/lit/ - Literature

>>20955482
Good god he’s so stupid.
One thinks later or in between lines. A book is essentially like a conversation or better a one-sided letter correspondence with the author.

Repeating another person's (author's) mental processes implies that we fully and immediately comprehend whatever the author is saying, regardless of the language the author uses or the order in which the work is presented. That doesn't make any sense.

>>20955482
>At what point do you stop reading into other people's stories to appreciate your own?
When you become deluded enough to belive your own thoughts contain merit.

>>20955504
I think what Schopenhauer was trying to say was that by reading books we're influenced by the author's perspective. You don't necessarily have to how they necessarily tick to understand their opinions and simpler ideas conveyed in the novels. One could read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings without understanding his fascinations with allusions to his experiences of war, or perhaps his inspirations of Norse mythology to appreciate the underdog experience of Frodo's journey to Mordor.

>>20955495
I see where you're coming from, Schopenhauer can be quite grim with his writings, so perhaps this is a healthier outlook on reading.

>>20955482
He is right, but this quote is out of context. Just think about everything that you read, get back to reading when you are done with it.
You are basically asking how to read a book. There are lots of books on this subject and it depends on what book you are reading.
>>20955495
Schopenhauer said a lot of shit, but he is right on that one. OP just took it out of context. Schopenhauer said something like reading and not thinking about what you read. I bet Kierkegaard would agree with him on this too.

>>20955510
Why can't your own thoughts have merit? Why do you consider it delusion to believe in your own words and ideas? Isn't self-respect and trustworthiness important, even if we can learn a lot from the words of various authors throughout our lifetime?

>>20955552
Reading books about how to read books. That's quite an interesting conundrum, why not have a person to person, fleshed out conversation about it. But more widely, I was speaking or more than just the idea of reading a book, but the relationship between how books impact our self-awareness, whether negatively, or positively. Would you care to weigh in on this? Perhaps it is best to read, but not be the books we read?

The first restless Western nihilist

>>20955581
He meant that you can read yourself stupid, and he is right. If you read book after book after book, nonstop, you won't really think about it. Consider that you read a math book, if you don't work on the exercises, most of it is probably worthless.
This is the same with everything, if you want to get deeper than what is obvious, you should think about it.

The quotation is, as has been mentioned, out of context. But the answer is that great philosophers are both aware of and are actively trying to avoid this pitfall: Plato and Kierkegaard foremost among them. For anyone who has a deep (and I mean deep) understanding of Plato, I recommend the essay "Plato's Pharmacy" by Derrida. Although I went into it prejudiced against the French, I came out thinking that he's one of the few moderns that has actually taken Plato seriously. (Unfortunately, his ultimate conclusions don't follow and are misguided by — I assume — his own biases, but the process is great.)

If you take this challenge at face value, what's the alternative? Not reading? The accumulation of knowledge depends upon the reliable transmission of past knowledge throughout the generations.

>>20955619
I see. Thank you for answering my question. I am in agreement with your stance.

>>20955635
What about intuition, and Ideals? You don't need to read or write a word to know those? Sometimes, the most beautiful things in life don't need words to be written, though, I suppose most people who don't read novels could read newspaper articles, or websites discussing info like here on 4chan, or you could look up Wikipedia's sources or look up research papers formal and informal.

But as another anon said already, going deeper is to think for yourself about certain subjects you may read about, though with the rise of technology, people don't need to necessarily read to get ahead in life.

>>20955635
Actions speak louder than words, don't they?

>>20955559
Don't bother with him. He's a midwit, lowest of the low of all humans.

>>20955495
No, he's right. You're stupid for thinking that's a bad thing.

>>20955482
I go by both direct experience and the knowledge of others.

>>20955678
I see.

>>20955689
Moderation of both sides is a great idea.

>>20955552
The line should be something more like a warning against not thinking about what you read. Like "Don't speed though, wanker" So no, he's WRONG

>>20955686
No. You and he are WRONG. I dare you to make your case.

