Quote: (09-10-2013 04:59 PM)Giovonny Wrote:  

The Bible or anything about The Theory of Relativity.

I've read the bible maybe once in total. New Testament about 3 times. The Gospels, each one, about 5 times in total. I see it as a collection of separate books in a single compendium, which I guess is what it is. Almost a Rorschach blot. I think the authors are getting at something they don't understand but really want to. I feel the same way.

Essay on Blindness

Although it is more of a study than a book, hardest one was The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer. Not confusing, just way way way too god damn elaborate.

The Tale of Genji is told not at all in chronological order, based on antiquated imperial court Japanese from a thousand years ago, and alludes to people whose names we aren't allowed to know.

But it is beautiful. Simply reading it can take you away from all the bullshit of technology and modern society.

Consider the image that this chapter title emotes: the floating bridge of dreams.

Simple and concise, but like a well-written haiku, full of possibilities well beyond its physical scope on paper. One can get lost in such a world.

Had to read Dickens in high school - Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities. Tough slogs. Maybe I should revisit them.

Tried to get through Gravity's Rainbow three times, just bogged down in the bullshit riffing. I always stopped at the banana part.

I got to chapter 18 in Catcher in the Rye. Incredibly painful read. I found it amusing at first, then the drudgery of the character started to grate on me and I had to put it down.

Quote: (04-18-2014 12:04 AM)poutsara Wrote:  

Quote: (09-10-2013 04:59 PM)Giovonny Wrote:  

The Bible or anything about The Theory of Relativity.

I've read the bible maybe once in total. New Testament about 3 times. The Gospels, each one, about 5 times in total. I see it as a collection of separate books in a single compendium, which I guess is what it is. Almost a Rorschach blot. I think the authors are getting at something they don't understand but really want to. I feel the same way.

I've read textbooks on relativity. The special relativity stuff I get, I think. The general relativity I don't get. Not sure if many people can really understand this stuff though. What I learned is, I will never understand what's really going on.

The main take home for me, for all of this, was that I'm just going to have to be ok with incomplete understanding.

Yes, the bible and particularly the new testament is full of wishy washy pseudo philosophical mumbo jumbo.

As for other difficult subjects, I remember reading stuff like Decartes and Kant in high school classes and back then it was pretty damn hard to make sense of some of it.

Needless over complication is intellectual failure and Descartes, as I recall it, uses it to "prove" god's existence.

Same with pretty much everything written by socialists, feminists or frankfurt school people. It is pure nonsense in pseudo academic writing. It fools some people though.

Quote: (04-18-2014 07:59 AM)Yeti Wrote:  

The Tale of Genji is told not at all in chronological order, based on antiquated imperial court Japanese from a thousand years ago, and alludes to people whose names we aren't allowed to know.

I read the Tale of Genji when I was taking a Japanese history course and had my professor fill in the blanks about what was going on. Honestly, it was pretty awesome and the prince Genji was getting a ton of pussy apparently.

However, it also seemed that everyone in the Heian court was a creampuff and lucked out due to geographical isolation. A few centuries later with better technology and they would've been destroyed.

Hardest book I've ever read was an English translation of Hegel's phenomenology of mind. That's a ridiculous read in any language and you need someone to explain the background issues before it starts to make any sense at all. Prussia doesn't even exist anymore, so that alone requires a political explanation.

Ulysses by Joyce is supposed to be damn near impossible.

Quote: (09-09-2013 01:40 PM)scorpion Wrote:  

Quote: (09-06-2013 08:08 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I believe a strategy for some writers is to make their work so dense that even people who don't understand it will claim to love it so that they can show intellectual superiority to others.

Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

This is what Schopenhauer accused Hegel of doing, and I think he was right. In his own words:

“But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”

God... I tried reading Phenemology of Spirit, by Hegel, and I wanted to shoot myself.



