/lit/ - Literature

>>21499990
Why would the blackpill be depressing?
Start with the Greeks.

>>21499990
If you don’t give a shit, why do you care about book recs? Just read… whatever?

>Start with the Greeks!!

Anyone who says this should at the very least be banned for 3 days for using an unfunny basically off topic meme. What they really deserve is to have their fucking eyes gouged out and a steel toe boot kick to the fucking face shattering their jaw into a million (painful) pieces for being a worthless subhuman faggot. Not even baiting right now. Anyone who says "start with the greeks" needs to kill themselves ASAP. Imagine repeating the same fucking meme from like 2010. Literally deranged autism tier

>>21499990
>>21499996
This
>>21500013
This is what happens when you don't start with the greeks.

>>21500013
classicsfags are terrible posters in general and always have been. Also OP da blaekpill is a meme and you should get over yourself

>>21499990
James and the Giant Peach

>>21499990
The Upanishads.

>>21499990
Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky)
The Stranger (Camus)
Whatever, Atomized (Houellebecq)
No Longer Human (Dazai)

>>21500044
The blackpill is just defined as whatever point of view the preponderance of evidence supports. There is nothing more to it, rejecting it is just rejecting the value of evidence.

Please post some books, thanks

>>21500013
That is the purest board culture we have. Frog posters should rope.

>>21500055
I got you
>>21500051

>>21500052
usually it comes with glossy depression popups and incel shit

>>21500076
That's unfortunate. I too wish the preponderance of evidence supported other conclusions, and that I could dismiss them out of hand with references to pop culture slang like "incel". I just take the truth as it comes.

>>21500013
Why does anyone say "Start with the Greeks"? It is because wherever there is philosophy, the Greeks have already considered it. Everything from the Egoism of Stirner:
>SOCRATES: A simple thing enough; just what is commonly said, that a man should be temperate and master of himself, and ruler of his own pleasures and passions.
>CALLICLES: What innocence! you mean those fools,–the temperate?
>SOCRATES: Certainly:–any one may know that to be my meaning.
>CALLICLES: Quite so, Socrates; and they are really fools, for how can a man be happy who is the servant of anything? On the contrary, I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this however the many cannot attain; and they blame the strong man because they are ashamed of their own weakness, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base. As I have remarked already, they enslave the nobler natures, and being unable to satisfy their pleasures, they praise temperance and justice out of their own cowardice. For if a man had been originally the son of a king, or had a nature capable of acquiring an empire or a tyranny or sovereignty, what could be more truly base or evil than temperance–to a man like him, I say, who might freely be enjoying every good, and has no one to stand in his way, and yet has admitted custom and reason and the opinion of other men to be lords over him?–must not he be in a miserable plight whom the reputation of justice and temperance hinders from giving more to his friends than to his enemies, even though he be a ruler in his city? Nay, Socrates, for you profess to be a votary of the truth, and the truth is this:–that luxury and intemperance and licence, if they be provided with means, are virtue and happiness–all the rest is a mere bauble, agreements contrary to nature, foolish talk of men, nothing worth.
To the relativism and subjectivism of Protagoras, of whom we have only a tiny fraction of the actual texts:
>SOCRATES: Well, you have delivered yourself of a very important doctrine about knowledge; it is indeed the opinion of Protagoras, who has another way of expressing it. Man, he says, is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not:–You have read him?
All the way down to Anaxagoras and his mirrors of Hume. The fact is that the Greeks still haven't been topped by any culture in philosophical output- and that's without access to the overwhelming percentage of lost texts. Even if we had access to those texts, the vast majority of philosophical knowledge was shared through lectures and oral poetry, as was the case with Plato. We know so little, and yet they still surpass us.

>>21500013
>>21500336
When an anon says "start with the Greeks" it's because, even if they lack the specificity of modern texts(owing again to the loss of the texts in question or their entire absence due to oral lectures) one still has much to gain from understanding their views. The Greeks are the branch that formed the entirety of western philosophy, and it's my unproven opinion that the last 2000 years of Western philosophy has been the gradual loss of philosophical wisdom. Just as Socrates and the likes spoke of the ancient views of relativism as a bygone and thoroughly refuted idiocy, I believe, or hope, that 500 years from now humans will look back on the enlightenment with disgust and exasperation for the depths that humankind could plunge.
I have sperged out too much. Now you know why /lit/ says "start with the Greeks." If you can't make it past the clarity of Plato, you're done for. You just aren't going to make it. You won't understand where every other western philosopher since has grown out of and you won't know if your entire pseud mindset was BTFO'd by an old man over two millennia ago. If, however, you have started with the Greeks and not pseuded your way through them with cliff notes and gay fucking youtube lectures, then you're free to continue with the full contentedness that you aren't entirely a pseud.

