In order to understand Ancient literature...

lol this board is shit

This. You'll re-read particularly good books again later anyway.

>grab a book
>read it
>rinse and repeat

That's like watching a new film by a certain director without previously having seen his earlier films.

No it isn't you tardo, it's like watching "O Brother, Where Art Thou" without being familiar with The Odyssey

>In order to understand "modern" philosophers such as Derrida
Derrida is not a 'philosopher'. He's a charlatan.

hehehehe! I like you.

What exactly should you know/read before Pynchon (that isn't "know everything")?

>projecting this hard
>stay pleb
Start with the greeks OP

>The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twentieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify, let alone quote, even the central biblical or classical passages which not only are the underlying script of western literature (from Caxton to Robert Lowell, poetry in English has carried inside it the implicit echo of previous poetry), but have been the alphabet of our laws and public institutions. The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology, to the Old and the New Testament, to the classics, to ancient and to European history, have become hermetic. Short bits of text now lead precarious lives on great stilts of footnotes. The identification of fauna and flora, of the principal constellations, of the liturgical hours and seasons on which, as C. S. Lewis showed, the barest understanding of western poetry, drama and romance from Boccaccio to Tennyson intimately depends, is now specialized knowledge. We no longer learn by heart. The inner spaces are mute or jammed with raucous trivia. (Do not ask even a relatively well-prepared student to respond to the title of `Lycidas', to tell you what an eclogue is, to recognize even one of the Horatian allusions and echoes from Virgil and Spenser which give to the four opening lines of the poem their meaning, their meaning of meaning. Schooling today, notably in the United States, is planned amnesia.)

>implying working class people ever knew that shit

Why would anyone care?

The only shit worth reading is The Bible, Montaigne, and Shakespeare anyway.

It is extremely hard. It basically requires a life of complete leisure, the will to spend your free time constantly reading, thinking, and writing, a fair amount of intellectual ability, and the desire to know truth more than confirm various ideologies you have because you identify with them. It is a gargantuan and basically impossible task that you have to spend decades at to even come to useful frameworks to use for your theories, though the seed is often present in some form at a fairly early stage.

Kill yourself.

Exactly, it just doesn't work.

kek

yeah m8 one time I crammed my head full of bourgeois culture while living on the sweat of better men than myself too

j/k I am a self-educating proletarian and it's pretty good. Every book is a weapon in the revolution

>In order to understand Ancient literature, you need to get an edition with notes
>In order to understand "modern" philosophers such as Derrida and such you first need to read them carefully
>In order to fully grasp Ancient Greek philosophy you can look for clarifications in literally any philosophy textbook
>In order to understand Joyce, you need to accept the allusions are part of an aesthetic and do not all need to be unpacked
>In order to understand Pynchon, you need to understand he is writing intentional surrealism and not be intimidated by mock science played for laughs or used as the foundation of literary metaphor

i'm sorry you couldn't find the cultural capital you came looking for
back to /tv/ now please ...

that's all literally me

hail satan

And once you actually do know something, you're in your 50s or your 60s and it's too late...

Goethe wrote the majority of Faust 2, the superior Faust (albeit less accessible), in his 80s

I mean, you're right about the Greeks at least. But it is important to have an understanding of the background of authors, and a lot of the references are important.

You can read and understand a lot of any philosophy based text without getting the allusions and references, but to fully understand what's trying to be conveyed, you do need to know that stuff.

he was brutal, germanic self-made intelectual

I didn't even know there's the second Faust, how uncultured am I?

You dont have to have any prior knowledge of books to enjoy a book. It doesnt matter what inspired the material, all that matters is the material itself. References and knowledge are for niggers and degenerates. If your a human being with an imagination you should enjoy literature on your own terms.

High-Schools never teach it because it's full of Greek references and elements, you'd have to study all of that beforehand, it would take forever

He did have a ton of leisure, time and a comfy life on account of being best buddies with the Grand Duke of Saxony - as long as he kept living in Weimar he could count on the Duke providing for him financially... I'm jealous.

>Appreciation of the work often requires an extensive knowledge of Greek mythology, and it is arguably one of the most difficult works of world literature

holy fuck

Goethe took the "start with the Greeks" meme seriously and never stopped

Read his Iphigenie auf Taurus, that one's great and pretty understandable without much knowledge about Greece, probably due to there being about 50 years between both works

>want to get into Shakespeare
>grab the first book by Shakespeare I see at my father's library
>Julius Caesar
>don't understand a single thing because I am not familiar with Roman history and culture and their 839 emperors and historical figures
>apparently there are allusions to Dante and Ovid too
>drop it

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cultural_references_in_Divine_Comedy

someone needs to make this for Gravity's Rainbow

>When comedy relies on references to be funny, it's bad comedy.
>When books rely on intellectual references to be intellectual, it's good literature.

