When it comes to choosing what to read, I suffer from compulsive indecisiveness. I want to use my autistic powers to read and study the entire body of work of one of the following men:
>Ludwig Wittgenstein
>D. H. Lawrence
>Vladimir Nabokov
>George Orwell
>Aristotle
>Lord Byron
Please help me decide. I have already tried rolling dice and flipping coins but it has gotten to the point where it is no longer random. I will answer any questions to help narrow the list.
Wittgenstein
Aristotle is the best one of that list, but I'd have to say Nabokov
There are a lot of collections of unpublished material.
Wittgenstein wrote only two books and he pretty much threw everything he said in the first one in the thrash.
Wittgenstein and Aristotle aren't writers that you just decide to read one day like Orwell. If you want to read philosophy you have to put in the work
Aristotle is by far the one you will get the most out of from your list.
Study Plato though instead.
If it helps I have read almost everything by Nietzsche. He is the only writer that I really love. Before him it was Schopenhauer but now I am not too interested in him because I see flaws in his philosophy. In a way, I am looking for something to complement Nietzsche. It is difficult for me to read fiction and poetry but sometimes I feel that I should force it on myself because I will appreciate it later. It is easier for me to read non-fiction like philosophy and history and books on politics.
Read some stuff on hero mythology. Jung and Joseph Campbell are good for that.
Kierkegaard is pretty much christian Nietzsche.
Most of Aristotle's work is a real slog to read through if you aren't an ardent philosophy major.
Honestly, for complete works, none of these are very appetizing. Lawrence and Nabokov wrote some great novels and stories, but they also wrote a lot of mediocrity. Someone like Shakespeare, Montaigne, or Tolstoy is probably more entertaining and enlightening to read through imho.
try stirner
I'll disagree on this, I tried to read the power of myth and it was shit.
Things like the collective unconscious and synchronicity are New Age pot-head philosopher bullshit.
I dislike his conception of ethics. It seems too dependent on a unhealthy feeling of guilt which I have never experienced.
Agree with Shakespeare and Montaigne but to fully appreciate Tolstoy I would need to learn Russian which I am not willing to do. I am okay with reading boring difficult material.
So far this is helpful and I am beginning to think I should eliminate Orwell and Lawrence.
philosophy
>Wittgenstein
or
>Aristotle
literature/poetry
>Nabokov
or
>Byron
?
Read all of William Blake
I'm the same way with Nietzsche OP, and really there is nothing better to be found in philosophy.
Shakespeare would be the obvious complement, to have the best of fiction too (Nietzsche's prose is great but not exactly maximising English).
You shouldn't waste your life on anything other than these (and, when you desire, the authors they are related to or reference) unless you are bed-bound, deaf, etc. There is more to life than literature. Listen to Mozart. Spend a year in Venice. Etc.
>he pretty much threw everything he said in the first one in the thrash.
shit only morons say and think
if you like N you will like LW
they have a very similar/overlapping worldview
but can I recommend someone not on the list?
Oswald Spengler is a brilliant history theorist / Nietzsche critic. If you really like N and have simply run out of things to read Spengler is a natural extension
sir,
is this post in earnest?
>they have a very similar/overlapping worldview
I strongly disagree. Though worldview is a vague term.
>Oswald Spengler is a brilliant history theorist / Nietzsche critic. If you really like N and have simply run out of things to read Spengler is a natural extension
I disagree.
Yes.
is appealing to your ego enough to get you to expound on those claims?
I don't think what I was replying to was substantial enough itself, so no.
If it's going to be a Romantic poet, it has to be Byron.
Now I have to add Shakespeare to the list.
I don't like how neatly he defines and separates civilizations and time periods and forces them to fit together by focusing on similarities. You could do that with anything.
well you commented on my vagueness (intentional in the use of "worldview") so I hope you'll understand that its tough for ME to respond due to the vagueness of your opposition.
So I'll clarify both your disagreements briefly:
my use of worldview relates to my belief that READERS of N and LW will be of a similar mind. If you have a taste for N, the writer on the list most likely to appeal imo is LW. A shared "Language" probably would have been more specific. But here using language in such a particular sense in such a short post seems pointless, when the chance of anyone reading it and having it strike them odd is ordinarily so low...
and as far as the 2nd,
your disagreement is much more vague, so its tough for me to do anything but restate my post in a simpler manner. A negation of my whole statement is satisfied by any single negation of:
>The claim Spengler is a brilliant history theorist
>The claim Spengler is a brilliant Nietzsche critic
>The claim that (satisfied) readers of N will enjoy Spengler
>but to fully appreciate Tolstoy I would need to learn Russian
Er what? Why would you think this?
Arthur Schopenhauer
Albert Camus
Not into hacks.
I colorized this picture. Here's one I did of Nietzsche.
Here's the shitty version. Not sure where I saved the unedited full-body picture you posted.
>Not into hacks
Why's my cutie Camus such a hack?
The whole premise of The Stranger is retarded. I don't get why anyone thinks it's deep or interesting. And he said something in The Rebel that annoyed me to the point where I stopped reading. I forgot what it was exactly. That and his Humphrey Bogart cosplaying makes him unbearable to me.
Wittgenstein and Nabokov
The Myth Of Sisyphus is his magnum opus. I'd at least give it a read, it strongly affected me as in how I look at things through an envious light.
besides the decline of western civilization, did spengler write anything else worth reading?
Prussianism and Socialism, about how Germany is intrinsically destined for authoritarian socialism
Hour of Decision, about the increasing political and racial tensions in the world
Man and Technics, where he talks about how Western man will have to face his fate despite how terrible things will get, and he predicted the extinction of many of the earth's species and the destructive nature of Faustian technology
thanks dawg
bump