What's the most difficult book of all time?

Sartre's Being and Nothingness

It is incomprehensible gibberish.

Excuse me, yeah. The Whitehead. A friend told me I was reading the WRONG version, something about there being the one to read, and the one not to read (which I wound up completing with the help of some secondary sources). Though more lit-oriented than phil-, I have read alot of philosophy too, including pictured, Kant ... to Slotrrdijk's early millennial trilogy (which, though mad, I enjoyed). Whitehead for me, however, has been the most difficult. Really, though I have a sense of him or of what he was after, I would not claim to have a knowledge. A book called Stuborn Fact (and something something) was a very helpful source for me when struggling through. It's been awhile (ten years, i was probably too young to take a crack at it). I read it after reading and enjoying Adventures of Ideas.

It's probably this. However there are many poems that I feel are much more difficult than Ulysses, especially in my opinion Yeats' later work and Crane's work. I also can't really comment on the work of non English speakers, but I have to say some of Kafka's short stories are really difficult to deal with; see A Country Doctor to understand what I mean. I also can't discount the work of Old English dudes like Spenser who are just plain hard to read. Math books can be pretty hard but that may just because it's not my natural orientation. For example I found the intro to set theory harder than the critique of pure reason.

first critique in german

Lol. That's pleb-tier easy-reader philosophy. Are you serious?

FW

it's the only well-known, frequently discussed book that I am 100% sure absolutely no one on here has ever read

Only correct answer is the Voynich Manuscript.

Harry potter, look at it as an allegoric religious metaphysical text.

Are you new to literature or are you going to pretend that Joyce didn't write Finnegans Wake?

My diary desu

>finnegans wake
>book

It's a parody of language and syntax ironically recorded on paper as a means to mock literature.

/thread

...

>it's just a joke
utter pleb

How in the fuck do you know about Ulysses and not know about Finnegan's Wake and choose that instead

Finnegan's wake is 12x more ridiculous and impenetrable than usylesses

I feel like this is a serious candidate. Most of the people who I've seen claim to understand it are clearly heavily basing their interpretation of it off second hand sources. Not that there's anything wrong with that in principal, but finding someone who can authentically read through a text like this and build up a first hand understanding of it is rare. I'm sure that Hegel had serious points to make, but I fear that much of what Schopenhauer said is likely to be true and the typical kinds of people who praise Hegel and the frequently weak reasons they use to justify the difficulty of his texts make me skeptical.

Not really. Just because we can't read it, doesn't mean it's a complex and difficult text with intricate ideas. I'm an classical historian, and we have plenty of texts we can't read because we don't know the language. But they most likely just contain texts like 'person X traded 5 cows with person Y'

Any Physics book. I bet none of you brainlets can even beat all the exercises.

>H-haha, dude, I was only pretending to be stupid.

I feel like this applies to everything Joyce wrote.

Habermas TCA is definitely not hard to read. Kant is also not that hard. Your professor has probably never heard of Hegel or Heidegger. Scotus is at times incomprehensible, and Aristotle's Metaphysics Z produced a shitload of secundary literature. Also the French deconstructionists, but the line between bullshit and difficult philosophy is easily crossed there.
For fiction/poetry: I never saw an adequate analysis of Pale Fire.

the cantos

you are aware that anytime there is a college major thread, it turns out that 90% of lit are math majors, arent you?

It's fine to disagree with the opinion but when you claim that a PhD teaching a philosophy course "has probably never heard of Hegel or Heidegger" then you've crossed your own fine line into bullshit.

t. the next class I had in the department (20th c. ) went into Heidegger, Witty and Derrida. Not Harvard, but a real, functioning philosohpy department.

...

Bet you were one of those kids who thought math was hard

>be humanitiesfag
>constantly encounter the outer fringes of maths in a hundred different branches of philosophy, from analytics to metaphysics
>be amazed by the mystical potential of maths being the language of reality itself
>be slightly in awe of STEMfags and assume they tap into this majesty through hard work, and humanitiesfags like me are missing out
>start learning maths
>it's fucking tough
>get to the point where I can just barely understand higher order university-level stuff
>eagerly start talking to esteemed, visionary, world-famous mathematicians at my university
>mfw I realize they are all complete, intuitive materialists in their outlook
>mfw they don't grasp an iota of the mystical or metaphysical aspects of higher maths
>mfw they don't even really understand what the concreteness of mathematical laws imply, and spend most of their time playing at meaningless quantitative number puzzles
>mfw even professional scientists are childlike retards who are genuinely content with puerile, reductionist accounts of the nature of reality
>mfw the vast majority of high level STEM people are ignorant of other branches of their own field, let alone other fields or disciplines altogether
>mfw the luminaries of STEM are the biggest reservoir of literally autistic toy collectors in the world
>mfw the vast majority are just average dumb normalfags aside from their single hyper-focused academic specialty
>mfw they don't read books (at all)
>mfw it is actually staggering how stupid they are in every single respect other than knowing one specific kind of maths really well
>mfw totally disillusioned
>mfw realising after all that work that maths isn't even the language of reality but a closed and self-referential puzzlebox for autistic fucking faggots

Veeky Forums is 90% liberal arts starbucks major pretending to be STEM

Well, thought I'd try some irony, but I always underestimate the levels of autism prevalent on lit. No sane man would suppose a philosophy PhD to have never heard of Hegel. I tried to convey that somebody who seriously names Kant's CPR and Habermas' TCA as the pinnacles of difficulty needs to read more broadly.