Yeah well, you're young. You have a lifetime to figure all that shit out. I know you want to have it all down by this time next year so you can impress all your friends with all your knowledge, but you aren't going to have any of it down for a long, long time. And that's fine. Read Pynchon, read Joyce, they'll only get better and better and better with time and experience. Read Dante and Shakespeare, study Greek history, go to college for philosophy if that gets you excited. Stop think there's no reason to do something if it's not perfect. That's bullshit.

You forgot about having to learn homeric, classical and koine greek, not to mention sumerian, akkadian, phoenician, hebrew, egyptian, coptic and so on and on

>Stop think there's no reason to do something if it's not perfect
This is literally me.

I also never argue with anyone about anything or join discussions because I'm always like "How can these people talk about these things when they know so little about them?". Most of the time I know more than the people who do the talking, yet I feel like I don't know enough to be allowed to talk about that a certain subject.

At what age did you realize that one life is not enough, Veeky Forums?

>greek references
>constellations
>poetry

all beautiful things that arent really necessary to live. oldfags being mad.

Hey look! A reason to live, thanks OP. :^)

the idea that you can fully graps something knowledge of hat produced that work, is bogus. You wouldn't have the need to read it then yu could make it up yourself if this sort of "transparent" understanding was possible.

In fact the value of a work resides exactly in what is stranger to you and the effect it produces by clashing with your cultural horizon, also not everyone needs to be a critic.

Never, ever, ever go back to /r9k/. You deserve better than that. You can improve, as long as you understand and accept that it'll take time and effort

Yeah man, I remember reading that section where Brigadier Pudding was literally lapping shit out of an asshole and thinking to myself that if only I had received a quality classical education I'd be able to understand what I was reading.

Seems to me given the size of any field, you have to decide what to pursue. Certain writers seem interesting only because of an aura they give off. Like Hegel. Then you read his Stanford Plato entry and find it interesting but not all that useful, so you move on to something that does interest you.

I don't think I need to read everything to have a good grasp of the majority of ideas, and delve into ones I like. Recently I've found a lot of life insight in reading psychologists and you certainly do not need the Greeks or Hegel to get it. However, having more background knowledge and a critical lens can make reading itself more fruitful.

It's like you can't know everything...

What should i read to get a good understanding of the greek so i can appreciate the works to the fullest?

Why in the ever loving FUCK would anybody in the twentienth century need to give one second of their day to constellations, outside of pleasure and being an astronomist (pleasure)? Not even seamen give a shit about constellations anymore and they're the reason why they were conceived in the first place, you cranky cunt!

>The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology
MAYBE BECAUSE I'M NOT A FUCKING ANCIENT GREEK?!

>to the Old and the New Testament
COME ON UP BOYS, BRING THAT BLACK PLAGUE SO I CAN HAVE A REASON TO READ THE TALE OF THE ANGRY SKY JEW!

what do i need to read to understand hegel?

>"modern" philosophers
thats the only problem with that sentence, you're just not bright enough to understand

are you aware of the century known as the 20th?

you sometimes see it mentioned right at the start of your films, before way Dwayne 'the rock' johnson comes on

Go back to the kitchen femanon.

haha nice ;)

nothing really
if you come across something that doesn't make any sense to you just google it

...

how gloomy, but it's true :(

>in order to get the most out of the foundation for all western civilization/highly technical philosophy/authors known as higher order semioticians you need to work hard
>implying this is a bad thing

If reading Hegel was pleasant it wouldn't be nearly as satisfying.

This is a perfect example for why getting every single allusion is irrelevant.

You got scared out of reading something suitable for fourteen year old boys because you hadn't brushed up on your Ovid.

Unless you have some revolutionary theory of knowledge that doesn't rely on empirical sense data and isn't anamnesis that's pretty much how all literature, language and communication works.

There is no such thing as a self-contained style.

daily reminder hegel was a loony protestant shit who thought the universe converging was literally the second coming of jesus

...

>It's like they couldn't have possibly made it any harder if they tried.
you mean human history and culture? yeah its a little complicated

daily reminder that your inability to see beyond the narrow conceptual framework you've relegated to "second coming of jesus" will forever mire you in your own demiurgic hell where nihilistic hedonism is the only answer.

>baseless, specious nonsense written in fancy-sounding purple prose

you and hegel should co-write a book together and infatuate yet another generation of easily impressed pseudo-intellectuals

DUDE THE DIALECTIC LMAO

i can almost guarantee you're equally as dumb as they are. try opening your mouth once in a while, in conversation--you won't be half as eloquent as you fantasize. the reality of conversation is that it attacks your weak points immediately.

>you're just not bright enough to understand
literally the only defense of derrida anybody has ever made.

"ur stoopid"

This. Your ability to word something on an online forum or in your own mind isn't anything like in a conversation, where you have max a few seconds to reply to something, people are going to ask questions you hadn't expected, there's pressure on you to not look retarded (which anonymity takes away) and just the fact you're actually talking to other human beings.

