i finished the decline of the west a couple of days ago, and i am amazed at how Spengler is not talked about almost (if not) at all, he is absolutely brilliant, probably the smartest man of the 20th century (or at the very least gives a good competition to Jung), why is he not talked about?
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I don't know. If what he wrote is true, it's somewhat uncomfortable to acknowledge, isn't it? I think Spengler was imperfect but I've been unable to forget his worldview ever since I read that book and I'm actually not happy about it.
>it's somewhat uncomfortable to acknowledge, isn't it?
Not really. All things must end and every ending is also a beginning.
And what to do with our lives in the meantime?
Just do our very best at ensuring continuity. Duty. Purpose. 🙂
I don't feel any particular duty to this civilization and I certainly don't feel any sense of purpose.
I found more value in certain readers of Stirner than Stirner himself.
then go meet a woman and have some kids anon.
Checked. Your purpose as you awaken is to build structures independent from the satanic system.
I don’t think that’s true to be honest with you.
Absolutely agree. Spengler is a once in a lifetime genius. His civilizational typology lays the groundwork for many more adjacent thinkers too. From normie academics like Toynbee to visionary mystics like Guénon. He is only ignored nowadays because his thought does not fit into politically correct libtard ideology.
> visionary mystics like Guenon
Or Evola or Schuon
You realize they're just Western dissidents in Spengler's view, right? They are so dissident that they fled to other civilizations.
>Visionary
>Guenon
>visionary mystics like Guénon
Someone held back by tradition can't be visionary by definition kek
Someone with a point of reference can only misinterpret his role.
>with
*without
Guenon isn't a visionary or a mystic.
>probably the smartest man of the 20th century
That would be John Maynard Keynes
Only in the month of June
He is a learned dilletante.
If redditors recognized the genius of people like Spengler they couldn't keep saying that right wingers are dumb.
Okay, but what does Crowley have to do with this?
Didn’t know Focault gained that much weight.
now read the everpresent origin
That's some JDE schizo theory that these two are related. In reality, Jean Gebser has nothing to do with Oswald Spengler and in fact they are at odds with each other.
>and i am amazed at how Spengler is not talked about almost (if not) at all, he is absolutely brilliant
Because no one here reads.
Evola speaks about the same thing in a more metaphysical sense. The New Science by Giambattista Vico is an earlier precursor.
What are your takeaways? What were some of his principle arguments? What sources does he draw from? I haven’t read that but I’m reading the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and could discuss it in that context.
Spengler's main point was that culture (religion, art, metaphysics, pastoralism) declines into civilization (technology, science, economics, imperialism, urbanism). This is nothing new. However, he posited a unique way of delineating between specific High Cultures. They can be distinguished by their Prime Symbols, which is akin to a numinous mathematical-metaphysical aesthetic tied to a central idea. Each Prime Symbol has a certain lifespan before entropy and reification kills it. The High Cultures that he posits all have a lifespan of approximately 1000 years, but they can be 'killed' early (as with Mesoamerican culture).
So for example, Classical civilization was based on the idea of the Static Body. In the Greek Dark Ages, the Ionians started imitating the sculptural forms of Egyptian Civilization (pic). They modified this idea to exemplify the male form, essentially a phallocentric dick-worshipping gaylord culture. After Alexander, Greek culture was inherited by the Roman Imperium.
Under Rome, you see the emergence of Middle Eastern Culture (the Pantheon being a Zoroastrian temple in disguise, eastern Hellenistic sculptors beginning to drill holes into eyes to signify a new understanding of the 'soul', and a turn away from naturalism towards symbolism/iconophilia).
The Germanic West adopted both Greek and Near Eastern forms to a new Prime Symbol: a masculine individual thrusting into Infinite Space (the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, the East during the Age of Exploration, the eternal feminine).
He also believed Russia was its own High Culture, and would overthrow Bolshevism and develop along a separate path to the West around the year 2000.
>and develop along a separate path to the West around the year 2000.
you're mixing up that date from the date he gave for Caesarism in the west. He never said anything about Russia and that date.
In The Hour of Decision, he stated that the completion of Faustian civilization will occur at the hands of the Russians by the end of the 1900s, in a manner isomorphic to the Hyksos Period of Egyptian civilization, if the Russian-led Bolsheviks were able to export their revolution to Western Europe. That is to say, Caesarism in one civilization will occur due to the intrusion of a foreign culture.
>1000 BC is the completion of Egyptian civilization and the birth of Classical culture.
