/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.9914753]

Does anyone else think that reading philosophy can lower the quality of your writing? I feel that after studying philosophy intensely throughout college, my understanding of the world is now so full of concepts, that it is more difficult to conceive of the world through certain aesthetics or phrases or feelings. I also feel that it is difficult to maintain a universality in my writing, because the problems that afflict my life are now very abstracted, and detached from the normal problems that people experience, or are normal problems experienced in a very different way, one that would not ring with other people and that seems to close myself off from connecting to any audience other than myself, due to my unconscious philosophical analysis of them. What do you guys think?

[Anonymous No.9914764]

>>9914753

I think you made this post quite nicely as a good little monkey, now go run back and tell your friends you posted here again (:

[Anonymous No.9914774]

>>9914753
>because the problems that afflict my life are now very abstracted, and detached from the normal problems that people experience

You need to read some Cavell. Also, as a philosophy major I couldn't disagree with you more. Which philosophers did you primarily read?

[Anonymous No.9914778]

>>9914764
I feel like I just got rekt, but I don't understand how lmao

[Anonymous No.9914782]

>>9914774
which cavell, and how to into cavell?

I studied analytic in school and read continental in my free time

[Anonymous No.9914806]

>>9914782
His deal is that philosophy is thinking about what regular people realize for a brief moment and discard quickly, and then meditating on those thoughts. He is also concerned with the concept of America and the American philosopher, so he writes a lot about film, in addition to others arts in general too. Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Emerson, Shakespeare, and Austin figure prominently in his work. Of course you can probably add all the pragmatists in there too. DFW apparently spent a lot of his short time at Harvard talking with him.

[Anonymous No.9914829]

>>9914782
here's a sample. Also, what analytics did you enjoy? About to embark on a Sellars/Mcdowell journey

http://tpp2014.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Cavell-Endgame.pdf

[Anonymous No.9914833]

>>9914753
Yeah, I completely agree. That's the reason Dante, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann and T. S. Eliot were so bad at writing. They simply read too much philosophy.
I implore you to stop reading philosophy now, it is dangerous. Imagine how disastrous the consequences of learning about the great questions of life would be!

[Anonymous No.9914858]

>>9914833
that's not what he is saying. His problem is that reading so much philosophy has installed a reductive heuristic to anything that he experiences. So instead of experiencing the world in an aesthetic way, the way a poet might, by trying to creatively name and interpret the world around him, he may instead be locked inside his head analyzing what a name is and trying to figure out whether or not it lays on the same level as a description.

[Anonymous No.9914933]

>>9914858
>reading philosophy can lower the quality of your writing
so that was what he was saying, and the examples prove that it is extremely improbable. There is no direct opposition between analysis and aesthetics, but a fruitful relation.

[Anonymous No.9914970]

>>9914933
I agree that they bear a fruitful relation. However, I think that it might also be harder for an analytical mind to produce aesthetic work, but when they figure it out, it usually superior. It runs the risk though of coming out too composed. I also don't think OP had writers in mind like Dostoevsky or Dante or Goethe (haven't read Mann so can't comment on him) whose philosophy isn't highly theoretical.

[Anonymous No.9916191]

>>9914753
I've wrestled with this problem too, anon. When i get out of a semester of school, after having written three or more final papers for philosophy classes, my creative writing suffers for a while. When you start saying characters' actions "entails X consequences", or that a character "derived x feeling" from his experiences, etc, it sounds jargonistic and unpoetical. Heidegger hurts my writing for a while afterwards too, because his interpretive schema (in Being and Time) is so potent and interesting and in its own way poetical that its difficult not to write on his terms. "The day revealed itself to be x" and "the book showed up to him as y" and so on. All this stuff sounds fine once in a blue moon, of course, but if you write like that too regularly the writing sounds constrained and unnatural, too technical, not resonant with real experiences, as there is an extra interpretive layer between the writer and the world that the reader can't help but pick up on and usually be turned off by.

However, you can shed yourself of these conceptual and interpretive shackles rather easily. Read a bunch of poetry and good fiction. Stuff yourself with it for a while. Read little philosophy. Gradually, you'll get back into a more literary mode of thinking and writing. When this happens, you'll find that your training in philosophy will have helped you clear up your thinking in a way that allows you to actually write much better than many without such an education. You will think more logically, set things in your creative works up more clearly, be able to make conceptually tight metaphors and similes, and allow characters to speak philosophically now and again if you want to switch into that rhetorical mode (I am a big fan of authors who have a more explicitly philosophical character or two in their works).

In short, you'll be fine in time. Unless you are planning on getting a philosophy PhD or something, in which case it might be slightly more difficult to shake.

[Anonymous No.9916244]

>>9914778

[Anonymous No.9916349]

OP get some Hegel in your life

[Anonymous No.9916431]

>>9914833
>That's the reason Dante, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann and T. S. Eliot were so bad at writing.

We were being serious in this thread and you pretend to play retarded

[Anonymous No.9916453]

>>9914753
Reading it should improve your ability to logically convey concepts and feelings. Maybe you're reading the wrong philosophy, or reading philosophy wrong, or something.

>Universality in literature

[Anonymous No.9916461]

>>9914970
Where he is going wrong then is writing 'to produce an aesthetic work'. The reason he can't write is because he is trying to play at being a writer without understanding what it means to write.