Is it really a good idea to start with the Greeks? Maybe the Indians would be better?

Maybe? The Bharatiyas are peak philosophy/literature.

>>24532468 (OP)
Why?

>>24532531
The Indians deeply influenced the Greeks but the Greeks did not influence the Indians.

>>24532586
So?

>>24532586
I’m pretty sure Indians only began making statues of their gods after encountering the Greeks. Early Hinduism was iconoclastic IIRC.

>>24532586
During the Alexandrian period, perhaps, but not "deeply," and Greek philosophy down to that point tended to be influenced by either engagement with Homer or Hesiod, or by Persian, Egyptian, or Babylonian mathematics and astronomy.

>>24532468 (OP)
Paraphrase of Hegel -“the Greeks are essential but the easterners (mongols, Indians, Persians) are only an exercise in erudition.”

>Is it really a good idea to start with thr Greeks?
Yes, and no.

If you just want to have fun reading books and coming across interesting stories, then you can go a lifetime without touching a single dialogue by Socrates or a play by Aeschylus.

However, if you wish to seriously engage with any of the branches of humanities (Literature, art, anthropology, history, politics, sociology and most importantly, philosophy), you will eventually land at the Greek's temple, and you'll have to go through them. They set the example and standard for most, if not all of the western canon.

Philosophy starts and ends with the Greeks, everything that came after was merely the footnotes of Plato and Aristotle.
Tales as old as time, such a man against the state, can be found in the story of Demosthenes.
The rebutal for communism existed in Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae, millennia before Marx existed
>The poor will no longer be obliged to work; each will have all that he needs, bread, salt fish, cakes, tunics, wine, chaplets and chick-pease
>But who will toil the land?
>The slaves
Appreciation for beauty, art and sports took their roots in Greece.
The entirety of political theory/philosophy can be inferred from Thucydides' Peloponnesian war, including the effects of war, the reasons for it, hell, the entire history of the American colonies and their revolutions is found in Athens and the relationship towards her neighbors.
In Poetics, Aristotle took a massive shit on works that amount to nothing but intellectual masturbation and the opposite, which is nothing but slop of the lowest degree, which is still valid today.
The Greek plays encapsulate the chaotic nature of life through the gods, if you remove them from the equation you still have the underlying theme: Life can be incredibly, if not ridiculously unfair at times.
Epicurus coined natural selection way before evolution was a theory.
The Greeks offer a plethora of insight into every aspect of life, there isn't a single study of a certain art that isn't enhanced by an analysis of Greek works and history.

>>24532789
>you can go a lifetime without touching a... play by Aeschylus.
You could live your whole life without wiping your ass either but you probably should at least consider it.

>>24532789
But isn't it naive to believe that it started with the Greeks when there are far more ancient civilizations that the Greeks surely must have borrowed from?

>>24532650
sybau

>>24533088

"Only with Greek philosophy do we make our beginning in the proper sense for what came before was merely preliminary. We refrain from speaking of other philosophies- Mongolian, Perisan or Syrian philosophy, to talk about such things is only a display of erudition."

There's a large footnote here where it says Hegel discusses these topics elsewhere but didn't hold them in particularly high regard, merely relegating them as Shamanism.

>>24532468 (OP)
>starting
cringe

>>24533091
I don't give a single fuck what Hegel thought about anything

>>24533077
You are right to believe that it's naive to assume it started with the Greeks, but the reason why we can claim so, is because the Greeks are among the few that we know existed, and we have tangible proof of it.

Take the pyramids of Egypt for example. Any conversation surrounding the pyramids eventually lends itself to theories about aliens and whatnot, because they're shrouded in such mystery, that most people can't fathom that the pyramids weren't built by a superior race of hyper-advanced aliens, but rather by humans like you and me, who were smart enough to understand mathematics, logistics, and architecture and apply them.
Such an issue doesn't happen with the Greeks, simply because we have records of their works, their existence and their discoveries. Though I still have to give it to you, the Greeks must've borrowed a lot from other civilizations, but what remained of them is what the Greeks wrote about them.

