How the fuck am I supposed to read the entire canon of western philosophy within my lifetime?

If you have really high standards, you can pare it down to the works of a dozen or so authors (maybe, at the top of my head: Homer, Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Austen, Wordsworth, Whitman, Tolstoy, Dickens, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, DFW) and a handful of individual books (perhaps: The Bible, Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, In Search of Lost Time). Those are the truly essential ones while the rest of the usual canon is just simply great books.

>Beckett, DFW
these are gonna be howlers in 50 years, promise

This is the future of all disciplines.

As we get more advanced, we get more specialized. You won't learn everything. Your best best is to only read Western philosophy until you die. No novels, no biographies, no magazine articles.

Hegel's chance of reading everything was not only a more reasonable task in terms of volume, but also in terms of specificity and required knowledge. His learning journey ended and his creative journey began with himself. You still have centuries of reading to go, and it only gets more intense and difficult to grasp.

If you want to learn math, you have to learn what Newton created on his own, plus everything in the proceeding centuries, and good luck understanding anything without having intensely dedicating yourself to a particular region of mathematical thought.

This.

Might as well fucking kill yourself because confining yourself to learning a single field is a miserable existence, and that's the only way you can truly learn something without being a pseudointellectual.

Depends. If the author is both not a heretic and deeply religious then yeah, skip them. Aquinas will give you nothing, just read Aristotle.

Whack jobs however are interesting, IE that Spanish mystic whose name I'm forgetting, von Bingen, and Bruno.

What is the discipline of disciplines?
What is the essence of discipline?

>Aquinas will give you nothing

Not him, but I think it really depends what your expectations are. If you expect to be an expert, that's one thing, but I don't think that's necessarily what everyone on Veeky Forums is trying to accomplish. I think it's really easy to be autistic about reading, but the fact is that you can't read everything and that's actually a good thing. If we all literally read the same things there's no room for difference, especially now that most people live more or less the same way in the western world. We're becoming more and more homogenized, so to also read a homogenized literature would be a shame.

Skip modern philosophy. It starts with Descartes intentionally misinterpreting Aristotle for the mere purpose of making his contributions in mathematics seem more useful. After that most philosophers were more worried about creating philosophical systems rather than discussing philosophical problems. (And that's why plebs like modern philosophy so much. Each philosopher is unique and special, so you can pick whoever you like the most.)
Obviously there are exceptions, and Leibniz is the greatest one. And he was really into portguese medieval philosophy.

Watch the TV cersions

Ignore the analytics

Post-Wittgenstein thats to say

>If you want to learn math, you have to learn what Newton created on his own, plus everything in the proceeding centurie
That's not exactly how you learn math though. A single calculus textbook compiles centuries of mathematical studies.

Hegel didn't read EVERYTHING dipshit, he read everything that mattered. As time goes on the Canon evolves and the essentials shift around