>1 AD is the completion of Classical civilization and the birth of Magian culture.
>1000 AD is the completion of Magian civilization and the birth of Faustian culture.
>2000 AD is the completion of Faustian civilization and the beginning of Russian culture.
This is his historical schema. It's not hard to understand.
>This is his historical schema. It's not hard to understand.
except its not. Cultures are not born out of other cultures for him. You clearly haven't read him and also these aren't even the dates he gives at the back of his book. Also Caesarism is something that comes from the civilization itself. not from a foreign culture. In volume 2 he explains how it develops and he never mentions it being due to foreign cultures intruding. He is studying cultural morphology and not universal history. You are trying to turn his theory into universal history which he explicitly rejects.
You are right that there has not yet been a high tide of russian cultural development but we could very well see it this century. Russia is still under the western pseudomorphosis but I definitely see a future for them.
>You clearly haven't read him and also these aren't even the dates he gives at the back of his book.
How about read what he said in his actual fricking book instead of skipping to the chart added by his publisher.
>For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of awakening it is bound by its charter. (145)
>Also Caesarism is something that comes from the civilization itself. not from a foreign culture.
He explains how Caesarism arrived in Egypt after the Hyksos destroyed the 'ancien regime' before being swept away by the resurgent New Kingdom. This is how Egypt reformed itself after the crisis in culture marked by the cult of Akhenaten. The New Kingdom was not "caused" by the Hyksos, no more than American imperialism was "caused" by 9/11, or the Crusades were "caused" by the Byzantines calling Western Europe for aid at the Council of Clermont.
>>For if it is incidental that the history of higher mankind fulfils itself in the form of great Cultures, and that one of these Cultures awoke in West Europe about the year 1000; yet from the moment of awakening it is bound by its charter. (145)
I wasn't saying every single one of those dates is wrong but 0AD is never said to be the end of Hellenistic culture and 1000AD is never said to be the end of Magian culture.
And the thing you're saying about Caesarism is not at all necessary for Caesarism as that would imply that cultures that are not geographically near to others never enter Caesarism because there is no intrusion of a foreign culture.
>I wasn't saying every single one of those dates is wrong but 0AD is never said to be the end of Hellenistic culture and 1000AD is never said to be the end of Magian culture.
It literally says it begans "from 0." and ends with "Practical fatalism in Islam after 1000" in the table that you read instead of his book, you fricking moron.
>And the thing you're saying about Caesarism is not at all necessary for Caesarism as that would imply that cultures that are not geographically near to others never enter Caesarism because there is no intrusion of a foreign culture.
Spengler never says the intrusion of a foreign culture is necessary for Caesarism. He explains that overlapping High Cultures will see one event being seen as differently by the High Cultures. Hence Alexander's conquests were the advent of Civilization in Classical culture, but also marking the high point of the "period of contending states" for Indian culture reaching the end of its Civilizational period as it transitioned towards Caesarism.
Indeed, Spengler even has a term for foreign cultures that assimilate within the host-culture., unfortunately I can't find it currently.
pseudomorphosis?
>He also believed Russia was its own High Culture, and would overthrow Bolshevism and develop along a separate path to the West around the year 2000.
How does anyone still take this guy seriously lmao
I have read him btw
that statement mischaracterizes what Spengler was saying. He was saying that communism is western and therefore it wouldnt stick to Russia but the part that that anon wrote about 'going separate paths from the west around 2000' is moronic for two reasons. First off Spengler doesn't have the idea of separate paths because every high culture is already separate. That anon is describing it as if Russia and the west came out of the same origin which is not what Spengler ever says so yeah. And also Spengler never gave a date for when Russia would reject the western pseudomorphosis. So I want to know where that anon got that date from.
No he said that this would be the high-tide of Russian cultural development. How's that working out?
The only relevant culture that Russia has produced has been reactionary and solely based on the impending terror of the cosh of western cultural hegemony. Russia is a dead country.
Spergler's issue was that he failed to view technology as the equaliser that it is, preferring some mystic Neech-ish 'Spirit' that would defend itself from Technology's overweening supremacy. This has not happened, and thus too all the world has been engulfed in a technological race to the bottom. Only trad-larpers and the like pretending that human spirit is still the primary locomotor of Earth's destiny can believe in such bilge; the world's not so pleasant as all that.
>he failed to view technology as the equaliser that it is
Opinion discarded.
Frick this homosexual Deus-sucking midwit.
