/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12443531]

Life-affirming books?

[Anonymous No.12443573]

[Anonymous No.12443577]

>>12443531

[Anonymous No.12443580]

>>12443531
The World as Will and Representation

[Anonymous No.12443633]

>>12443531
War and Peace

[Anonymous No.12443652]

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

[Anonymous No.12443809]

Pickwick Papers

[Anonymous No.12443834]

>>12443809
Just started this one a few days ago. An interviewer asked Harold Bloom what a good place to start in literature is - he said "The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens." I've been reading literature for years, but damn this is good and funny. So far it kind of reminds me of Don Quixote. Really fantastic stuff.

[Anonymous No.12443840]

Any mid - late Nietzsche before the Dionysus thing
Anna Karenina
Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum

>>12443580
I don't know if you're making a joke, but he really is life affirming in spire of himself. "The world is my idea, the world is my will" can be read in more than one way.

[Anonymous No.12443929]

>>12443531
The concept of "life-affirming" is inherently vague. Does not every view point affirm something about life in some way? There are no inherently valueless beliefs. Even the suicidal nihilist has something which he cannot let go of, which he points to within himself saying, "Look, this cannot be denied!" causing him to forsake all other forms of satisfaction. Evidently he is satisfied by the reasoning of some argument, or some belief, or conviction which he has that has persuaded him to such a degree that it swirls around him incessantly, whispering words to him which he cannot dispel. The sobbing father who has lost a child, who is subsequently consumed by a darkness and misery cannot be called a "life-denier", even if he writes some condemnation of it, calling it cruel or unfair; quite to the contrary, we would have to admit that his depression is tied to the fact that he very much affirmed something in life, the value, the spirit of his child which he found in it. The conception "life-affirming" is, again, deceptive, precisely because rarely do we affirm life itself, or everything which life holds, but rather, something particular, which in fact causes us to become antagonistic toward every other form of life. Only the ideal sage, who others would see as a madman, might affirm everything in life, every tragedy and transient pleasure, every man, woman, and child from the sweetest child to the treacherous killer. Ironically, this philosopher would be called a denier of life, most of all by the diligent mother who prizes her own child above every other, even to the point of hostility. Therefore, I say, the most "life-affirming" books would have to be those written by the wisest, which yet often taste bitter to us on account of our selfish will which does not want to sacrifice itself for the good of others, or the good of God, or the good of morality.

[Anonymous No.12443936]

Kant
Schopenhauer
Hegel
Nietzsche

[Anonymous No.12443939]

>>12443531
The Foundation for Exploration

[Anonymous No.12443964]

>>12443929
Really a shallow approach to the idea of "life affirmation." It's about how you value the entire cycle of desire and satisfaction, not particular desires and satisfactions within the cycle. The concept of "life affirmation" is vague to this person because he clearly does not understand it.

[Anonymous No.12443967]

>>12443929
tl;dr

[Anonymous No.12443988]

>>12443967
he knows what OP is asking for but would rather respond with deconstructionist platitudes

[Anonymous No.12443993]

>>12443964
I see you did not hesitate to reply after reading only the first two sentences of my post.

>>12443967
This board really is a travesty.

[Anonymous No.12444015]

>>12443573
i gotsa havea good meal

[Anonymous No.12444017]

>>12443929
You lost me at your image.

[Anonymous No.12444083]

>>12443993
No, I read it all. The "ideal sage" does the what you describe in negative. The "ideal sage" feels deep sympathy and compassion for all things because he knows suffering is the only necessary feature of life, if "sagacity" and "wisdom" are to retain any meaning. This, coupled with the knowledge that all things are only aspects of himself, he gives the appearance of "affirming the value of all life," when in reality he is only affirming the value of his own suffering. And a sage certainly does not affirm "every transient pleasure," that is solely the province of artists and is a place that most "wise men" throughout history have feared to enter. That the popular idea of what is "life affirming" is vague does not mean you should let this vagueness and confusion creep into your analysis of the concept itself, which you have by combining two incompatible aspects of life valuation in the sage; the affirmation of every pleasure on the basis of its "vitality" alone, and the voluntary renunciation of "selfish will" for the the good of the other. To say it's entirely a matter of taste solves this problem, but also properly destroys the idea of a historical sage or wise man.

