English or philosophy

What reasons to study one over the other

If you could only do

1. philosophy, or

2. literature sans philosophy

which one would you do and why

Don't go for philosophy.

Here are some unreleased thoughts of Cioran (unreleased in English) about philosophy. It sums up my own sentiment quite fairly.

Translated with Google Translate because I'm lazy, but you'll get the meaning:

>The most stupid thing we can do is to study philosophy. One can study a problem, but it is absurd to merely study… all the problems. To say that I went through that error!

>Essential condition if we want to think, refrain from thinking about philosophy.

>There is nothing more sterilant for a poet to read other poets. Similarly, they read philosophers and nothing (that is what the prof. do), is to condemn oneself to never have one philosophical thought.

>The history of philosophy is the negation of philosophy.

>One of the few advantages I had, it was to have understoof, in twenty years, that philosophy had an answer for anything, and that even its questions were inessential.

>I hate to develop, explain, comment, support, I hate everything that reminds the philosopher, thus the teacher.
> The philosophy: spread a thought (as they say of a dung it stretches, stretches). I do not like the thought picked up, blasted into a formula.

> Except Pyrrho, Epicurus and others, Greek philosophy is disappointing: it seeks only the truth ...; on the contrary Hindu philosophy does not pursue the issue: what is otherwise important.

>"This philosophy is not worth an hour of trouble. "- This affirmation of Pascal, I did it unconsciously since my time insomnia, whenever I read or reread a philosopher.

>Sartre managed to make good Heidegger but not good Celine. Counterfeiting is easier in philosophy than in literature. This ambitious who thought wanting was enough to have talent. He has not even managed to give the illusion of "depth" which is very easy for any philosopher who encroaches on the letters.

>A philosopher is someone who indefinitely explains his thinking. The artist fortunately can't have such bad taste.
>I name non-philosopher the one who can not have the bad taste to explain his thinking.

>Any exegesis is desecration. A text explained is not a text, like a corpse is no longer a body. The history of philosophy is the negation of philosophy. We struggle with an idea, we do not describe the steps. The scholarship is to be avoided. The same criticism. Find innocence. Let destructive.

>It took me a long time to get rid of the fascination on me philosophical jargon. But I finally got rid of it. This style of teachers, pedantic, laborious, which turns round, and whose essential aim is to hide away the problem is the long intolerable. But we understand that deceives young and fills teachers.

>I just read a very fair thing in correspondence of an English critic. According to Aristotle, there has been no poetry in Greece.
> The philosophy kills inspiration.

These quotes are some of the most idiotic things I've ever heard. How can you possibly claim that thinking and learning are bad things?

In regards to studying literature of philosophy, its a matter of taste. Do you enjoy philosophy? Do you enjoy literature? Which one do you enjoy more? That's all that's really important.

>How can you possibly claim that thinking and learning are bad things?

Swing and a miss. At least you tried.

>he thinks that literature and philosophy are 2 completely separate entities that do not blend at certain times or in certain aspects

Right is cute but left is pretty inciting.

he seems to be implying that the highest form of human cognition is something other than contemplation. and seems to be assuming philosophy is some other activity beside contemplation, or that the act of philosophy is incompatible with contemplation, which leads me to think hes a total positivistic cunt who is deeply regretting a career in academic humanities and not scientific research. but then you have this bit on hinduism. but what the fuck is this english.

also, anytime i encounter anything along the lines of "philosophy has an answer for questions" the speakers power level is immediately shown to be sub attic greek peasant farmer. the point is contemplating the questions, and developing answers. those of us in the conversation know there are no developed answers, simply developing answers. get it?

google translate probably fucked a lot of shit up tho, he seems to be saying fuck truth, fuck this history of argument, hell even logic is illogical! truth is relative! MEDITATE YOU FUCK.

well yeah, and then you want to converse with the fucking people youre at home with and find its nice to have a history of ideas and a fucking vocabulary to use to converse. this is a cold bitter old man who seems to have forgotten that he is literally everyone and everything and to negate philosophy is to literally be partaking in philosophy. its a bunch of contradictory shilling fuck your google translate shit.

>A philosopher is someone who indefinitely explains his thinking. The artist fortunately can't have such bad taste.

>Any exegesis is desecration. A text explained is not a text, like a corpse is no longer a body. The history of philosophy is the negation of philosophy. We struggle with an idea, we do not describe the steps.

These seem like wonderful insights, but surely they dismantle the purpose of studying literature too? I would say they make me feel more secure in my choice of study (literature) but, at the same time, its a very apt analogy to say textual analysis is like dissecting a corpse - the author is dead, and we scholars spend our lives picking at the carcass.

Left is objectively superior.

