Be Honest Veeky Forums

How many of you have actually engaged with all the philosophical texts you use as examples or arguments when discussing philosophy. I'm going to be lenient here and say translations also count as direct engagement, but nothing beyond a published book that does not purport itself to be anything beyond a translation.
Is one being a psued if they haven't directly engaged with the philosophical texts, or are relatively brief (5000-10000 word long online articles (seen here iep.utm.edu/egoism/)) enough to suffice?
As Max Stirner would put it (according to this article I read), wanting to directly engage with a philosophical work could be in and of itself a spook, since the reader may be attempting to act as a "Philosopher" instead of in their own self-interest (which in this case would be learning about egoism and max stirner)

Others arguments could conclude that since philosophical works are so eclectic and hard to follow anyway it is better to read an accurate summary than the book itself since it may allow the reader to more fully comprehend the philosophical concepts. The core of this line of thinking revolves around the idea that philosophical concepts, like scientific concepts, are somewhat universal and do not need to be expressed by the original philosopher to be understood.

Honestly any article is going to be a reduction that misses at best nuance, at worst entire concepts.
Stirner is a bad example because his book is so easy to read and well written. Even then, I had read articles and a book worth of Stirner shitposts, and his philosophy wasn't crystal until I read Ego and his Own.

Well yes, but at the same time I was writing today about how humans constantly fight to suppress vice through agency and came to the conclusion that instead of following older ideals (follow god to go to heaven) or new ideals (follow money to achieve a state of bliss equitable to heaven), to instead only work towards your own goals and agencies, to essentially become self-driven. I had at once realized that I was not the first person to come up with this or discover this concept, yet I still understood it fully through my own reasoning. Since all philosophical concepts stem from logical lines of thought, then when one writes a book about one is similar to a scientist discovering something. In our system of logic these concepts already existed, we just didn't know about them yet. Therefore all philosophical concepts can justifiably be detached from whomever first wrote about them, and we no longer have to study philosophy in terms of its most famous authors.

>wanting to directly engage with a philosophical work could be in and of itself a spook
No. A desire can't be a spook. A desire can be influenced by spooks (like thinking you need to be a "real Veeky Forums philosopher" so you need to read everything in it's original language). Veeky Forums is a spook, so don't let "Veeky Forums" tell you what to do.

>since the reader may be attempting to act as a "Philosopher" instead of in their own self-interest
Yeah, kind of. But avoiding doing something for the sake of avoiding labels sounds spooky to me.

From one Ego to another: I can tell you that I myself find value in reading original works (in translation if need be). An article is going to be an interpretation, and while the author of an article may have good points, you would probably get more out of them if you're familiar with the source.

You can certainly use articles and websites like the one you linked as a tool, to see if you like an idea enough to read it in more detail.

sorry about the grammar in this post I'm a little buzzed right now.

not that guy.
you're right. 99% of philosophy doesn't really cover anything as unique or complicated as the masturbatory rhetoric might suggest. the only people who can get something worthwhile out of philosophy are the ones who can sieve out the simple, actual phenomena documented by small-penised rhetoricians.

I said in the op that I would count translations as direct engagement, but I've read a little bit of the original German and it is not too hard to understand (in the context of German). It also feels like even for a language so close to English the is still missing a lot of the minor nuance that the original possesses. I feel now that an accurate summary is equal or greater to a translation in terms of the meaning.

Well a good translation would be an accurate summary, except translations tend to exceed the original in length. However, I very much doubt you'll be able to judge if something's an accurate summary if you haven't even read a translation of the given work. Both summaries and translations (like said) are interpretations, and you obviously won't be able to capture all of the 'minor nuance' of the original in a translation, but to prefer a summary in brief to the complete work (even a translations) seems to be blatant philistinism. Besides, I've yet to see someone on Veeky Forums explicate just what constitutes a 'minor nuance' in a text, and the few English translations of Stirner's Ego I've browsed seem to get the gist of it alright and you can follow the lines of his argumentation perfectly well just like in the German original, so 'nuances' like, say, allusions that don't translate well aren't really all-important in 'terms of meaning', whatever that means.

Ego is the second best and most faithful translation I've ever read next to the Bible. It even goes so far as to put original German words in brackets so as to clarify his word play with base words.

>Ego is the second best and most faithful translation I've ever read next to the Bible. It even goes so far as to put original German words in brackets so as to clarify his word play with base words.

Just look how poorly translated the title is compared to the words used. the Unique and its property is far more accurate and cuts through all the confusion and baggage.