The Man's Search For Meaning
Also, I've read that the simple fact of you reading self-help books already contribute a lot for your mental well-being in general...

So maybe... start with the self help books

>>21499990
>In such a world we can wonder what horrors are in store, but we might not need to look too far for Ligotti shows us a universe that is dysphoric and nihilistic, one that is fascinatingly revealed in the story of The Clown Puppet, where the protagonist receives certain visitations from a puppet clown (agent of the Big Other?) at different junctures in his life. None of these strange encounters is every very revealing, instead they seem to be both banal and utterly absurd in their marked propensity to undermine any meaning whatsoever.

>The protagonist is working in a medicine shop one night when the clown suddenly appears handing him a small book, a passport - the passport of his boss, Ivan Vizniak. This intrusion surprises him because he had never thought that anyone else would become a part of the visitation. The puppet floats before him with its dead eyes hollowed out of some hellish mind, bound to strings that vanish in a blur above it in the ceiling where some invisible puppeteer of the abyss hides, withdrawn in his dark objecthood, while the clown puppet like some sensuous artifact of wood and string dances on the hollow thoughts of a mad god.

>Just as protagonist is about to lose his mind and do something rash, the puppet turns its head toward the back of the store where a curtain covers a small store room. The puppet moves off in that direction just as the proprietor who has been sleeping above raps his knuckles on the front door of the shop

>The protagonist assumed that he was alone, that he'd been singled out:

"Who knows how many others there were who might say that existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and had nothing behind it or beyond it but except more and more nonsense - a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense"
- Ligotti
The Clown Puppet

>>21500336
This is to sate my final bit of spergout about modern philosophy. Socrates, Plato, and the rest of the Greeks very clearly had to deal with the subjectivism, constant skepticism, and criticality which is so common again today, and although we only have fragmentary knowledge of the other side and not the full story here, we know that they understood the problem.
>when a simple man who has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things, which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-ceasing ebb and flow. That is quite true, I said. Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge–that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of realities.
It makes me think that there has been a cycle which ended around the time of Socrates and is now coming to a similar end in our era; that of complete nihilism, subjectivism, and relativism, represented now by enlightenment liberalism and then rebirth into "truth enlightenment."

>>21499990
I have pretty much lost all ability to start friendships with people and keep them going. It’s like I see through absolutely every deception, including my own deception, and as a result cannot really do these things I use to. It all seems so fake and superficial.

Nietzsche is the light out of the blackpill: life affirmation to the extreme, an overwhelming attack on nihilism and pessimism. Start with "The Gay Science." Learn to love your suffering; be proud that you endure. Good luck anon

>>21499990
I have zero respect for someone that uses x-pilled as a means to describe an opinion
How about you become grown up pilled and then get a life pilled

>>21500356
When you reach the level of true cynicism, if such a thing is possible, you will become unable to form relationships at all. Even when you find a starry-eyed innocent normie, the very act of withholding your cynical worldview is a form of manipulation that seeks to preserve the pleasure you experience from the innocence with which they hold the relationship. Everything becomes despoiled and rotten. All that remains is isolation.

>>21499990
There are no books for them, because if their state is irrevovable and they have zero hope on the horizon, then there's nothing which possesses value to them. They might as well just rope themselves.

>>21500013
lmao this nigga actually skipped the greeks, probably to read genre fiction

>>21500051
And Crime and Punishment to cure your depression

>>21499990
>'Until I Am a Mummy' by Shimada Masahiko
>The Blind Owl, Hedayat
>Schopnehauer, Mainlander, Zapfe

>>21499990

>>21500513
Buh buh buh buh based?

>>21500013
You obviously aren't well versed on the Greeks

>>21500377
I can't read German. No I refuse to use translation on anything.

>>21500742
In NEET's case this is actually justified. We'd probably be spared the majority of retarded posts about him if people had read him in original but oh well

>>21499996
nta, but which greeks?

>>21499990
Literally me. I'm so fucking tired of living. I've no friends and I only write shitty whinging threads on worthless online boards like this.

Wiish I were wealthy enough to opt out of living in this shitty world

>>21500742
based but learn german

>>21500984
Iliad and Odyssey, then Plato(although if you like history try Thucydides first). While reading Plato you can mix it up with Greek plays, Aristotle, and some Roman writings such as that of Lucius Seneca.

>>21501000
Already learning it in order to become the formidable chuddy. But I'm struggling a lot with the basics, especially the irregular verbs and the unpredictable declension patterns.