>innocence
enjoy your cancer

Literature. Philosophy gives me hives. I have yet to meet a philosophical assertion that wasn't self-evident, senseless, or demonstrably bullshit, and in neither case did it require much thought. Literature is endlessly interesting, and doesn't require as much contact with fucking philosophers.

Embarrassing post, pal. Those self-evident philosophical assertions only seem self-evident because you're so used to them after thousands of years of development.

>muh opinions are fact!
>stop liking what I don't like!
Dear god, this is dumb.

I haven't read anything by or about him. But I'm guessing he was somehow extremely butthurt at Germans.

He was obviously bullied by the others in his faculty.
At least that kind of rhetiric usually starts happening once someone can't deal with the usual intellectual scrutiny you find at any university.

>Not studying PPE and reading literature in your down time
You will never be patrician.

>Philosophy is BS.
>Either I understand it easily, because I'm so smart, or it is senseless and wrong.

You are the high school bimbo of people who read.

you're an idiot.

Philosophy can't get you anywhere. It's the most useless degree I can think of. Go for literature.

>implying there's a wealth of jobs for english majors

If you spend four to five years focusing on English, of course. However if you manage to learn one or two foreign languages, you could easily find something in finance/business/administration/politics. I also know plenty of history majors who made it to consulting/investment firms.

This could as easily read:

>If you spend four to five years focusing on philosophy, of course. However if you manage to learn one or two foreign languages, you could easily find something in finance/business/administration/politics. I also know plenty of history majors who made it to consulting/investment firms.

Circumventing the argument much?

There's a quote that was badly fucked up in translation. I'm now translating it manually, because it could answer to your interrogations:

>Except Pyrrho, Epicurus and some others, Greek philosophy is disappointing: it only seeks… the truth; on the contrary Hindu philosophy only pursues liberation: which is somewhat more important.

Cioran had no "career" whatsoever in the academia, and obviously he knew that he was partaking in the big game. Do not take his rants at face value.

>thinking and learning are bad things
You didn't understand his point.

His opinions are not "facts", just his opinions. And he doesn't try to convince anyone (as he's not a proper philosopher). All these quotes come from his notebooks that should have been destroyed, and not published.

Cioran had deep knowledge of the German philosophers and wasn't "butthurt" at them; he just considered them insufficient and inefficient (for him).

>All these quotes come from his notebooks that should have been destroyed, and not published.
So literally ramblings. Noice.
>Cioran had deep knowledge of the German philosophers and wasn't "butthurt" at them; he just considered them insufficient and inefficient (for him).
I just read up on him.
That dude obviously was emotionally invested.

Reading literature for your pleasure (even exhaustively) and "studying" it to get degrees: these are two different things. Cioran would support the former, but advise against any kind of academic studies in the humanities (both literature and philosophy).

A bunch of Cioran quotes on the academia-- mediocre translation again, Google Translate with manual rectifications:

>The academia is a cesspool of imbeciles, in all countries of the world.

>To make a good people out of the Germans, one should remove beer and the academia.

>These students by hundreds of thousands.
>And when I think I made, for so many years, great efforts to forget what the academia taught me, to erase the traces it left in me! Traces, no, soiling.

>I noticed my inability to get along with anyone that is marked by the academia. As soon as I tracks the slightest didactic element in someone's mind, I consider it useless to continue the interview. I prefer the amateurs who are amusing at least. Then, as I've got the mania of reading, I do not feel the need to learn through conversation; conversation is entertainment to me, and nothing else. Woe to those who want to teach me! I prefer dinner with a socialite than with a specialist.

>In these so-called advanced companies where the plumber is as rare as genius, only the false intellectual proliferates, the rubbish and pretentious academic, which stands as revolutionary to conceal his nothingness.

These are only insights from his personal notebooks, not from his actual published books who are more developed and thought-out. I advise "The Trouble with being born", his most famous book.

>In these so-called advanced companies...

Advanced societies of course, not "companies" (fuck you, Google Translate).

Ramblings? But almost all classic French philosophy, from Montaigne to the Enlightenment, is "literally ramblings".

So, more Cioran quotes for you, from "The Trouble with being born" (with a professional translation this time):

>Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

>Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no rises out of the blood.

>It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.
>Ideas are unsuited to a final agony; they die, of course, but without knowing how to die, whereas an event exists only with a view to its end. A sufficient reason to prefer the company of historians to that of philosophers.

>Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Now I'll stop spamming my Cioran, and I'll simply say that "studying" philosophy means you'll have to use philosophical jargon at some point (added to the standard academic jargon), which is extraordinarily laughable.

Academic "philosophy" is bullshit written by bureaucrats, and a paragon of misused intelligence.

English majors are dumber on average (because English is now dumbed down) though.

I don't know if this is going to help you in any way, but the following is based on my experiences with both in a European country with analytical philosophy departments.