I look at it like music. If I'm just chilling in my room, I can play through some decently technical stuff. But if I'm in front of a group of other people, I have to make it less complex otherwise I fuck up, and plenty of artists do this.

Though obviously gigging more and practicing in front of others helps with this, the same as more public speaking and formal debates will help you be able to argue your points in a manner much closer to your full capacity.

>ANGRY SKY JEW

underrated

it makes perfect sense tho lol

what is this from? thank you in advance

Found it if anybody else is interested
ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Science of Logic

Is Derrida worth reading?

Also what should I read before him?

Don't read French philosophers. Even Camus.

>something suitable for fourteen year old boys
>Shakespeare

Are you serious?

Always start with the Greeks, it's not just a meme, it's actually true.

I highly recommend Prometheus Bound to everyone here.

It's an ancient play, one of the oldest we have, about a simple man who was horrifically punished by the powers that be for the terrible crime of trying to bring light to the common people.

In the words of Aeschylus, "No good deed goes unpunished".

The Greeks are outdated as fuck.

You really think Ancient Greeks (especially Aristotle) would come up with the same philosophies and accept the pantheon of gods as a given if they had Newton's Principia?

I mean, they read it in high schools, though I think they start with the actual language around 16 or so, and kids miss most of it apart from the basic story.

I mean, they read it in high schools, though I think they start with the actual language around 16 or so, and kids miss most of it apart from the basic story.

The Greeks are important as they set the foundation for what we know. You can't understand electron clouds if you don't even understand how electrons bond to shit, even though they aren't really sharing them molecule to molecule, you learn it so you'll understand the more accurate, but vastly more complex theories down the road.

>In order to understand
Stopped reading there.

what shit school did you attend, family?

ego=1/knowledge

>In order to understand sports you need to have in depth knowledge of each player's back story and abilities.
>you also have to know all of the underlying strategies and rules.
>you also have to know the story, mentality, and training technique of each coach
>you have to know these for every team in the league.
How do you do it /sp/?

Cocaine t b h famalam.

When will this self hate >xD everyone on lit is an idiot haha meme die?

when u stop bein a gay

(so basicaly never LOL)

>tfw literally started with the greeks and read the Western canon
>tfw it took several years but I now feel like a titanic demigod of patricianness whenever I meet fellow philosophy + literature enthusiasts in university
>tfw the best of the best postgraduate students that my elite university can throw at me are all plebeian fuckboys who know tiny slivers of their field, if anything
>tfw they are unable to contextualize anything properly in the history of western thought, so they are all permanently stunted babbies with no firm ground to stand on
>tfw unleashing even a fraction of my power on some poor PhD student who has committed his entire existence on this earth to posturing about some ultimately shallow flash-in-the-pan fad like homo-colonial nu-cauldian dildostructionism
>tfw he tries desperately to assert the uniqueness and revolutionary nature of his gay little bitch philosopher of choice
>tfw i just chuckle softly and inform him that schelling already said that shit and moved beyond it in a single paragraph
>tfw effortlessly and unconsciously wading through thousands of post-existentialist pseudophilosophies like motes of dust in the air, mind untrammeled and time unwasted by their emotivist sophistry
>tfw striding over vulgar nietzscheans and postmodernists who think their 150 centuries-old truisms about truth and power are still the alpha and omega of philosophy
>tfw amassing and holistically combining the sum total of current human knowledge about semantics and representation without getting bogged down jerking off with individual linguists in a poorly ventilated conference hall saying "Humans are sign-makers! Humans are sign-makers! Humans are sign-makers!" for all eternity, interrupted only by eating lukewarm egg salad sandwiches on paper plates
>tfw entering an ivy league university philosophy department or colloquium and seeing a desaturated world of drab grey hues and lifelessness, yet still unable to cover the shimmering golden aura of the One Other Guy in the Department Who Isn't a Retard
>tfw practically floating toward him angelically until he sense my presence too, and we begin a lifelong friendship and intellectual communion that could not be described in mere words
>tfw i thank three different gods you don't even know about that i started with the greeks

>read the Western canon
Seems impossible.

This is worse than the fucking Marvel Cinematic universe.

Why did these authors have to be Reddit and make all these stories part of the same universe?

Even the more self contained books are filled autistic references so the nerds can shout out "HUE HEE HAH THATS FROM XYZ.

this this this.
everyone who says otherwise is unreachably autistic.

>read them carefully

This is the meme killing academia by turning philosophy into a zero-sum game of kayfabe instead of a gradual ascetic induction.

>not be intimidated by mock science played for laughs or used as the foundation of literary metaphor
But I am...

What should I read to understand Wittgenstein?

Frege and Russell.

racist

Hey that's okay dude. We're all wrong about something.

And what before Russell? Or is Russell a good introduction to philosophy?

gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page