/lit/ - Literature

is nonbeing a real, categorizable feature of reality? whats more definitive of an object that which it lacks or that which it has? is the subtractive notion of nonbeing real or is it an aspect of perception? it SEEMS that nonbeing would be present as a causal discrepancy, i.e, the difference between potentiality and actuality, e.g, an object having been moved from one spot to another, thus possessing the actuality of being there, while another object only possesses the potentiality of being there (while being actually somewhere else), and this being their main differentiating element assuming the objects are exactly identical otherwise. Is this a foundation for the proveness of nonbeing, as an attenuation of being? Much like how the form of a statue is attenuated thru what has been taken out of it by the sculptor? Is this a primarily cognitive thing or is it actually part of reality?

>>10647153
Basically God is the prime mover who is omnipresent in causality and the reason he created everything was because it was not possible not to do so seeing as it is in the divine nature to become extrapolate for the purposes of instrumentality and the consummation of things, and further it was recently revealed to us with the Christ that it is in the divine nature to become communicable to man for the purposes of man being made communicable to God. One thing is certain, if you do not die, you're not one of us, death is the context within which life, human life, carries on, so by God himself dying not only plainly and physically but also in spiritual aridity and misery, we then are able, by tracing his steps in reverse, to commune with God and participate in the beatific vision and life of the spirit which has produced a way of thinking which is extremely precarious and particular to the post-Christian civilized world. Had Christ not come, no consistent domestic life at this scale could have ever arisen, because no pre-Christian system of thought could bequeath to mankind those particular normative suppositions from which our high-academic institutions and moral standards have been born.

>>10152409
Aquinas
Augustine
Boethius
Cicero
Aristotle
Kierkegaard
Hegel
Jacques Maritain
Zizek and so on
Schrodinger

>>10064599
Zizek is wrong about that one. Chesterton's orthodoxy chapter 8 mentions the same exact thing, that God became an atheist etc. The difference arises in the last chapter, and particularly the last paragraph, which I'm almost certain zizek does not even understand.
People like this piss me off the most >>10064625 acting like Christianity has been obsoleted and even taking the effort to be somewhat sad about it despite not knowing anything. Christianity is still around you dipshit, the Church and its theology is just as vibrant and contemporary as secular philosophy, but just because you are separated from it (as the state is separated from it) you think it has been left in the dust, when in reality the church will go on like it always has and you will be the one fossilized in the dust for future Christians to marvel upon.
Secularism is nothing else than the world trying to keep up with Christianity whilst remaining separate from it. It is not obsoleting Christianity, it may perhaps destroy Christianity one day, but Christianity will always remain the central well of dynamism and progress. Always.

>>9613499
A true hegelian understands that it was the departure from hegel by the bourgeois mob that ruined civilization. Hegelians are still trying to fix it but right now they're stuck in this post-Christian hubbub not realizing that the final swing of the dialectical pendulum will land on Christianity in the end times desu. And then after the rapture a true Catholic-socialist monarchy will be established and bring on the World To Come.

>>9058663
The fundamental idea of Christianity is this: God falls into his own creation, and by falling into it expresses his Godhood, beyond the mere judaic or islamic conception of God.
Jews and muslims say that God is somebody else, an impersonal 'other' who writes arbitrary laws based on his own preferences about what ought to be done etc.
In Christianity God became man, which completely violated the philosophy of judaism and pre-emptively violated the philosophy of islam.
Because Christ is God, he is transcendent, existing not as an 'other' being but as the subsistent principle of existence, and he is communicable in that whenever people are gathered in his name he is there too in the midst of them as in the holy spirit for example.

Another fundamental revelation of Christianity, which is a consequence of the above, and which western society is most invested in, is this:
Truth, beauty, and good, are all defined in terms of one another. To be beautiful must also mean to be true and good; to be true must also mean to be beautiful and good; to be good must also mean to be true and beautiful and so forth. To have one without the other two is an empirical error, and such ideas do not regard the inspiration of the holy spirit and as such are not Christian nor are they western.

As for reading, my personal favorites are Aquinas, Jacques maritain, Chesterton, Ratzinger, and kierkegaard.