[Anonymous No.12444137]

>>12444083
On the contrary, affirming the value of the lowliest ant, the place of each thing in regards to the whole, is not in contradiction with the renunciation of the selfish will--in fact, they correspond to one another. It is a misconception that only suffering can lead to compassion. The artist you describe, who wholly encompasses a thing in verse, even if it be a trivial pleasure, has in a manner transcended it; the true sage leaves this world, not with a feeling of despair but having attributed to it its whole worth, not merely as a machination of violence and suffering, but as truly containing positive value. Only in loving the world can we really let it go, like the father who sees his child off into independence. Do not think that the sage must condemn pleasure, nay, he must know it more deeply than any other. You falsely claim that the sage must fear it. He must have matured past it, seeing it now as a childish thing, a truth which can be found in the words of St. Paul. But this is not to deny its place among childhood.

[Anonymous No.12444167]

>>12443573
>>12444015

[Anonymous No.12444168]

>>12443577

he asked for books

[Anonymous No.12444180]

>>12443834
Lucky you
>'One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read Pickwick Papers – I can’t go back and read it for the first time’ Fernando Pessoa
It's a gentler, kinder, Don Quixote where nobody gets beaten in a blanket

[Anonymous No.12444187]

[Anonymous No.12444197]

>>12444137
I don't know what you mean by "only in loving the world" etc. What are "loving" and "letting go" in this context? You talk as if the sage can somehow "send" the material world "off into independence." But he is constantly confronted with it, must inhabit it at all times: he cannot treat it with the fond nostalgia of a long discarded pastime. He must perpetually, even in a state of dreaming, choose to follow or renounce a particular desire. If one has "matured past" material desire and found "higher," more thoughtful, pursuits, that's fine, that is a personal value judgment. But to frame it as proper wisdom and maturity is disingenuous. The sage in your conception still sees the material world as something to be overcome, something that "wise" people voluntary and unconditionally give up for the sake of something else. I can't see a person as actually wise or sagacious who believes that material desire is callow. All I see is the old Schopenhauerian ascetic in a new jacket, claiming now that his abstention from non-contemplative and non "moral" (i.e. abstraction-condoned) action is actually evidence of his love for it, rather than his disdain.

[Anonymous No.12444200]

>>12443809
I would've loved to live in the 19th century if I was an aristocrat such a comfy life

[Anonymous No.12444392]

>>12444197
To my understanding we are debating as to whether or not the sage loves the world or renounces it. I claimed that one can renounce it even though he cognizes its full value. For instance, a man can look upon the activity of his childhood with fondness, now liberated from the will, seeing how pleasures which are now trivial and simple to him yet fully absorbed him at that time. This is not to renounce them as evil or as merely suffering and pain—but to recognize that at various degrees of development, a person carries out the tendency of his inner nature to corresponding levels of sophistication. I fail to see, however, how this is not “proper wisdom and maturity” since I am not sure what else is. Once the sage has fully experienced this life, as a mixture of suffering and joy, seeing how each is connected with the other, he has developed as an identity, gained insight from his experiences, and is ready to “move on” so to speak, and this is to attribute to life a genuine purpose and place for him, a positive value, which is to affirm it the way he might affirm childhood as a necessary step to adulthood. He does not say that it was all suffering and all woe, for this would be to condemn friendship and truth as mere vanities, not to be valued over any other thing in life.

[Anonymous No.12444435]

[Anonymous No.12444554]

>>12444392
So a person ought to value truth and friendship over other things? He renounces the world because he loves it, but has a greater love? This is precisely the kind of valuation I associate with the immaturity and idealism of young adulthood, the reverence for reason, cause, justification, truth, that infects young men with the desire e.g. for warfare or the monastery. Wisdom can take the form of having a full comprehension of the contemplative aspect of life while renouncing that for the sake of material pleasure, i.e. an unflinchingly broad diversity of sense experience, even to the end of one's days; this is the wisdom of an artist, for artists. What is the immature stage in one sort of person will be the highest stage in another, and vice a versa.

But the fact remains that, even if I were to grant that this sage loves life in the way you say he does, it's a fundamentally colder and less immediate love than the artist has. His love, in attempting to step without the cycle, incorporates also an essential aspect of life denial.

