>Spend the past few months immersing myself in classical literature/music/etc, having ignored pretty much all of it for most of my life
>Realize how utterly robbed we have been by modernity: modern life, education, culture, etc
Anyone else know this feel? My life now feels like one long catch-up. Have things declined, or are all these people who insist that I'm nostalgic, or wearing rose-tinted glasses, wrong? Should I make peace with modernity?
Other urls found in this thread:
en.wikipedia.org
youtube.com
twitter.com
Go full Don Quixote
They don't make windmills like they used to.
You're a meme, OP.
Things have not declined, you just have no insight and don't know where to look. Stunning ignorance and fedoraism - it's embarrassing to watch.
>He thinks you have to choose
You're a meme. But for the sake of curiosity, just where should one 'look' for culture of the classical calibre in the modern day?
>>He thinks you have to choose
What?
I started listening to more Beethoven recently.
Modern music is just fucking noise, by comparison.
lol thovenplebs
Artistic creations are all responses to the authors contemporary "climate", if they are relevant to that climate. Certainly biases can likely be found that are remnants of their contemporary existence even in places where they should not, such as philosophy, but in most places, such as narratives, they can be found much more explicitly.
Now to the point: you can not feel robbed of something you have never experienced, and to say that any experience which has not been directly felt by the speaker can be compared is an even more preposterous concept.
In short- don't say the past was better than the present when you never experienced both, then even negating the effects of a false nostalgia, and realize that if you don't relate to modern concepts which are connected to the collective modern conscious it is a result of the fact that you lack the mental faculties to, as it is through a collective advancement of modern conscious that we have progressed.
>if you don't relate to modern concepts which are connected to the collective modern conscious it is a result of the fact that you lack the mental faculties to
So what you're saying that modern art/music/etc are good, and that anyone who doesn't think so is dumb.
Yeah, you're full of shit.
retard frogfaggot
>don't say the past was better than the present
Who cares if the past was better than the present, you can't change the past.
they are good, as is the pre-modern. it's dumb to pick a side
>they are good
Who let the pleb out?
read civilisation as divine superman
it'll help
The argument you will encounter will usually be to the effect of:
>"People have always said that things are getting worse!"
And the funny thing is that in a way, those 'people' are entirely correct.
Our universe/plane of existence is one in which entropy is inbuilt, and it is therefore not unreasonable to postulate that this necessary decline will present itself even in Human affairs.
As Schopenhauer said, perhaps the Bible's only redeeming argument is that this is a fallen world, occupied by fallen beings.
>start reading classical literature and philosophy
>can't get myself to even watch a film anymore because it won't challenge me intellectually
>knowing that this is pretentious as fuck but can't help myself playing chess, listening to classical music and reading literature because it is far more stimulating than anything else
>feel empty in the modern world
You should read Nietzsche's aphorism entitled 'Wanderer', the final one in 'Human, All Too Human'. It resonated pretty powerfully with me:
>He who has attained intellectual emancipation to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth and not even as a traveller towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness. To be sure such a man will have bad nights, when he is weary and finds the gates of the town that should offer him rest closed; perhaps he may also find that, as in the East, the desert reaches to the gates, that wild beasts howl far and near, that a strong wind arises, and that robbers take away his beasts of burden. Then the dreadful night closes over him like a second desert upon the desert, and his heart grows weary of wandering. Then when the morning sun rises upon him, glowing like a Deity of anger, when the town is opened, he sees perhaps in the faces of the dwellers therein still more desert, uncleanliness, deceit, and insecurity than outside the gates and the day is almost worse than the night. Thus it may occasionally happen to the wanderer but then there come as compensation the delightful mornings of other lands and days, when already in the grey of the dawn he sees the throng of muses dancing by, close to him, in the mist of the mountain; when afterwards, in the symmetry of his ante meridian soul, he strolls silently under the trees, out of whose crests and leafy hiding places all manner of good and bright things are flung to him, the gifts of all the free spirits who are at home in mountains, forests, and solitudes, and who, like himself, alternately merry and thoughtful, are wanderers and philosophers. Born of the secrets of the early dawn, they ponder the question how the day, between the hours of ten and twelve can have such a pure, transparent, and gloriously cheerful countenance: they seek the ante-meridian philosophy.