>>8702408
I don't listen to music while I read, but I do listen to music.

1.) Stravinsky
2.) Part
3.) MacMillan
4.) Bruckner
5.) Ockeghem

The ideal book would be a fictional expression of the contents of Aquinas' summa, most preferably set in the future and with a general theme of sobriety and clarity and spirituality within a vast cyberpunk cityscape.

I planned to write this book myself, but I don't have the immense cognitive dynamism required, it would be groundbreaking if executed successfully.
I'm already seeing this kind of aesthetic appearing in small online communities, typically involving anime, technology and distinctly Catholic spirituality, also sometimes accompanied by classical music or renaissance-era polyphony.
The general idea is, affinity with entropy, to find silence within the noise.

>>8626723
Basically here's the deal, consciousness exists despite the universe being a deterministic phenomenon, this is a fucking problem and we still haven't figured out how this is possible.
On one side you have the people who say that consciousness doesn't really exist and it's just an effect of all that shit going on in our brains.
On the other side there are people who say that consciousness is some kind of magical aether separate from the body.

Both are wrong in very nuanced ways; in the former case, it's correct to say that consciousness is the result of natural, empirically verifiable brain operation involving matter, but this is a perennially incomplete observation because it is reductionist, which is to say that you've only walked around the problem saying shit like 'that ain't real senpai' when in reality anything known is real and thus consciousness, being known, has just as much eidetic vividness as anything that we can touch and feel.

In the latter case, it's correct to say that consciousness isn't actually made of matter, because even though the brain is matter, it is producing something which is supremely known to us, but does not exist in any tangible way. However, it is incorrect to say that consciousness is separate from the body or that it belongs to some plane of existence besides the physical one, since clearly our sense-perception extends to the body and also our abstractive intellect is tethered to the construction of the brain.

So materialism is wrong, and 'God-of-the-gaps' is wrong as well, so how do we solve this puzzle?
The answer, simply put, is the Christian God, particularly the Christian God that Aquinas wrote about.

In a material universe you have total quantum equilibrium, nothing is different from anything beside it, not even being is different from non-being, all matter is uniform.
This is where the divine love comes in, and disturbs this equilibrium in such a way that it never existed in the first place.
The divine love is the self-imparting force in which things may rise to existence by participation.
God, being the prime mover, created causality, and by extension the universe and human beings and consciousness.
Human beings are what could be called 'composite movers' since we do not have divinity but we do have the image of God, which is precisely immaterial becoming, which allows us to exist within the universe, bounded by its laws, and yet in such a way that we appear to be looking at it from the outside.
That is to say, my perception is different from my being, my brain is different from my consciousness, and this the divine love causes in us.
The divine love expresses the universal by the power of the particular, good by the power of evil, life by the power of death and so forth.

>>8602898
Whenever I see people thinking like this, I usually try to tell them there's ultimate truth and stuff but then they just give me that whole science thing and how we're all made of space dust.
That's fine and all, if you're the kind of person who uses double quotes to emphasize your own skepticism of certain words then who am I to judge?
But for serious, when you say that there's no ultimate truth you're probably appealing to the fact that all things are composite and can be dis-integrated and as such nothing is really what we conceptually imagine it to be.
Ultimately speaking nothing exists at all since being can't be proved to be qualitatively different from non-being. I get that, I really do.
But you are considering reality as if it were abject from experience, which realistically speaking is impossible but you do it nonetheless by creating a mental model of the universe which is purely material and in the which none of your own ideas and thoughts exist.
So by doing this you are only convincing yourself that your made up empirically verifiable model of everything is the extent of reality, while the truth is quite different because anything known is real, and ideas and concepts and consciousness are known and thus exist and have just as much eidetic vividness about them as what is physically palpable.
So the goal is to adjudicate these things on their own terms, not try to walk around them by taking them apart and saying "see! consciousness is just brain matter it don't really exist lol!"

>>8582327
Roman Catholic throne-and-altar distributist thomist.