>>24533101
t. revels in useless displays of erudition

Explain to me how much use is in memorizing the several hundred peaceful and wrathful deities, their names as well as attributes.

useless erudition is based

>>24533088
Dilate

>>24532586
Indian metaphysics probably isn't real. Despite so much written about Eastern faith systems, we know very little about them. A lot of what we know has been through the anthropological endeavors of the British in the East. "Hinduism" is also a recent invention when in reality it's like a lot of religions which we systematized with our Western world view, and tried to jumble it all into one coherent thing. That's why people believe Easterners have "Greek" counterparts when in reality it's just our projections

>>24532605
>making statues of their gods
Isn't Egyptian and Mesopotamian (or West Asian in general) statuary older than Greek though?

>>24533104
>we have records of their works
The Indians have good texts as well even if they were originally orally preserved. The Rig Veda goes back more than 3,500 years. The earliest Upanishads are also more than 3,000 years old. The Buddha predates Aristotle and Plato by two hundred years. And when the suttas were first set down in written form was probably around the same era that Aristotle and Plato was alive. And those Greeks were not older than Confucius and Lao-Tse either.

>>24532468 (OP)
>sar do not redeem the samsara do not redeem

>>24533108
>memorizing
Brainlet detected
Better luck next life buddy

>>24533861
This is shakra the Buddha body of emanation and the 47th wrathful deity of the pantheon

He exists in the throat chakra and holds a bloody vajra and a severed goat testicle which symbolizes enlightenment.

>>24532468 (OP)

>>24533091
>There's a large footnote here where it says Hegel discusses these topics elsewhere but didn't hold them in particularly high regard, merely relegating them as Shamanism.
That’s a very ignorant take, it seems he only had incredibly superficial knowledge of eastern texts

>>24532468 (OP)

>“Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears in comparison with the abundant light and vigor of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun—faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished."
- Friedrich von Schlegel (1772 – 1829)

>"When we read with attention the poetical and philosophical monuments of the East, above all, those of India, which are beginning to spread in Europe, we discover there many a truth, and truths so profound, and which make such a contrast with the meanness of the results at which the European genius has sometimes stopped, that we are constrained to bend the knee before the philosophy of the East, and to see in this cradle of the human race the native land of the highest philosophy."
- Victor Cousin (1792 – 1867)

>"It is impossible to read the Vedanta, or the many fine compositions in illustration of it, without believing that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India."
- Sir William Jones ( 1746 – 1794)

>"I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood."
- Max Muller (1823 – 1900)

>"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial…"
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)

>(The Bhagavad Gita is) "The most beautiful, perhaps the only true philosophical song existing in any known tongue ....perhaps the deepest and loftiest thing the world has to show."
- Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 – 1835)

>"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)

>"In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life -- it will be the solace of my death. "
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860)

>>24533939
Brahma wisdom

>>24532468 (OP)
>Maybe the Indians would be better?
no offence but just go compare the best of Indian society with the worst society coming from the west and your intuition will tell which path is better. we have nothing to learn from indians.

>>24533437
Maybe, but that’s not really relevant to what I said.

>>24533401
> Hinduism" is also a recent invention when in reality it's like a lot of religions which we systematized with our Western world view, and tried to jumble it all into one coherent thing
Even before western influence there were texts written by Hindus like doxographies (like Sarva-Darshana-Sangraha and others) that clearly linked all the various schools of Hindu thought as all being followers of the Vedas, even if only nominally, in contrast to non-Vedic schools like Buddhism and Jainism. The idea that nobody in India saw Hinduism as being united in any way before the British is one of those dumb false talking points that people read online somewhere and then they just repeat it thoughtlessly without knowing the details of the actual situation.

both are pagan and fake.who cares.