I wonder if that was a subtle reference to the 'Wandering Jew' legend/folklore that existed in much of Europe, given his love for them.
en.wikipedia.org
>The Wandering Jew is a mythical eternal whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming.
Why not try natural philosophy?
you don't have the dubs to be talking like that son
>he posted from his computer, in a heated room, after having had several meals that day, and not having excruciatingly died from infectious disease and exposure
Thanks for sharing -- good quick read while sitting in the crapper.
>"The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man." - G.B.S.
>He unironically conflates material progress with intellectual/spiritual/ethical progress
>He unironically conflates material contentment with intellectual/spiritual/ethical contentment
Someone said that the worst consequence of the Enlightenment was to put the whole of Human discourse on material terms.
Wish I could remember who.
The toilet is rightfully regarded as philosophy's throne.
You're right. We'd be better off starving, emaciated and yet "intellectually/spiritually/ethically" content...
...
This is a philosophical discussion, for which lit is *the* board.
The joys of being a ``sophisticated'' 17-year-old.
so why are you posting here? don't you have some mac 'n cheese to go roll around in?
Nah, but now that my most basic needs are attended to, I can freely attend higher pursuits.
Try listening to classical music, or looking at modern art, when you are crippled by hunger/thirst/illness/etc.
>fell for the hierarchy of needs meme
>most autistic of all memes
By definition, you can't just ignore the hierarchy of needs - unless you like the idea of dying.
Though of course, you don't consider yourself when ignoring it. You merely hope you will not be among those who perish from having their most basic needs neglected.
I simply ask, why take that chance? Better safe than sorry.
Being in modernity puts you in a privileged position to survey all that came before you.
But often the experience of modernity paradoxically leaves us unprepared to appreciate or even be made aware of the past trends which are influencing us. That their discovery is accompanied by a sense of loss is totally appropriate given the circumstances. At the same time you are viewing them from outside the meme, which is a special vantage point. Everyone in this thread is right.
To me it seems apparent that a spiritual need can be just as fatal as a material one.
>Have things declined, or are all these people who insist that I'm nostalgic, or wearing rose-tinted glasses, wrong?
Read Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. Yes, things have declined.
>Our universe/plane of existence is one in which entropy is inbuilt, and it is therefore not unreasonable to postulate that this necessary decline will present itself even in Human affairs.
In a closed system dumbass. Also how the fuck does entropy apply physically and not metaphorically to human society?
>Have things declined
Things are declining all the time - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The world is a graveyard full of gone civilizations, peoples, and languages. Progressive leftists just labor under the delusion that society, like wine, can only improve as time goes on according to some magical principle.
Underrated post.
Things haven't declined one bit. You can enjoy everything that has been done in the past with the commodities of the present, and if and when anything new happens to be good you can enjoy that too. Why is this so hard to grasp?
>Things haven't declined one bit.
Degeneracy is just a spook? Suuuure.
>good music can't be atonal
Jesu christ almighty
>Progressive leftists just labor under the delusion that society, like wine, can only improve as time goes on according to some magical principle.
Not only this, but they believe that 'their' society will be an exception to the rule that you've alluded to; that theirs will not experience the same fate as all the other civilizations/peoples/languages.
That's what happens when you have a retarded linear view of history, rather than recognizing it as cyclical.
Describe degeneracy
le vito face
>implying the world has ever been at a level of closeness and globalization as it had today
>implying this doesn't totally change the game across the board
>MY ideal is an exception to the rule
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Why does everyone on this board write in such a pretentious way?
Wine doesn't always improve with age anyway.
How come the people who claim that X medium is dead has no interest or knowledge about it
>Wine doesn't always improve with age anyway.
You're right. Let's drink some Welch's grape juice bro.
All white wine turns to vinegary shit at some point (except the very sweet ones), only red wine gets better with age
That's not even an ideal
The peoples of the world have never had such immediate one to one contact as they do today
I can get on social media and start looking into the life of someone from South Africa, Korea, etc etc, something previously available only to merchants and nobles
10/10
None of this means your ideal society is any less impermanent than those that have come before.