>>8508041
the seven storey mountain

What is your favorite text in mysticism and why?
>>8110745
Well, when I was very young I had a habit of thinking very hard about things, and eventually I had invented a little bit of philosophy.
The first text I read on the topic was fear and trembling, and I noticed that these were my ideas.
It's not as if it simply reinforced a philosophy that I made up, it was as if there was something we both saw.
I spent more time thinking and less time sleeping, eventually overcoming all materialistic philosophy, moving through scholasticism.
After that I quite favored jacques maritain for some reason, and I still do.

What is my point?
My point is that, after a period of time, I am able to hear a non-believer, atheist or otherwise, see everything from his point of view exact, no matter how advanced, and say to him "there's more than this. you are not deceiving yourself. you do not have a mental disorder. you simply are seeing less than what actually is."

And if there were a truth truer than Catholicism, I would go to it, almost by habit.
That's the reason; Catholic philosophy precludes and concludes all other intellectual traditions, it is the philosophy of philosophies and I haven't encountered anything more than it.
So, to become a materialist again would be a step backwards on a path I've already traversed.
John 1:4-5 describes my feelings about the relationship between Christian thought and secularism, or truth and not-truth more generally.
That truth is the antithesis of not-truth.
I say not-truth as opposed to un-truth or non-truth because truth can have no antithesis, as darkness does not paint over light but rather derives its quality of darkness by a distinct lack of light.
So do secularists lack the power to extrapolate or deal in Christian philosophy by virtue of having not been enabled by God to do so even in principle.
So rome was painted over.

>>7396461
lol, there a a great many others to read before kant and hegel.
As far as I am concerned, the definitively western intellectual tradition is epitomized by Aquinas.

I suggest reading the church fathers (Augustine, Origen, Ignatius of antioch) and the mystics (eckhart, john of the cross, teresa of avila) and the vatican II guys (De Lubac, hans urs von balthasar, karl rahner).
And then there's jacques maritain.

>>7335741
>>7335765
>>7336490
>>7336595
This is pretty prophetic.
I wonder if you guys would cry if I misted you with holy water.

Are there actually people that think science has supplanted philosophy?
You have your answer OP, this is the age we're in, we've shifted away from ontological truth and into a howling wilderness where every faced of our existence is interpreted under the light of sheer unabating yet also completely misguided skepticism.
This is precisely what killed the greek schools, we had philosophy that was influenced by the greeks thanks to people like aquinas further enriching the thought of aristotle and presenting it for new generations, imbued with new truth.
Now all we have are rogue intellectuals like habermas and his crew.
People are dead inside and they simply don't care about anything but themselves.
It is exactly the same story with the arts.

This is the eschatological endgame, complete freefall, instantiated in part by the perception that this freefall is actually progress; and subsisting in the ignorance and pride of materialists chasing shadows on a moonless night.
But in the midst of it there will be a rebirth, we are already beginning to see it.

Catholicism.
It's wrong to list off different religions as if they are various genera of the same species.
Also, do you make all of your choices based on superficial nonsense?
Why don't you go find out which one is true for yourself, I can guarantee that if you are humble and persistent (that is, not accepting of half-truths) then you will be a Christian.

The summa theologica is the best introduction to catholic doctrine.
But the thomistic philosophy holds many nameless and invisible secrets, without a genuine contemplative mind nobody can really know aquinas.
Jacques maritain writes a lot about why most people simply can't seem to grasp basic thomistic reasoning such as is behind the quinque viae.

For those who are experiencing the terror, read "dark night of the soul" by john of the cross.

>>7160281
The cloud of unknowing was the thing that really struck me.
Catholic mysticism in general rings true to me because, I've been an academic/intellectual most of my life and felt the utter vexation of endless study for this or that compound truth which ultimately made no difference, yet at heart I thirsted for the theodrama and for my ultimate spiritual identity in the divine.
As more things were revealed to me, my colleagues saw me as increasingly delusional as I began more often to speak in riddles due to the ineffable nature of divine truth.

I used to be part of an influential academic research group, and now I have the secrets of the universe, but to the secular thinker I am just not versed enough in the sciences to have been disillusioned.
Where oh where are we going, /lit/?

Sorry for blogging.