>>24533939
>>24533960
Hmm who to believe: a frog poster or racist joker?

>>24533998
> both are pagan and fake.who cares.

“This self was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew itself only as "I am Brahman." Therefore it became all. And whoever among the gods had this enlightenment, also became That Brahman. It is the same with the seers (rishis), the same with men. The seer Vamadeva, having realized this self as That, came to know: "I was Manu and the sun." And to this day, whoever in a like manner knows the self as "I am Brahman," becomes all this universe. Even the gods cannot prevent his becoming this, for he has become their Self. Now, if a man worships another deity, thinking: "He is one and I am another," he does not know. He is like an animal to the gods. As many animals serve a man, so does each man serve the gods. Even if one animal is taken away, it causes anguish to the owner; how much more so when many are taken away! Therefore it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this."

- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10

>>24534030
At last I see, the Canaanite volcano/storm deity Yahweh wished to keep me in ignorant subservience to him, like a pet animal. But now, thanks to your post, I have been unshackled from my bondage and I no longer wish to be a pet of such trickers, I have overcome my former condition and have realized the Universal Self.

Om

>>24532650
Based Hegel as always.

>>24533990
Concrete structure becomes crystallized where there was none, where it was more syncretic and maybe idiosyncratic, and animistic, and polytheistic: it gets all jumbled up together and this starts to get systematized as "Hinduism". The efforts that were done in attempting to codify this stuff created a methodology that the native populations then pick up and use and match them up with "matching narratives" or whatever's "equivalent" or perhaps compatible they might say with western ones or Christian ones.

>>24533990
Concrete structure becomes crystallized where there was none, where it was more syncretic and maybe idiosyncratic, and animistic, and polytheistic: it gets all jumbled up together and this starts to get systematized as "Hinduism".

>>24532650
>Hegel said it so it is right

>>24533960
Might as well compare ancient india to modern greeks

start with greeks is a meme. It is the single most harmful meme to come out of /lit/, and has without a doubt filtered thousands out of a bright literary journey.

Imagine if every time a /g/ poster asked about programming he got spammed with
>start with logic gates
>start with transistors
>start with x86
This shit only works if you are a smart, autistic boy aged 10.

The real answer is work backwards. Read something relevant, easy to read, that personally interests you. If you are not a pleb and get stuck in a local optimum of reading slop, you will inevitably find yourself reading the classics, the Bible, the greeks, etc because they are the foundation of everything that came ofter.

So I'm declaring a new anti-start-with-the-greeks movement on this board. This sabotage won't go on, I started reading and luv it, and frens cannot keep being misled by a bunch of retarded spergs and their stupid memes

Everyone smart and worth listening to read the Greeks. There's your answer.

>>24534755
>where it was more syncretic and maybe idiosyncratic, and animistic, and polytheistic
That’s also wrong, the major schools of Hindu metaphysics/theology all consolidated and were expounding a henotheistic type of monotheism many centuries before any meaningful European contact.

The major Vedanta schools (Vaishnavist and otherwise) and the major schools of Tantric Shaivism were all writing systematic treatises on their metaphysics and how there is one Ultimate Supreme Deity centuries before colonization of India.

The Vaishnavites and Shaivists and the first schools of Vedanta were already doing this throughout the first millennium AD, and some of the later Vedanta schools did so from the 11th-14th centuries roughly, but this all took place before Europeans had any non-negligible impact on India.

You are just throwing random buzzwords at the wall and have no idea what you are talking about.

Lastly, a certain level of syncretism or the synthesis of different views together is naturally found in almost all Hindu thought, but the trend was actually the opposite of what you claim, i.e. as the centuries passed more there was an increase and not a decrease in the ideas of different schools being combined as for example Vedantists using Nyaya concepts in debate or utilizing the methods of Yoga in their practices.

>>24533960
Indians are the most successful highest-earning demographic in the West. Their problems in their own country have to do with overpopulation and overcrowding combined with unfavorable geography for world trade. Also, they were robbed of trilions by the British who funded their own Industrial Revolution by deindustrializing India.