Gravity's rainbow, Mason and Dixon, Finnegan's wake, and blood meridian. I've never fully read finneganss wake though.

also humanities roasties are tigers in the sack
Stemstacys are vanilla as fuck

I remember this thread. Is this a copypasta?

This is very true. Having read secondary sources and Hegel's texts, it is difficult to believe they actually engaged with Hegel firsthand. Many authors hear secondhand accounts and continue the trend of misunderstanding Hegel. However, you should not be put off by the lack of valuable secondary literature. Granted, Hegel is one of the most difficult philosophers, not someone one can just read through at a casual pace. Some people dedicate their entire lives to understanding his works, but understanding him is entirely possible. We figured him out on our own and host a reading group in order to elaborate on parts that are not immediately clear after a cursory reading of the text. Our blog is meant to be a source for newcomers to Hegelian thought and has been validated by qualified philosophy professors (Daniel Pascal-Zorn, Greg Sadler, John Kern, Alan Ponikvar) and learned Hegelian scholars. I hope this is helpful.

empyreantrail.wordpress.com/

Don't you mean full of farts?

I WANT TO READ MY BOI KIERKEEGARD FOR SO LONG BUT FIRST I MUST GO THROUGH THIS SLOG HEGEL REEEEE

Thanks user.

Right, but if it's not a meaningless pseudo-alchemical text, then it's a genuine alchemical text and there are still idiots to this day who think alchemy is about changing physical lead into gold.

Tried reading it once in English (I am Greek)
A bit too random (seemingly) for my tastes, but still, reading the first couple of pages aloud is hilarious.
Ulysses I have read in the Greek translation which is very faithful to the original text (took the guy 25 years), it was hard for sure. The hardest I have ever read for one.

Now I realize this is pasta and all, but has anyone found out he is somewhat right? Every single person I have met that was doing something related to math always had this obnoxious fatalistic worldview.

what a cool blog. thanks user

>namefag
Not him but you can't criticize anyone, m80.

pic related

what? i'm not criticizing. that blog really is interesting & i'm enjoying reading it.

sheesh. sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know?

99.99% of the time that phrase has an ironic feel to it, can't really blame me there.

PAY DEBTS you Mediterranean lazy bones.

Reported for off topic discussion.

no doubt. and i do not blame you either. esp given my own frequently blog-length schizo-rambles on this board.

so this i am not doing. just want to salute a cool user posting a hegel site with some cool hegel stuff on it.
>salutes

That's not going to save you when ze Germans want their money back.

I can just migrate to Germany in that case.

Tbqh the whole 'understand books' is a huge mentality issue and you should stop looking at literature like it's a puzzle.
Objectively this, 2000 years of debate ongoing.
Not really.

>Objectively this, 2000 years of debate ongoing.
Only because some people take it as 100% fact.
Actual theological debate should have finished with Origen.

Critique of Pure Reason

>I didn't understand it so anyone who did is just pretending
This is the saddest way of thinking.

IGNORE HEGELPOSTERS

Hegel is the ultimate pseudointellectual philosopher. Early in the Science of Logic, he mentions how the role of philosophy is only to elaborate and draw out out common sense prejudices to their logical conclusion using the dialectical method (pic related). It's worth noting that the phenomenology proceeds from a "common sense" worldview of sense-certainty and, proceeding with the pseudo-motor of negativity, ascends to "absolute knowing" whereupon the Science of Logic begins.

Hegel, while certainly better at it than most philosophers, remains trapped in a dogmatic image of thought. Having done away with all objective presuppositions (about concepts, the object at hand, etc.) and being in such a position ends up resoprting to subjective or pre-conceptual presuppositions from common sense. These take the form of "everybody knows" or "no one can deny" type statements that inevitably slip in from common sense. Everybody knows what is meant by pure being, and everyone knows what is meant by pure nothing, and no one can deny their absolute indeterminacy. Furthermore, everybody knows what is meant by thinking, thought, negation, etc. Such elaborations of what everybody knows, so called rules of thought, so called "logic" are supremely uninteresting. The most problematic thing about Hegel is not that he is necessarily wrong about the conclusions that he makes, but that he is simply boring. The error he makes is to make this boredom a totality, and reduce all thought and thinking to it, reducing everything new to what is already known. You can see this in the way Hegelian thinkers such as Zizek reduce every thinker they encounter to Hegel, attempting to force and twist everything to fit their preconcieved scheme of things.

