Deconstructing The Lulz

duchenne-parallax:

sterwood:

duchenne-parallax replied to your post: The hardest part of writing an essay is writing an…

I am literally writing an essay on Spinoza also or, am not because today I’m fucking incapable of anything. =___=

Seriously? What a coincidence!

What do you have to write on? I’m stuck…

mine is comparing him to Leibniz (or, more straightforwardly the differences in their approaches to rationalism as such),

but Spinoza is just sort of perfectly flawed insofar as so may things he says are quite brilliant and then he just goes batshit panentheistic the next paragraph over 

but the thing is, it’s entirely cohesive, and the more I can ‘get inside his head’, as it were, the more I see that and the more multifacetedly interesting he is. 

I think the issue I’m having is that this is supposed to be a summarize-and-compare essay for a survey course when I’d really just like to talk about implications

and I’ve gotten NOWHERE on it in fourish hours

waugh. 

Oh, damn, those are about the same problems I’m having. My essay prompt is just like “explain these 7 or so pages in a short essay” and I’m all like “Don’t you realize these might be the most important pages in the whole damn Ethics! How do you want a concise essay on that?”

I’m really bad at summary, or compare-and-summary type essays, because my mind instantly goes to implications. Especially implications re: other authors. And I just sit here and think “how do you want me to write about this properly when I can’t even engage with all the other authors this has direct repercussions for???”

And I don’t know. I’m sort of diggin’ the pantheism to some degree? Especially since its couched in his whole monism-pluralism stuff. I don’t generally dig monism, but his is so delightfully consistent and internally valid, that I can’t help but really appreciate it.

But yeah, most of this complaining is just do to academic snobbery. Whoops.