>>24532468 (OP)
>Is it really a good idea to start with the Greeks?
For what ? If you want to understand philosophy as a whole historically then yes it's important to understand them, because they influenced all of the pre-modern world (christian thomism uses Aristotelian metaphysics, virtues being transcendental, political philosophy being structured around virtues and souls etc).
However if you simply want to read about philosophy in its modern discourse, then no, start with Hume and the contractualists before advancing chronologically.

>Maybe the Indians would be better?
No their philosophy is hermetic to outside sources and, while interesting, is fundamentally reliant on the religious aspect. Iirc, the few excerpts I read ressembled scholasticism in their attempts to reconnect their systems with brahman.

But imo, >>24534829 is right. Start with something that you like or interests you rather than autistically read your way through chronologically. I know that /lit/ made it sound cool, but it's futile in reality.


>>24533401
No it all more or less originates in the Veda and in their collection of immemorial texts and poems

You start with the Greeks because they fought and died defending the western lands you mooch off of.

>>24532605
They had statues before, as they were already in the beginning of the Puranic phase of hinduism (during the Vedic period they were indeed iconoclasts and focused their worship on songs and domestic sacrifice).
But yeah, greek contact really made indians step up in their game. The peak of hindu sculpture happens a few centuries after the macedonian conquests.

>>24533108
>thinks eastern philosophy is about mythology
Well you just proved the point that you don't know shit about eastern philosophy lmao.

Abstain from this conversation until you get at least the very basics.

>>24535043
The British figured out how to get goods out of India for trade with the rest of the world and they industrialized without your tea plantation by scraping their own forests clean. Cope some more, jeet.

>>24532468 (OP)
That cup is Roman.

>>24535009
I don't doubt they did any of that, but is it fair to call it Metaphysics? Menander writing about Buddhism -- is he writing about purely Hinduism/Buddhism or is he writing about Greek philosophy?

Hinduism, unlike the Abrahamic religions, is not a single religion. It's an umbrella of several different religions, all coexisting and cohabitating and sharing the same pantheon of Gods. A Hindu from the Northern Parts of India will have very little in common with the Hindus of Southern India, as their "Ultimate Supreme Deity" (so to speak) is totally different. Think of it like how Spengler viewed the mathematics of each cultures as different and unique, and thus incomparable. This results in Hinduism being an incredibly, diverse, and fascinating study. However, it brings with itself its own problems.

Another thing about Hindu culture that we get confused about is the caste system. The traditional western conception of the Caste system is a kind of pyramid. King at top, then the nobles, then commoners, etc. The problem is, much like about Hinduism, the caste system isn't that simple. The divisions aren't as clear, and there aren't 4 castes; there are millions. There are millions of different castes, all interacting with each other in a totally different way.

India, for all its religious and caste diversity, is an extremely linguistically diverse country. Several states, like Maharashtra (the state where Mumbai is) are formed around said linguistic lines. The Indian government tried to fix the caste issue by abolishing untouchability and adding an affirmative action policy for historically oppressed groups, but there are just so many and before you know it it got really messy, really quick.

tl;dr - how can we say for sure that we actually truly understand what it was they wrote about when they all have different ideas about shit, and most of our sources come from recent translations? What there is now for Hinduism is so separated from an original Vedic faith by thousands of years. Much has changed in that time imo

>>24535203
>I don't doubt they did any of that, but is it fair to call it Metaphysics?
Yes it clearly is, they write at length about many of the same topics that are focused on in western Greek metaphysics, i.e. different types of causation, the nature of the soul, the nature of God and God’s relation to the world, the nature of time and relations, the nature of reality and falsehood/unreality etc.

>Hinduism, unlike the Abrahamic religions, is not a single religion
Unless you are begging the question by using a convoluted and idiosyncratic definition of ‘religion’ then that’s not really true. The major Hindu schools share the same core base of scriptures even if some schools add additional ones, the same pantheon, the same cosmological and metaphysical concepts.