>>20955698
There's certain things we can only learn from an external source, and there are things we can only learn through direct experience.

>>20955703
Fair enough.

>>20955700
You said a book is like a one-sided conversation or correspondence. There's a synchronization of thought that happens when two people effectively communicate. Sharing information is to share thoughts, i.e. mental processes, as Schoppy puts it. If a person explains things to you in a lecture, strictly speaking he's sharing his mental processes, which you then 'repeat' by understanding or synchronizing your own thoughts to his. A book is similar to a lecture, as you pointed out, in that it resembles a one-sided conversation or correspondence.

>>20955700
No, he starts by criticizing some dude who would unironically read nonstop (he would pay people to read out loud of him). Read his parerga und prolegomena, it is a small text in it.

>>20955657
>What about intuition and ideals?
That's a great counterexample. Intuition (I assume you mean in an active sense, like "trusting your gut") is developed by life experience. Mistakes, sometimes grave ones, are often made while an individual searches for the right thing to do. Literature can act as a supplement here, simulating these experiences for the reader who is thus able to make decisions in a consequence-free zone. Well-written histories can highlight causal chains, leaving the reader to conclude whether the subject's choices were right or wrong. Moral philosophy can bring ideals into sharper relief, or else (if you disagree with it) hone your ethics by forcing you to argue in favor of your ideals and against the author's.

>The most beautiful things in life don't need to be written
True, but you can sometimes refine (or broaden) your appreciation for beauty by encountering it in literature. Not to mention that certain stories are themselves beautiful. But otherwise, I agree — there's no substitute for immediate apprehension of beauty or the sublime.

I hope you know that I'm not arguing for books to replace lived experience. I'm arguing that books can supplement gaps in a single individual's lived experience and can lead an active reader to sharpen their minds and souls against a textual whetstone. Again, merely technical writing has its own virtues that are not being discussed.

>>20955723
Not that Anon, but suppose that you could imagine yourself talking to the author after properly understanding their perspective. This be a conversation that was reciprocal, since you recreated a potential conversation with the individual by his mental processes which you learned from him.

>>20955730
There. Fine. A proper context. Thread quote is out of context junk.

>>20955740
I appreciate your worldview on books and experience mixed together. This is how it should be, where everyone should bring home some books from the library and read in order to live the examined life as Aristotle once touted, "The Unexamined LIfe is not wroth living" all while not necessarily scrupilously observing every single grain of sand on the beach, appreciating direct experience and the bigger picture alongside finer details which we can remember from the books that we cracked open to dare to be curious about something that interests us. Surely, the only people who tend to have trouble with this kind of balance tend to be the bookworms who read all day, but you're nonetheless correct, there's so much literature offers to uplift the reader's experiences in life, enriching their perspective, outlook, idea, pacing of life(especially today with how everything on the internet moves fast, where with writing, you set the pace of your own experience.

People speak about how this is out of context, but the line by itself speaks volumes, are we the author's words, or have we just merely observed and learned from the author's ideas, without fully developing them? I'd be one to say the latter.

>>20955784
Don't you mean, enveloping, instead of developing?

>>20955785
Yes, Precisely, thank you for the secondary clarification, kind sir.

>>20955482
My own thoughts are uniformly retarded and there's nothing you can do to force my to listen to them instead of filling my brain with other people's.

>>20955789
A retard can be intelligent. A retard is just someone whom thinks slowly. To call yourself retarded is to actually call yourself patient. Now isn't that fascinating?

>>20955779
Actually, Plato said that about the unexamined life.

>>20955800
Not particularly.

>>20955806
>>20955779
Guys, it was Socrates.
https://medium.com/@muditdeveloper/socrates-the-unexamined-life-is-not-worth-living-bebe9f36a19e

>>20955779
Well said, anon! I totally agree.

>>20955842

>>20955482
Deep