"Another passage, also involving Wagner, comes from the autobiography of the painter Friedrich Pecht. Writing of his and Wagner’s days in Dresden in the 1840s, he says: “One day when I called on him I found him burning with passion for Hegel’s Phenomenology, which he told me with typical extravagance, was the best book ever published. To prove it he read me a passage which had particularly impressed him. Since I did not entirely follow it, I asked him to read it again, whereupon neither of us could understand it. He read it a third time and a fourth, until in the end we looked at one another and burst out laughing.” - Sense and Nonsense, Prospect Magazine

From the article above:

Quote:Quote:

Gilbert Ryle, a true stylist among philosophers, said: “It’s much easier to catch a philosopher out… if he is not talking in technical terms, and the most important thing about a philosopher’s arguments is that it should be as easy as possible for other people, and especially for himself, to catch him out if he can be caught out.”

I am related to Gilbert Ryle - interesting fact. lol

I've read all three of the big books of economics by Ludwig von Mises: Socialism, Human Action, and Theory of Money and Credit.

The last two are tough reads.

Currently reading The Trivirum and it's no easy thing to do.
"Melmoth the Wanderer" took me years to finish.

Basically anything I studied in high level philosophy classes.

- Phenomenology Of Spirit

- Being And Time.

- A Thousand Plateaus.

Although, with philosophy it's often hard to tell the difference between difficulty due to inherently difficult subject matter, and difficulty due to obscurantism and (for lack of a better word) "bullshit." Deleuze for instance was probably mostly bullshit.

Good luck to any of you if you ever attempt to read a clockwork orange.

Quote: (04-23-2014 08:55 PM)L M McCoy Wrote:  

Good luck to any of you if you ever attempt to read a clockwork orange.

It's easier to read if you are familiar with a slavic language, especially Russian - the slang in the book is based on Russian.

Quote: (04-23-2014 08:55 PM)L M McCoy Wrote:  

Good luck to any of you if you ever attempt to read a clockwork orange.

I actually enjoyed reading it, and thought the method of throwing in foreign words was a great teaching method.

I still know the word Devotchka to this day, thanks to Clockwork Orange.

I think Kubrick did a good job turning it into a movie.

Quote: (09-06-2013 08:08 PM)Roosh Wrote:  

I believe a strategy for some writers is to make their work so dense that even people who don't understand it will claim to love it so that they can show intellectual superiority to others.

Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Interesting thing to note here is the context of the Sokal affair.

The person who submitted the article is a physicist and he submitted to a sociological journal.

When you look at the scale of intelligence in the sciences. Physics attracts the most intelligent people in society. Sociology is at the other end of the spectrum where it is intellectually deprived to the point where it has become a point of mockery for anyone who works in a respectable field within the realm of the sciences.

That affair was simply another case of physicists making a mockery of sociology for being filled with dense people who should have never been able to have any level of success in academia.

The derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations. Prose is cake compared to that shit.

Quote: (04-20-2014 08:21 AM)ElJefe Wrote:  

Ulysses by Joyce is supposed to be damn near impossible.

It is. I've read some crazy shit, and Ulysses is the hardest book I've ever read.

I heard 'Finnegan's Wake' is even worse.

Joyce was such a retard.

So much of German philosophy is incoherent, useless nonsense. Seems like these guys count it a badge of honor to be incomprehensible.

Same with anything by Kant.

Maybe language has something to do with it, but I doubt it. Sometimes translations can ruin a decent piece of work.

Quote: (04-23-2014 08:55 PM)L M McCoy Wrote:  

Good luck to any of you if you ever attempt to read a clockwork orange.

There's a glossary in the back of the version I have.
Once I got the hang of it, the book was a fun read.

My take is that Kant was very smart and also a very bad writer.

Because Kant was a legitimate genius - he made difficult writing fashionable. And a lot of lesser philosophers have buried their lack of talent underneath a deliberately difficult and wordy writing style.

Take 2Wycked to give one example!













:-)