[Anonymous No.12444699]

>>12444554
I see. You write very clearly now. Now we can talk about why a man should value one thing over another, and I think you accuse me of a subtle hypocrisy when I say that the sage loves all things but affirms with certainty that some things are childish and not worthy of the lover of wisdom and so forth. You mean to say that the artist is as justified in his work as the philosopher, and that he is perhaps even milder because he does not go to war or opt for tyrannical dogmas in the Church. This would, I think, be just the kind of antagonism towards other forms of life which I initially brought attention to in my first post.

It brings to mind a difficult question: when ought a man to yield and when ought he to fight? What is he fighting for or what is he yielding to? It is often said by masters that the one who yields overcomes, and the one who fights does damage to himself, and so forth. But in other places we read fine declarations of defiance against some particular enemy, as in Christianity, as in Greek histories, or in the ravings of the monk against decadence. Even Tolstoy, who championed the lowly, submissive laborer looked with contempt upon ceremony and idleness, which, as you say, are things in which others might find supreme dignity, like a courtly knight or an aimless yogi, respectively. The artist yields to the serenity of perception and yet cannot help but affirm something, as I also mentioned in my initial post. For every renunciation is an affirmation of something else and vice versa. Can I rightly claim, then, that the sage affirms all, or is this monstrous hypocrisy? Remember that I qualified the term sage as an ideal, for I believe, if it were possible, the truest genius would embrace all things if he could, and would not want to miss any detail of life or any element. He wishes to know the sensual revelation of the artist as well as the heroism and contemptus mundi of the battered knight. He would want to experience the plight of the the factory worker, the grime and the ache, as well as the formality of royalty and the court. In such an ideal, is there not an affection, a respect, a wish to know and to carry in oneself the significance of all things? To feel the depth of every sorrow as well as the peak of euphoria? Perhaps, finally, such a sage could overcome the duality of renunciation and affirmation, yet there would still be something left--and I say he has still yielded to truth, to identity and fraternity with all things and has in doing so become something more, something which is not caught in the tempest but has gone into it and transcended it. He does not sever himself from the world, but embraces it and yet becomes something entirely different.

[Anonymous No.12444786]

I have a question: what is the point of being life affirming if you will likely be happier as an Epicurean/Stoic?

[Anonymous No.12444814]

>>12444786
stoics aren't happy.

[Anonymous No.12444854]

>>12444699
Very "overmanish," this sage, with his going through and out. But the kind of wisdom I'm talking about transcends the desire to overcome, the desire for a better future, the vestiges of optimism. The kind of life affirmation I'm talking about in an artist is the kind of unattainable persuasion found in Michelstaedter; one has such foresight and hindsight that all time contracts into an "eternal present," a moral state in which nothing immediate is sacrificed for any kind of abstraction, that has gone beyond even the megalomaniacal fixation with transcendence that has strode haughtily through university halls for the past two hundred years. If this is the kind of wisdom you impute to the sage, I think we agree, it's only that what you call a sage I call an artist. The word "sage" has a lot of historical baggage and it is difficult for me to untangle what you consider a sage to be from the rigid definition given by a person like Epictetus, because it is hard for me to tell whether you're describing your theory on the inner state of the historical sage or describing a different ideal of sagacity entirely.

[Anonymous No.12444857]

War and Peace

[Anonymous No.12445105]

>>12444786
Stoics are actually just really bad buddhists and Epicureans who still live within society and access the internet are kidding themselves.

[Anonymous No.12445119]

>>12444814
Why not?

>>12445105
I'm talking about the historical ones.

[Anonymous No.12445222]

>>12444854
I am familiar with what you describe. It is not the mere prudence of, say, the Christian who looks for reward in heaven, in some future time. Nor is it the modern day conception of "living in the present" which to me seems like something closer to the dullness or carelessness of animal experience rather than any sort of higher living. I understand what you say about not sacrificing the immediate for the sake of abstraction, and you are right to point out the moral significance there. Weininger thought he recognized this very thing in the command of in the Gospels not to think of what one is to say until it comes by the Holy Spirit, since, for example, it is like dealing with your abstraction of a person rather than the real entity in the flesh. Clearly, in the former we are dealing with an uprooted fiction, like talking to ourselves and thus going in a circle, instead of addressing a living person and giving the whole depth of our consciousness to the being before us and then letting our heart speak to that.

