals posses them. This is why, when philosophy has succeeded in going what it can do, not only is wonder still there, but it henceforth infects all the statements whose vocation was to explain the world, that is, to disenchant it.

>The Whiteheadean scheme is a work of politeness because it seeks to be "adequate," refraining from insulting any living value. Yet if it is effective, it owes this to its fabrication, to the articulation of constraints that oblige thought, an "asignificant" matrix whose truth is the events of "disclosure," it may induce, modifying a being's relations to the environment, and, in this case, the relations of a statement to its consequences. Whitehead made coherent the vector of this efficacy, and it is coherence that demanded the twofold production of Whitehead as speculative thinker and strange object, the speculative scheme. Whitehead fabricated this scheme in order that the scheme might fabricate him, that it might oblige him to undergo the becomings of thought demanded by coherence.