>A Hindu from the Northern Parts of India will have very little in common with the Hindus of Southern India, as their "Ultimate Supreme Deity" (so to speak) is totally different.
This is factually untrue in many cases since the different schools of Hinduism formalized and spread all across India and adhere to a mostly standardized doctrine, Sanskrit was their lingua franca which meant that intellectuals and educated peoples from every corner of India were reading the same texts and learning the same doctrines even if these were additionally translated into texts written in a local vernacular. The temples in southern India of a given sect will read the same Sanskrit texts that lay out the foundation of their beliefs as a temple of that same sect in northern India.

>hurr durr its diverse so we cant understand it
dont make me laugh

>>24535146
The Romans started with the Greeks and look what happened to them

>>24535416
their real fault was forsaking their ETRVSCAN heritedge for the gr**ks

>>24535378
>Sanskrit was their lingua franca
About that, much of ancient Sanskrit had been lost and untranslated by Indians until the British and Germans took an interest. Even then, only a few people know the language.

>hurr durr its diverse so we cant understand it
>cant understand
Not quite. I said they are all different and can't be one same thing

>>24535203
>an umbrella of several different religions
Frankly I think you're underselling that. The shiva that vaishnavans worship looks like the same guy that shaivans worship, but they might occupy entirely different cosmological roles depending in which particular schools you are comparing. One shaivan might consider shiva to be the supreme being, while one vaishnavan might consider shiva to be part of a sort of triumvirate that is lesser to a supreme being. Krishna might go somewhere near the top of the hierarchy or somewhere near the bottom depending on that particular guy's sect.
But both those guys would still put "Hindu" on a census. If Europe was like India in that regard we would still have cathars and Arians at the Christian table. Hell that anaology doesn't even really do it justice. If European religion was like Indian religion their would be people worshipping Jesus as a fleshy incarnation of Dionysus calling themselves Christian and praising Zeus during eucharist or something. Not that I'm espousing one world view I don't especially care, but the sheer variety of beliefs that fit under the "hindu" banner make it barely qualify as a religion in Western terms. It's a sort of category of religions that get along surprisingly well that was made up to politically separate native Indian faiths from foreign ones.

>>24535508
>About that, much of ancient Sanskrit had been lost and untranslated by Indians until the British and Germans took an interest.
That’s complete bullshit. There is no source for that claim and endless evidence that refutes it. Education in Sanskrit was a pre-requisite for anyone undergoing serious education. At every temple of practically every major sect and certainly every Vedanta school, the monks studied Sanskrit and wrote texts in Sanskrit addressed to a pan-Indian audience. The founder of each Vedanta school wrote their texts in Sanskrit and to even read the main works of the founder of their sect the monks had to know Sanskrit. It was no different from educated European members of the Church needing to learn Latin in order to read the Bible. We have records of Sanskrit texts being written in every corner of India in every century down to the present day.

Studying Nyaya was considered a pre-requisite for engaging in serious dialectical argumentation and Nyaya texts were largely all written in Sanskrit for example, but this is also true of e.g. hermeneutics and various other topics.

What you may be thinking of is that there was some smaller libraries of texts sitting around in some temples and that nobody went and took a comprehensive survey of those texts and categorized each of them until Europeans did, but that’s not the same as Sanskrit itself dying out or not being studied.

>Not quite. I said they are all different and can't be one same thing
You never provided any criteria that would justify such a claim or explained what criteria you were holding to in saying that. Despite enormous variety, all the different Hindu sects profess allegiance to the Vedas and source their ideas in the Vedas in some way, they have the same pantheon and the same set of shared metaphysical concepts (Atma, karma, rebirth, moksha, the gunas, prakriti etc). I have yet to see why that should not be considered one religion.

>>24535693
Was it all on palm leaf?