/lit/ - Literature

>My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
Thoughts on his conclusion?

Is philosophy literally nonsense? Just a big fat confused arbitrary waste of time?

Midwit genstein

Philosophy is just a system of sympathetic magic. This is obvious if you understand Plato's theory of recollection. If you do, you begin to realize that all philosophers believe likewise in the sympathy between the mind and the world "out there."

The idea that we already know things that we don't know because there is a link between the human mind and the realm of the Platonic forms, is really the same thing that gives rise to the idea that you can hurt someone by tying their hair to a doll. It is just more sophisticated-seeming in Plato because Plato manipulates words and not objects. In this way we do not notice the defects in Plato's thinking, because words can be manipulated with trivial ease.

>>18485547
What in the logicus philosophicus did you just philosophucking just say to me you little Metaphysician? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Vienna Circle, and I've been involved in numerous secret debates in politically powerful circles, and I have over 300 published analytical papers. I am trained in logical analysis and libertarian think tank organization and I'm the top logician jn the entire Jewish Intellectual Forces. You are nothing to me but just another argument. I will destroy with facts and logic the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my smart words. You think you can get away with saying that philosophical fecal fecundus to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of Jews across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, OP the faggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your world view. You're fucking done, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can debate you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my protolinguistic dialectic. Not only am I extensively trained in verbal combat, but I have access to the entire set of libraries of the United States and Israel and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable pretenses off the face of the continent, you little shieze. If only you could have known what unprovable retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your friendly tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you g-d-damnedidiot. I will scribble symbolic fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're game is over, lotus eater.

>>18342338
It's not a vulgar misrepresentation. Having read the Platonic canon, you have to understand that it is only mildly more serious than voodoo.

Plato is still a man of his time; he still believes that dreams are messages from the gods, that near death experiences are credible witness testimony of the afterlife, and so his arguments that objects have "suchness" are part of the same investigative impulse that gave us alchemy, astrology, divination and ceremonial magic. The idea of metaphysics continues to make people believe that the destiny of the world is controlled by the power inherent in symbols rather than the laws of physics.

Overall, Plato has stifled the human intellect in ways that are subtle and gross. He together with his student Aristotle, have only been useful by making what seems like every possible mistake at the outset. So you can appeal to their authority as great dunces whenever people make the same mistakes.

Can we diagnose any of the problems of "society"?

>>17678854
Yes, Wittgenstein did. No two persons can be proved to have the same experience. The contents of your head, whether they are pleasure or pain, are entirely yours, you cannot use the subjective and individual experience as a measuring stick for objective actions.

>>17369333
>>17369545
The Platonic dialogues are banal. Everything he wrote was just the combination of doctrines he inherited from the poets, with worthless arguments about geometric shapes, and abstract concepts. Plato was a petty conjurer of confusion only a little more subtle than Crowley.

He was Catholic and recanted his execrable doctrines on his deathbed, asking his friends to pray for his departed soul.

Can we get a thread like this started?

>post a specific feeling, emotion or thought
>other people reply with a short story, novel or poem relevant to that specific thing


For example:

>Dreading having to work the same dead-end job for the rest of my life.
>A Room Forever by Breece D'J Pancake

>"For both Rowland Hutt and Fania Pascal, listening to the confession was an uncomfortable experience. In Hutt’s case, the discomfort was simply embarrassment at having to sit in a Lyons cafe while opposite him sat Wittgenstein reciting his sins in a loud and clear voice. Fania Pascal, on the other hand, was exasperated by the whole thing. Wittgenstein had phoned at an inconvenient moment to ask whether he could come and see her. When she asked if it was urgent she was told firmly that it was, and could not wait. ‘If ever a thing could wait,’ she thought, facing him across the table, ‘it is a confession of this kind and made in this manner.’ The stiff and remote way in which he delivered his confession made it impossible for her to react with sympathy. At one point she cried out: ‘What is it? You want to be perfect?’ ‘Of course I want to be perfect,’ he thundered."

>"In the same year in which he made his confessions, Wittgenstein astounded the villagers of Otterthal by appearing at their doorsteps to apologize personally to the children whom he had physically hurt. He visited at least four of these children (and possibly more), begging their pardon for his ill-conduct towards them. Some of them responded generously…but at the home of Mr Piribauer, who had instigated the action against Wittgenstein, he received a less generous response. There he made his apologies to Piribauer’s daughter Hermine, who bore a deep-seated grudge against him for the times he had pulled her by the ears and by the hair in such a violent fashion that, on occasion, her ears had bled and her hair had come out. To Wittgenstein’s plea for pardon, the girl responded only with a disdainful, ‘Ja, ja.’ In reflecting upon the effects of his confession he wrote: Last year with God’s help I pulled myself together and made a confession. This brought me into more settled waters, into a better relation with people, and to a greater seriousness. But now it is as though I had spent all that, and I am not far from where I was before. I am cowardly beyond measure. If I do not correct this, I shall again drift entirely into those waters through which I was moving then."

I really relate to this intensity of guilt, cowardice, shame and moral perfectionism.

Does anyone relate to this?

It's so interesting to me that Wittgenstein felt a need to confess all his sins in such a manner before carrying on with his life.

>>17232271
>By what metric has it failed?
Liberalism, properly understood, has not failed, but rather it has been subverted by a combination of money, misuse of language, and outright lies. When you say liberalism nowadays, it effectively means oppression by an elite class who have and misuse the keys to power for their own ends.

Although nobody says things like in Orwell's 1984 like "freedom is slavery" people have done something more insidious that Wittgenstein actually predicted; in his posthumous work, Culture and Value, Wittgenstein posits a society that is totally dominated by a single religion. All the people have freedom of speech in this society, but they are incapable of thinking outside the box of this religion, because its language is so pervasive. What essentially happens, without anybody knowing it, is that words like "freedom is slavery" are not said, but the word freedom means slavery to the masters of the religion.

Arguably we saw this at the Capitol; notice how everyone condemned these people for trying to usurp "democracy." But "democracy" simply means "ruling class" in practice.

authors/philosophers you share a birthday with (and if not any, the closest birthday next to yours)

>>17131109
>The horrible truth is that philosophy cannot be refuted, or proven useless, without engaging in philosophy.
*Blocks your path*

>>17130054
Spinoza was a brainlet, and so was Hegel, and so was the dean of the University of Heidelberg, and so was the Rabbi of the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam in 1656, and so were his children, even unto the present day.

>>17129608
>You are the problem with philosophy
There is no problem

>>17010607
Read Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations, or watch this video. It's only 20 minutes, and it conclusively proves that philosophy is a gay lie, so you can get on with your life you lazy fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTgy3WCT0UU

>>17009074
wrong

>>17006062
>It is better
>Morals don't exist
>Contradiction?
Nope, just because morals don't exist doesn't mean I cannot express rational preferences & express those preferences with modifiers like good, bad, better, worse etc.

You can just fuck off with your sophistic language-game, peasant.

>tells philosophers to stop being vague and confusing
>philosophers continue to be vague and confusing
Is this why philosophy is dying?

>>14457984
>René Guénon ended philosophy
nope

there is only 1 person who accomplished this feat