(1/2)

Among the other features of this dogmatic image of thought is the presupposition of a good will on the part of the thinker, that human beings are naturally inclined towards thinking and the truth. People are often hard of hearing, eyesight, or even memory, yet that thinking is a difficult task, perhaps even something that must happen violently and involuntarily *to* the thinker is beyond all consideration for some. Certainly, if you reduce thinking to be entirely a matter of propositions, oppositions, negations, and reflection, error would appear to be the only error that a thinker could make. That a thinker could not merely err, but be stupid or malicious rarely crosses these people's minds. Perhaps it is because Hegel is the most supreme pit of stupidity. Having bathed in it, and breathed in its fumes, Hegelians have become so stuupid themselves they cannot imagine life otherwise.

What I mean here by stupidity is the inability to tell sense from non-sense. A proposition or question is nonsensical when it deals with something entirely unimportant and irrelevant. Error only becomes the primary foe of thought when you are a game show contestant. The real enemy is nonsense. If we go around asking about "the present king of France" we are asking a nonsensical question. It cannot be true nor false. Ordinary philosophers are rescued from nonsense because they *preserve* the common sense distribution of importance. That is, they are content with the way common sense prioritizes and cuts up the common field of sense, and content themselves with tracing it. Hegel however, being the model of an idiot, must alienate common sense notions by negation, and on its journey back to itself, it "discovers" the church, the state, and even God, reuniting harmoniously back in Kansas with a simple negation of this negation. Hegel's "circle of circles" is incapable of even thinking of decentering itself, of questioning the sensibility of what it entails with. It never moves beyond the slavish mindset of the dialectician, it instead enthrones stupidity. No amount of "reflection" can save thought from its own stupidity, it will just hide it with smoke and mirrors.

Science of logic page 96.

That Hegel thinks that "the real absolute was inside us all along" should alert onlookers to the banality of his philosophy.

>quote mining

Can you find some quotes that contradict the presented views from the Encyclopedia Logic? (My apologies for calling it the Science of Logic) I have more quotes to post too. I'm posting the relevant quotes with their surrounding section too.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guatarri

You've never performed a single dialectic, have you?

Here's your (you)

my diary desu

Since you're a brainlet, let me explain to you what these are about.

Like Kant, whose goal was not to prove something new, but rather to show that that common thinking (understanding) which allowed for science was more or less fine and dandy by a transcendental proof of the validity of its categories and structures, Hegel was not aiming to prove anything new.

The dialectic is a method of rational reconstruction of what, from Hegel's historical point of existence, was already the case. Thus Hegel does not take himself to be creating anything new, but rather giving a rational reconstruction of what already was there. The categories of the Science of Logic are not new, nor the Phenomenology's, nor the Phil of Nature, etc. These are all rational reconstructions of what is already in play in his day. This is a reconception of Plato's 'recollection'. Where does the knowledge we recollect come from? The world we already live in. You must first act, live, a philosophy and only then can you learn it by reflection.

Congratulations, you've stated my problem with him perfectly.

So your problem is that someone is actually aware of where their ideas come from? That's quite stupid, user, not going to to lie.

The critique of the categories which already exist is to properly reconstruct them as valid and objective, so not just any common idea enters into the picture. You would, of course, have to read Hegel and actually be capable of doing a dialectic to understand how the reconstruction works.

You're the biggest pseud I've ever read on this board, and that's saying something--thinking you've done away with the greatest philosopher of all time with a cursory reading of a few quotes and two Veeky Forums posts. You're the lowest of the low.

I'd be a pseud if my critique was original. I'm just restating someone else's criticisms. Obviously two posts are not sufficient, but you can go and read Difference and Repetition, or Nietzsche and Philosophy, and get the full picture if you are curious :) .

There's nothing wrong per se with justifying people's prejudices. What is wrong is totalizing this process and making it out to be the entirety of thinking. That this happens can be shown by the fact that you see no alternative and no other way of thinking, no outsideness.

*was original and I claimed to be my super special own.

Also, common sense has no need of being justified. It gets along perfectly well on its own, unfortunately, and will not be rescued by transcendental proofs from its stupor.

>I'm afraid of absolute knowing

Literally the mark of pseuds who never found out what absolute knowing actually means.

Second, Hegel is not out to justify thinking or common sense. He's out to understand what common thinking really does, which is what the Phenomenology is about. Speculation is the thinking of thinking. First, you have to think.

To paraphrase a quote from Hegel: Common sense does not understand what itself and speculation do, but speculation understands common sense and itself.

>one single day in an average persons life contains as much depth and meaning as the whole of the Odyssey if only you look for it

wow, that was hard.

I didn't say I was afraid, I said such a task is banal and ultimately pointless.

...