>Philosophy
- If you're not used to being intellectually honest and precise, you're in for a big pummeling the first semester or so. Teachers love to humiliate first year students who think they are going to be the next great philosopher.
- You're going to become extremely good at analyzing truth claims. Since I studied philosophy people annoy me much more because they are constantly lying to themselves, exaggerating, contradicting themselves, etc., etc.
- There is surprisingly some prestige in studying philosophy. It's not STEM, but people are automatically going to assume you are interesting and very smart.
- You're going to read a lot of plain uninteresting, useless shit for historical reasons.
- You're going to read a lot of hard, dry stuff like Kant and Heidegger. You will also be expected to be able to write something sensible about it. Did you like math in HS?
- The longer you stay on, the more it will be expected of you to pick some very narrow subject and endlessly tinker with it despite there being no practical value in doing so for you or society, except that you might get tenured if you're the best at it so that you can help produce new tinkerers that might become tenured.
- You will most probably come out of philosophy believing exactly what you believed coming in. Don't come to philosophy for answers or to fill some emptiness inside you. Your problems are probably very banal and concrete, and philosophy is just a diversion. Paradoxically though, I might never have had this realization if I hadn't studied philosophy. So I guess I grew/changed a lot in a relatively short time.

>Literature
- Most of the time you're just going to be reading tons of tons of tons of patrician lit.
- Most literary theory is *completely* and *utterly* insane. Your basically going to be sitting there gaping as the lecturers talk as if Freud's theories are factual, or how Beckett's prose "breaks apart the fabric of reality" whatever that means.
- The longer you stay on, the more insane you will be expected to become yourself.
- 95% of your classmates are going to be quiet, overly kind girls.
- You're going to have a lot of time on your hands to practice writing fiction.

>Your problems are probably very banal and concrete, and philosophy is just a diversion. Paradoxically though, I might never have had this realization if I hadn't studied philosophy. So I guess I grew/changed a lot in a relatively short time.
Out of curiosity, what do you do with your personal problems? I remember Melville writing something similar ("What are my problems compared to the New Testament?"), yet he is probably one of the most lonely and arrested writers I've ever read.

With philosophy your image is bolstered. With literature your image is bolstered by your superior taste, and you walk out of there with a wife.

if Cioran hadn't studied philosophy he wouldn't have had any of the negative things to say about it that he then built his writings and point of existence on.

you might as well say Nietzsche thinks no one should be philosophers because he hates most of them.

you fucking nob

everyone should study philosophy, and especially the ones who think they do/ought to hate it

study whichever one you enjoy more

A certain kind of person, when they're for example very different from most of the people around them and think very differently, instead of simply accepting that this means they are probably going to be quite lonely, I think they will start to intellectualize, attempt to make their life perfect using their thoughts or something. Maybe it's hurr durr, the evil of modernization that needs to be overcome, which Heidegger might say, or capitalism that is the fault of everything. Or maybe I just need to what the meaning of life is and then I can be at peace with myself, living accordingly. I think there is something fundamentally feverish/desperate about this though. And simply straightforwardly facing your problems is seldom as painful as you might think it is. Also, once you realize how banal your problems are, you will also see how banal your joys are. For example, even if I can't have the social life I might desire, I know that books make me really happy, so I can try to make sure that I have a lot of time to read books, and that is going to make me a lot happier than when I walked around in constant fear that my solutions to all the world's problems might not be right, or that question such as these had any direct relevance to my life ...

The short answer, I guess, is that I beat on now, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly. But at least I'm actually rowing now, you know. Idk if I made any sense. Noooo, I didn't overcome my personal problems, but at least I'm not making things worse. And at least now, hopefully, I'm equipped to recognize viable solutions.

As said above, reading philosophy seriously and extensively is NOT "studying" philosophy (i.e. taking academic classes to get degrees).

Cioran despises the latter, not the former.

I feel a bit of the same way. It might be better to wander happy in the desert than to live paranoid in the oasis, at least in terms of intellectual questions.

they're both in high school so they're too old

nice post

I'd pick philosophy if modern philosophy wasn't full of consequentialists in ethics or Marxists in sociology.

God I hate you Hegel.

I would really rate them based on university. Both can easily be dominating environments that will only feel nauseating if you have an actual love for philosophy or literature. I'd recommend going to smaller, lesser known schools because those are the ones where real passion and open-mindedness is found. That is my personal experience going to a prestigious engineering college that I think has an average program at best, while the philosophy department doesn't even give a major but has some amazing classes and professors.

enough of this pathetic, maudlin edgelord.

boo hoo hoo everything is bad. fuck off

Except I never saw a single philosophy curriculum which includes an extensive foreign language learning. It's quite common in literature departments to be fluent—not fluent like “I took three years of French in high school and used Duolingo”—to a business extend. Literature also makes you write better.