Still, it takes work to get to this artistic state, as well as a kind of trust, which requires a consciousness above and beyond the mere sensations before us. My question would be, how is such a being constituted? I mean, clearly they must have a very powerful identity to be able to approach the immediate present which such integrity. This artist must have a power of understanding which matches his power of perception, and he must look upon the present not solely with an attentive mind, but with a knowing one as well which identifies with the content it receives, which embraces and respects it, as I said in my other post. I think the significance you place upon the contraction of time is a necessary specification as to what it is that my sage actually loves and embraces. If he addresses mere fantasies in his mind he is a Don Quixote, and not truly in union with the deeper reality. And yet, in order not to flinch from it, must he not respect it, and have the strength of character, the integrity to meet with it in a moral way? How can he do this if he discards the world as mere suffering, and not as positive value?

[Anonymous No.12445264]

[Anonymous No.12445455]

>>12445222
The moral state I mean is anti-moral, or less moral than you seem to be talking about. The moral is treated as a subordinate aspect of the physical and bodily. If one treats the moral as greater than the physical one will still end up making sacrifices to abstractions. But I am suspicious that we are "speaking thereof" since neither one of us seems to be able to describe these interior states with the conviction of experience.

[Anonymous No.12445482]

>>12443531
The Gay Science

[Anonymous No.12445564]

>>12445455
If I am to draw on personal experience I can only think of a state which I found myself in recently, and only for a short time. It was brought about by a thought of trust or perhaps more accurately, faith. This faith was not a looking forward but a sort of fearlessness, whereby I felt as though I could be anywhere in the world, and yet would fully embrace whatever was before me as it was. I felt as though I was without any grudge towards others, and that everything would happen naturally of its own accord without effort on my part. I felt as though I was entirely myself, and yet did not feel in the least that I had to protect my identity from any person or thing, in fact I could give myself entirely to it without fear of being unseated from this state of consciousness. I was fairly certain that my being in this way was precisely unreasonable, and that I ought to soon realize that I did indeed have things to fear and enemies to defend myself against, and so forth. I am not sure that this however is what brought me out of it, rather, I think what eventually interrupted me was a feeling of doubt which crept up, or rather a redundancy in my consciousness which appeared as a reminder that I was in fact in an unshakeable state, and this paradoxically, caused me to become confused as to whether I really was or not.

That is my personal experience and perhaps it is somewhat childish but alas it is all I have.

[Anonymous No.12446964]

>>12443531

Gandhi's Autobiography. Its kind of workmanlike in its writing style, but there's a genuine love for mankind that shines through and a sense of humility that pervades throughout.

[Anonymous No.12446969]

>>12444435
Yup

[Anonymous No.12447016]

>>12445564
Yes. That's the quivering perpetual moment of life that ablates all suffering, which really to me is nothing but a renewed and renewing faith in one's own ability to have knowledge, which is essentially irrational (feeling is the only sound basis for knowledge).

A ladybug just flew out of my lamp. Out of nowhere. It's the dead of winter, in a blizzard, and there is a ladybug flying around my house, trying desperately to find something to eat.

[Anonymous No.12447021]

my diary desu from now on :)

[Anonymous No.12447468]

>>12443929
Anonpai, random inquiry but are you the one who wrote that passage about the "scientist and the Christian" compared to the "mystic", and about the former "fighting or fleeing" when the truth "dresses differently"? If not, my mistake.

[Anonymous No.12447514]

>>12443531
The Transcendentalist. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman are all great.

[Anonymous No.12447545]

pic related

[Anonymous No.12447573]

[Anonymous No.12447629]

>>12447016
I am delighted to hear we have reached a concord. Ladybug, you say? I have always looked upon them as mild and unoffensive creatures. Perhaps a fitting representation for our conceptions. Adieu, friend.

[Anonymous No.12447634]

>>12447629
Fitting that I put some sugar in a Corona cap and left it out as a food dish, then. Enjoy the remains of your night of shitposting