Thread 24798988

According to Hesiod, the purpose of literature is to give men relief from their pain

>>24798988 (OP)
Reading philosophy and the Greeks just gives me mental pain.I beat myself up trying to understand political philosophy and metaphysics. I wish I was stupid and always stoned sitting by the side of a lake watching the sunset every night instead.

>>24798988 (OP)
does that only mean escapism? art is a conversation with the artist. fiction teaches you about the author - his own weaknesses and follies - and, since you must know that no failings are unique, you may be helped to acquire tolerance for them in others. if the novel comes off at all, the reader will accompany the writer in some parallel process of self-discovery.

>>24798998
Just smoke weed

>>24799025
>Just smoke weed
Yeah but it bothers me if I don't "get it." And I'll diagram and write out arguments etc. Feels like I left the oven on if i just read something I want to understand but don't

>>24798988 (OP)
Pull up the reference.

Of course it's escapism. Even non-fiction is hard pressed not to be a pack of lies. Those who have their noses buried in a book are not living. This passion is for the mentally ill. Both failure and success alike in the arts are sick and demented. It is not limited to literature. It takes a sick man to spend his days shaping stone into a breast, a depiction of rape, to paint hell. No healthy, reasonable person does this.
That the arts have been so heavily romanticized by their own self-fulfilling legacies is one of the greatest curses cast on poor mankind since his inception.

>>24799722
>Those who have their noses buried in a book are not living. This passion is for the mentally ill. Both failure and success alike in the arts are sick and demented. It is not limited to literature. It takes a sick man to spend his days shaping stone into a breast, a depiction of rape, to paint hell. No healthy, reasonable person does this.

'... what is supposed to be beautiful just because it is alive, is for that reason already what is ugly. The concept of life in its abstraction, to which recourse is made here, is by no means to be separated from what is repressive, relentless, truly deadly and destructive. The cult of life in itself always amounts to that of these forces. Whatever the expression of life may mean, from brimming fertility and the frenetic drives of children, all the way to the competence of those who cobble together something correctly and the high spirits of the wife, who is idolized because appetite shows in her so unreservedly – all of this, taken absolutely, has something of the taking away of the light from others, of what is possible, in blind self-perpetuation. Rampant health as such is always already sickness. Its antidote is sickness which is conscious of itself, the delimitation of life itself. Beauty is such healing sickness. It arrests life and thereby its decay. However if one denied sickness for the sake of life, then the hypostatized life passes over, by virtue of its blind separation from the other moment, into what is destructive and malevolent, insolent and self-aggrandizing. Whoever hates what is destructive, must hate life along with it: only what is dead is an allegory of what is living and undistorted. Anatole France realized something of this, in his enlightened way. “No,” says the otherwise mild-mannered Mr. Bergeret, “I would rather believe, that organic life is the special illness of our unlovely planet. It would be unbearable to think that there is nothing but eating and being eaten throughout the endless universe.” The nihilistic antipathy in his words is not merely the psychological but also the material precondition of humanity as utopia.'

>>24799733
>>24799733
the quaint irony of preserving and arresting beauty to, what is effectively a different style of digestion for those destructive living is unmistakable.
in any case, it's as if this writer was brought up in some place where the immortal soul had never been so much as mentioned, and as such, i feel more sorry that they likely passed away in this ignorance than impressed by what he has to say.

>>24799722
Rousseau was just a contrarian chud

>>24799749
Wouldn't know. Reading philosophy is for the birds.

>>24798988 (OP)
yes. i used to be a decently growing content creator. then i got into books and just pretty much stopped. books are too good bros...

Everything is escapism, you breed and then you wait for death.

genuinely baffled as to why are people on a literature board if art isn't an important source of meaning in their lives. is this why every thread is so bad?

>>24799768
do you even realize how much one must adore art to even become aware of how evil and fucked up it is?
i'll bet you still haven't figured out that some folks hold directly contradictory and hypocritical beliefs which inform their identities on an axiomatic level.
please, try to think just a little?

