Is this the part where I give a shit?
No, that chapter comes after the one where you realize you’ve spent all your time with books and your relationships have gone to shit. Then you can come back here and see why.
I spent just as much time writing books.
And relationships are supposed to go to shit.
Who cares about your interpretations of Spinoza, Spinoza has been dead for centuries, he doesn’t need to be interpreted and reinterpreted to death, especially by the likes of you. No need to butcher the man’s thoughts with your melodramatic blather.
So your first book is going to be a plagiarizing of another man’s philosophy, no surprise there. How creative, how original of you and how vital. At the very best, you will be a mere footnote.
It is the sign of a mediocre mind to not talk about the thoughts of others. Philosophy is a long, protracted conversation, over the course of many centuries. Of several thousand aphorisms, a few discuss Spinoza, in most of them there are only my thoughts. But for a man’s own thoughts to take form, they must bear against the thoughts of others. All great writers and thinkers have discussed each other, to one extent or another, in order to articulate their own thoughts in the history of philosophy. I am terribly sorry you can’t figure out where to place your reptilian theory.
I talk about other philosophers, so I can’t have a philosophy. Nice logic. How exactly do you, Lucis, think, with an empty mind?
Everyone talks about the thoughts of others but few can come up with their own.
Yeah… Let’s see, 342. 342 original thoughts in my book, 342 small essays and aphorisms, of original thoughts. How many have you had again?
I take inspiration from others, but I am also capable inspiring and conjuring up radical new ideas and departures from established ways of thinking.
As am I. But could you give me an example of this “radical new idea” of yours?
Those aren’t thoughts, they’re emotional expressions of another man’s thoughts.
Whose?
I’m just making an inference based on your intellectually stunted attitude here. Perhaps some of your thoughts aren’t entirely derivative, if so, I commend and congratulate you.
A few random aphorisms.
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37. Vanity often becomes so interwoven with our happiness that where we cease to feel vanity we are unable to recognize that we are happy.
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The great remedy.-- The ancients knew very well that grave danger itself draws off the heart’s laden excess: unhappy lovers used to jump into the sea from the promotonory of Leucadia and, if they were saved, took their survival as a sign of Apollo’s favor and were relieved the pang of their unrequited love.
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Art and moral suffering.-- The more ingenious that man’s delight in form becomes, so the need to endow meter, tone, and figure with the significance of higher ideals drawn from various moral and philosophical visions of life is equally strengthened. For in this way man’s delight in form is rescued from a deterioration into the primeval joy of intoxication and madness, to instead flower as a more “spiritual” exaltation of man’s greater instincts: only in this way can a culture significantly advanced endure art with a good conscience. A consequence of this, however, is that the entire sphere of man’s moral and philosophical understanding must be extended to the same depths and heights of art, including no less the great tribulations of that consciousness: the suffering of this understanding, and of this whole obverse side of the heart of man, must finally attain to that boundary point where his joy in form begins. Art, which began in intoxication, which later communicated spiritual exaltation, always ends in an terrible affirmation of that consciousness of moral and spiritual suffering which artists, in their primitive naiveness, have sought to provide a small redemption from, or else it is faced with a return to the barbarism of intoxication.
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Contrary virtue.-- What delightful wisdom there is in Voltaire’s prescription again the ills and thorns of life; cultivate thy garden. But there are those beings destined for ruin: the little thorns and weeds of life, of unsated desire and envy that has learned indignance for example, have taken too strong of a hold upon their depths. Before such a being must be preposed a contrary wisdom, namely, that he give himself over to the tyranny of nature, that in the least something may rule him that is greater than little thorns and weeds, and he may attain to a figure mighty in its ruin. For such a being this is virtue and beauty. [/size]
So, let me get this straight. These aren’t my thoughts? You are accusing me of plagiarism, and that is not a light accusation. So I commend you to either prove it, or shut your fucking mouth, because I take that kind of shit very, very seriously.
You may read my posts if you like. Keep in mind my ideas are germinating, I am still young and in the process of defining and formulating my philosophy. In time, with luck and courage, perhaps I’ll write a book. I am using this forum as a way of challenging and refining my philosophy. With constructive criticism comes growth. I appreciate the feedback of Statiktech, James S Saint and many others here who have helped mature my thought.
The thoughts I just pasted here, there is nothing emotional about them. They are actually quite passive in tone. Now are you suggesting I stole them from another man, or not? Let’s try it again.
[size=85] In general every period of contemplation that has been known to a nation endures for the least amount of time- it is by far the most ephemeral of all periods, and always arises only after the ages of darkness, of secrecy, of fear, of war, of luxury, have all lent their own colors to the soul of a people, enriched and fertilized it. This fact demonstrates that the real value of world-history for the philosopher is that, through its study, the distances and the gulfs within perspective and knowledge that have been born open throughout the ages can finally be transposed within the soul of an individual and grasped inwardly, as a passion, as pathos. The inclination and disinclinaton for knowledge, the refinement of the spiritual life, the discovery of the nuances of the passions, in short the essential instruments for the practice of thinking- this all depends upon the capacity to grasp inwardly the divergence of those drives which could never be isolated, delimited, and set upon a peculiar development in the course of a single life. The more immense a consciousness a philosopher has of the world, and of the ages of the world, the more immense are his powers of creation: the Greek soul had to be fructified with the profound history of Asiatic conquest and self-conquest before the poets and philosophers could be born. For in grasping inwardly this divergence and isolation of the drives, in the effective diversification of them, in the enlargement of man’s sphere of consciousness over the drives, so the inner turmoil of the heart becomes greater: the contradiction of man’s drives urges new sufferings, passions, and longings without name to struggle for expression, urges the realization of new ideas in whose image their war can be arrested. [/size]
Did I fucking steal that, or did I not?
I don’t fucking think I did.
[size=85]335. Artists and men of action.-- To create excessively signifies what all youthful beauty signifies- the first awakening of an instinct that does not yet know itself, which cleaves about itself everything that delights it, that strikes it as just, and that commands its admiration; that is, ultimately, overladen with its adornments and grasps at life with clumsy hands. There is another variety of artist, however, one who is moved to create rarely, and then only in the moment of death, in the abeyance of passion. Every great work of art is only an idea or passion that has been cast off as superfluity, excess, and remnant on the part of its creator. This is not said to diminish its value to us, but its beauty, with respect to its creator, can be one only of happy and foolish memories. One should never hold artists of this stalk to the measure of their works, which is deceptive: to create, in their sense, only means to have relinquished and left behind. Corresponding to these two forms of the aesthetic life, there are also two forms of the man of action; one who acts excessively out of some obscure instinct which seeks to know itself, and that other, far nobler man of action, such as was Brutus, whose hand moves only in the hour of death, when passion has grown still to an ember; which moves only to rid itself of the ash and dross of life. [/size]
What about that? Did I plagiarize this one?
Tell you what, I’ll give you an assessment after I’ve had some time to analyze it.
You can assess as long as you want, it’s all original.