Indeed, the irony is that as the world becomes more 'interconnected', nationalism is also on the rise.
chess is far from the most intellectually challenging game you can play...
t. Checkers player
you haven't been robbed of anything OP, you're just a fucking peasant comparing yourself with the nobles of yesteryear
unless you genuinely think being an illiterate who lives in a hovel and scratches at the dirt your entire life is better than having all modern conveniences and immediate access to the sum of human writings
OP is asking us if things have declined without making a definitive statement. I think he is only, more or less, disappointed that he was never pushed in the right direction by his parents, schools, media, etc. I felt the same way after finally reading Homer. The only time I had ever experienced that before was when I studied Shakespeare in highschool. But I was annoyed that I hadn't been exposed to Homer much earlier in life. The Iliad is a perfect book to teach in highschool.
The point is, without some stroke of luck, thanks to the distractions of "modernity", more and more people will go through life without exposure to great canonical literature from the past. Such expose will eventually lead the more ardent readers to more contemporary lit. You learn to 'know where to look' by first reading what has stood the test of time and is broadly recommended, hence the importance of establishing a literary canon -- something Bloom can't get enough credit for.
My thermodynamics prof said all philosophy boils down to the second law of thermodynamics. Kind of cringy, but it does have its applications.
t. Go player
>My thermodynamics prof said all philosophy boils down to the second law of thermodynamics. Kind of cringy, but it does have its applications.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is a meme that keeps getting applied where it does not belong.
I think I remember reading that the outcome of every Go game is decided within the first few moves.
Kinda pointless game desu.
If you think Beethoven is classical you're fucking retarded. He was a romanticist and a 'meh' one at that; you should try the Russians.
There's composers of beethovens caliber all over the Internet, hell, on fucking noteflight the neo-romantic composers are better.
You complain about a lack of supply, when in reality shit is just unfortunately inaccessible to you because you can't be bothered to look over the veil of a 30 second Google search
What is it with this board and the fucking Russians.
If it's not Dostoevsky/Tolstoy/etc, then it's Russian composers.
I'm convinced this board is full of culturally barren, modern-day Russkies who revel in their nation's former glory.
This
Also, has anyone here actually seen modern art beyond the entire 'Le abstract is shite xDDDD' meme? Go to a local gallery sometime and a lot of the work, particularly that wrought by technology and multimedia is unprecedented sublimity
Look out pleb Scandinavian master race coming through
>Go to a local gallery sometime and a lot of the work, particularly that wrought by technology and multimedia is unprecedented sublimity
If you have no soul, maybe.
Thanks for your bullshit equivalence
I've nothing to comment on the literary aspect of the Russians per se, but a lot of Russian arts were overshadowed by the Soviet Unions cultural disavowing of its past
And holy fuck just listen once to Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and then compare that with Beethoven; concerto on concerto or sonata or sonata, it is simply on seperate levels of complexity and thus musicality
>unprecedented sublimity
kek
fucking plebs man
Fuck off Ivan.
Russia has no answer to Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Brahms, etc.
Bach especially.
Enjoy the krokodil, it's clearly hampering your aesthetic taste.
Elaborate?
Modern visual art, in most fronts, is much more open to interpretation than their predecessors. That's he very definition of having a 'soul'
A lot of it actually blends together aspects of predecessing art styles and accentuates the best feelings incurred by all of them
>Rachmaninoff
WHOA, HE'S A VIRTUOSOS, DO YOU KNOW WHAT ETUDES ARE?
>Tchaikovsky
WHOA, THERE'S ACTUAL CANONS IN THE SONG
Let me know when you actually can comprehend Beethoven.
Art has been redefined: "The world around us, with all its imperfections, is actual beauty."
Implications:
1) Since the real world is "beautiful" (no exceptions), then everything can be art no matter how ugly it is.
2) Since everything can be art, skill is no longer a necessity.
3) Everyone can claim to be an artist, by virtue of (2)
4) Since everyone can be an artist, with no skill required, we have no objective standard with which to measure art.
Modern "art" is not art, but instead a competition to produce what is most ugly, mundane or outrageous. This experiment invariably fails, produces nothing of value; and indeed, produces nothing aside from the instinctual revulsion of our senses. What is the value of this?