>>24799771
>do you even realize how much one must adore art to even become aware of how evil and fucked up it is?
to me this doesn't sound like taking love of art to its furthest extreme, but giving up halfway, losing faith in your own consciousness of art in the face of the overpowering rationality the world imposes, and letting your subjective experience fall back into purely subjective experience, a compartmentalised part of your personality instead of the experience of an objective contradiction that contains the secret power by which it will overcome itself. but the way you've phrased the question means that if i don't agree with you it can only be because i don't love art enough to have had these mysteries revealed to me!

>>24799795
i'm sorry but you've made quite the stinker here, i think you should try to simplify what you're saying down to a frame which can actually wear the trappings you attempted to hang on it.

and yes, i was insinuating that you don't know what loving art means. i'll give you a little example to help you on your way.
a woman falls in love with a man, she penetrates to his deepest thoughts and desires only to find that he is a psychopath, a murderer. the only way she could come to know this is through the patient observation of the man, patience afforded by love.
i think this should help you quite a bit, though, as i have made quite clear, stubborn refusal in the face of truth is quite human.

>>24799755
Sounds like a net gain. The world is awash with “content” but how much of it does any good for anyone? Knowing nothing of your personal circumstances, maybe it’s better that you are communing with the human soul through literature instead of churning out time wasting slop for more people to find oblivion in.

>>24799053
Try watching some Youtube videos that explain the basic arguments?

everything is escapism to some degree

>>24798988 (OP)
Hesiod was a funny dude. But what isn't cope? It's all cope. That's not much of a mark against literature.

>>24800067
Not him but youtube videos on philosophy are usually way too superficial. Sometimes they don't even get the ideas they're trying to explain at all.

>>24798988 (OP)
Anything can be escapism, its entirely dependant on your approach.

>>24799763
Just like me (except the breeding)!

It entirely depends in what you are reading. If you read the principles Aristotles detailed in his Poetics he claims all good art will inevitably be a mirror of the world and should strive to be as reasonably close to it as possible, or if the writer takes a more fantastical type of approach he should strive for internal and external consistency at least
Deep down literature and art are capable of describing reality better than science ever could strive for. No one looks at other humans and sees a pile of hormones, molecules and organs, we see a soul there and project our depiction of what that soul is on them. It's why impressionism and expressionism are more realistic than hyper realistic artwork, because they depict the metaphysical curls and emotions we feel while looking at or experiecing something, our world inevitably distorts itself into an emotional mess, places can be majestic or pathetic depending on your mood that day. Thus the most expressionist and honest type of literature that attempts to depict reality in it's rawest form according to the artist will never be truly escapism, because you're not creating a new reality, it will always be a mirror of it through which the reader can reason himself wih the reality around him, how many times has reading a otherwise depressing book with a cast composed of sinners, schizoids and dickheads made you ultimately feel a little bit more at peace with the world?
Genreslop and booktokslop are almost always just pure escapism and suffer from turgid arsenine robotic prose, it's no wonder those authors are worried AI might replace them because ChatGPT's writing skills are jusr a flowerless and impotent as theirs

>>24802521
>tranime
Didn't read a single pixel

>>24802521
good post

>>24802521
slop lets people pretend escapism is worthwhile because it replicates most popular tropes, genre conventions and story structures, ones that are well-worn and do not require much thought. it's still a kind of representation of the author's mind, it just reveals it to be a barren, capital-driven place.

i can't get over the kind of perversion practiced by readers who wish to stay in pretend worlds and ignore the agency of their authors, forcing them to serve the Plot. all the values that to us make a text interesting, its unique representation of an individual mind, is something publishers despise.

What am I supposed to be doing if everything is escapism? Is nothing worthwhile? When no longer struggling to survive what's the point of surviving in the first place? To do what makes you happy? Isn't that just hedonism?

>>24803067
If there's nothing you're supposed to be doing, then escapism is not a thing. Activities generally considered "escapist" in nature are only actually so if you're engaging with them to avoid thinking about the fact that you're running away from something you KNOW you ought to be doing.