![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have ordered Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding". Have I lost my mind? The classic philosophers, really? The masters of abstruseness! If anything, it might have been time to limit all of my reading to the world of Thomas Mann, with occasional time off to read "Lolita" and "1984" and maybe the odd pop-novel. Is it not too late in the day to start getting ambition?
It started with Safranski's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy". It tempted me to consider his "The World as Will and Representation", but then it got me to appreciate that, in order to fully appreciate "Will and Representation", I really should tackle Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I spent some days browsing through various editions and renditions of this book, and in my research, I came to appreciate that I should probably go one more step back and take on Hume. It was Hume, it may be recalled, that woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
But won't all these books merely put me into a dog-like slumber? I recall taking a look at Kant's Critique before, maybe twenty years ago, and I was utterly unable to find a foothold, and it is not as though I have been gaining IQ points in my old age. Nevertheless, I apparently feel moved, one more time, to give it the old college try. I am practically hoping that I will give up inside of a week, finding it an intolerable expenditure of my all too limited time, so that I can give that much more time to Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers" as well as his letters, which should be more than meal enough for me. Of course, I would not mind finding myself getting turned on to these philosophers, but I presumably would stand a better chance of dating Miley Cyrus and getting her to feel turned on by me.
It started with Safranski's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy". It tempted me to consider his "The World as Will and Representation", but then it got me to appreciate that, in order to fully appreciate "Will and Representation", I really should tackle Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I spent some days browsing through various editions and renditions of this book, and in my research, I came to appreciate that I should probably go one more step back and take on Hume. It was Hume, it may be recalled, that woke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.
But won't all these books merely put me into a dog-like slumber? I recall taking a look at Kant's Critique before, maybe twenty years ago, and I was utterly unable to find a foothold, and it is not as though I have been gaining IQ points in my old age. Nevertheless, I apparently feel moved, one more time, to give it the old college try. I am practically hoping that I will give up inside of a week, finding it an intolerable expenditure of my all too limited time, so that I can give that much more time to Mann's "Joseph and His Brothers" as well as his letters, which should be more than meal enough for me. Of course, I would not mind finding myself getting turned on to these philosophers, but I presumably would stand a better chance of dating Miley Cyrus and getting her to feel turned on by me.