We could have stopped this degeneration a hundred years ago, perhaps, but now it is too late.
>especially Bach
Stopped reading here Lmao
You're pulling more shit out your ass than /pol/ can in a day. Baroque music (Bach) is untenably more simpler in every measurable (in expressive techniques, tone colour, on the amount and conplexity of ornamentation a etc) than romanticism
Nice b8, even if it isn't you've provided no tangible argument
>2016
>not listening to the sound of the Devil
youtube.com
>One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream. In vain! The music which I at this time composed is indeed the best that I ever wrote, and I still call it the "Devil's Trill", but the difference between it and that which so moved me is so great that I would have destroyed my instrument and have said farewell to music forever if it had been possible for me to live without the enjoyment it affords me.[4]
>polyphonic articulation is simpler than melody
>pure music is simpler than impressionism aesthetics
You're the one baiting, my friend.
Be glad because it happened. Imagine if all that is beautiful that is available today was lost in the eternity of time.
>ctrl+f
>whitehead
>0 results
>trivium
>0 results
>quadrivium
>0 results
>loads of wankers talking about middle class taste
>ok
>ctrl+f
>sheridan
>0 results
>stanhope
>chesterfield
>0 results
ffs Veeky Forums
like tears in the rain...
>This is not the greatest song in the world... this is just a tribute.
>middle class taste
Spotted the marxist.
Just couldn't help sterilizing culture, could ya? Putting it in class/monetary terms.
I'm sure we can end this pointless dispute in peace, I'll just cut both your opinions in half, and then throw each side into the trash, how's that sound to you?
You never did answer his question.
Many of us here like the idea of dying.
Mostly we like the idea of it happening to people like you.
My needs trump your needs, though.
You are my property, and you no longer have a hierarchy/pyramid of needs to tell me otherwise.
>he likes Rachmaninoffshit
kek
This is the same guy who thinks Beethoven is mediocre and that some random nobodies on Noteflight are better than him.
Romanticism is probably the worst period of Classical music.
Is this what Veeky Forums has come to?
Am I wrong?
kek, enjoy that middle class anxiety about whether you like bach or beethoven more for literature points
i read this initially as chopping off one our arms each, because i'm high as shit, and it seemed like a fun time. call me if you want to revise that
>wrong
>right
You just spooked yourself
My only advice for little people like you is to re reread The Ego and It's Own
I'm not anxious, I know what I like.
I also know who is best, it's just a case of convincing the drugged-up Russophile.
...
Stirner is just a meme at this point, right?
Nice spool nerd
>Advice
Advice is only given to those whom you think are in some way incorrect, and therefore 'wrong'.
Looks like you too are operating within those very same confines.
Unspook yourself, I can see your ectoplasm from here.
>at this point
>post list of English education reformers
>get called a Russophile
You know Sheridan standardised English for a reason?
If you can entertain the notion that the classical/Western canon has survived because they contain eternal truths, then it can be conceived that modern and popular culture is concerned with ignoring, distracting, or obscuring these truths from us. This would raise the question of why this is the case. I have my own ideas, of course.
>Beethoven is classical
You're the worst kind of pedant: an incorrect one.
"I listen to Classical music" means you were listening to music in the "Classical" period of Western art music. Not Baroque, not Romantic, not Modern, etc.
"I listen to classical music" just denotes art music generally.
>Composers of Beethoven's caliber all over the Internet
>neo-romantic composers on fucking NOTEFLIGHT are better than a man universally agreed to be a transcendent genius of his artform
I want to see any one of them make something as inexorable as his late sonatas and string quartets. And that's just chamber music. Let alone the fucking symphonies.
You are a bad person, and I'm not going to engage with you. I hope you don't have a nice day.
>Advice is only given to those whom you think are in some way incorrect, and therefore 'wrong'.
Why? Can't you give advice just for the sake of it? Are you seriously this spooked?
>tripfag
>copyrighting ideas on a Dragon Ball Z discussion forum
INTO THE TRASH
YOU GO
>Can't you
Whose permission are you asking? Ours? Yourself?
Since you don't seem to know the answer to the question, and felt the need to ask it, we can conclude that you are still spooked by authority.