>First off Spengler doesn't have the idea of separate paths because every high culture is already separate
Yes, separate means separate. Good job.
>That anon is describing it as if Russia and the west came out of the same origin which is not what Spengler ever says so yeah.
You're inventing shit to argue against. Stop.
>And also Spengler never gave a date for when Russia would reject the western pseudomorphosis.
He gave you a thousand page book explaining his fricking method. Page 193 directly links Charlemagne as a contemporary to Peter the Great. Both reigned approximately 250 years before the beginning of their respective High Cultures. In between these figures and the beginning of the culture, you get the blossoming of a mythopoetic tradition. He links Dostoyevsky and the Russian literary tradition to the Homeric Period (1200-800 BC) and sagas/romances in the West (800-1200 AD).
>You're inventing shit to argue against. Stop.
what do you think going separate paths means? It implies that they were originally on the same path, no?
>He gave you a thousand page book explaining his fricking method
You're now talking about what stage of its culture a country is at at any given time which is different from when a pseudomorphosis is rejected. There is no universal history and thus a pseudomorphosis has no inherent necessity. Some cultures have them and some don't. They are accidents of history. For this reason there is no way of extrapolating from other cultures to know when a new one will shed its pseudomorphosis.
>what do you think going separate paths means? It implies that they were originally on the same path, no?
No it does not. To say that Russia will develop along a separate path to the West does not mean that Russia ever originated from the same one. You are just a basic IQfytrionic injecting moronic interpretations for the sake of argument.
>You're now talking about what stage of its culture a country is at at any given time which is different from when a pseudomorphosis is rejected
Pseumorphism has absolutely nothing to do with the beginning of a culture. The West began its culture under a double pseudomorphosis, and continues to be under it to this day. He explicitly names Peter the Great as a contemporary of Charlemagne, which means they mark the beginning of a pre-cultural period lasting roughly two-hundred years. Subtract a thousand years from Peter's reign, and it roughly overlaps with that of Charlemagne. He explicitly labels 1000 AD as the approximate starting date for Western culture. Therefore one would expect Russian culture to emerge around 2000 AD by isomorphism.
>To say that Russia will develop along a separate path to the West does not mean that Russia ever originated from the same one
Yes but you said that it would only develop along a different path starting from 2000 which implies that before that they were on the same path - this isnt what Spengler says. If thats not what you meant thats fine.
>Therefore one would expect Russian culture to emerge around 2000 AD by isomorphism
I agree with this but that says nothing about whether it will go a separate way from the west at the same date. It is clearly still under heavy pseudomorphosis. He also never says it will literally happen right at 2000, its more of an approximate date so people who say Spengler was wrong dont understand how his theory works.
The dates Spengler gives have a margin of error of a hundred years because he's describing gradual, continuous processes. Nevertheless we should actually note closely events seem to follow the dates: Putin's term in office began on May 7, 2000.
I always point this when this comes up. In fact, many of the predictions about the West have already come true, but in Russia.
A bunch of nothing kek
The prime symbol for the Ancient Greeks is not bussy, lmao. It is the measure related to the bodily form.
>Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Oedipus and the phallus-symbol.
>There is something of pure unrelated present in the Phallus and the Lingam, and in the phenomenon of the Doric column and the Attic statue as well.
>To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of mother-love... The Mother with the Child - the future - at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found its highest expression in Raphael's Sistine Madonna.
>since Faustian civilization has essentially gone global,
so everyone is now Faustian? I mean I get that with the end of nazi in ww2 & collaspe of soviet union in cold war. The western faustian spirit have become the sole greatest power on earth but did everyone actually become or obtain faustian spirit into them? what about the chinese?
The Faustian spirit has not "gone global" just because the West is the global hegemon, as soon as the West falls most of its superficial influence on non-western countries will dissipate. And it never had spiritual influence to begin with.
I see. I was kinda confused wheter or not if the faustian spirit has finally conquest alreadh conquest the world due to the fact that younger people in non-western countries are starting to become more and more western.
Yeah I think it has and you see it in all aspects of life from political and military affairs to working life to socializing. The Western way has become the norm in many countries across the world in just about every arena, but still, Spengler would call this a pseudomorphosis. It’s not as if the nation or it’s people literally become Western, although at one point he did make a remark implying that’s what happened with America. I don’t know if he was serious or if that was rhetorical. I think the latter.
No, more like many non-Western countries are either under a Western pseudomorphosis, Westernized, Westernizing, or are simply forced to do things in the Western way due to technological imperatives and such. It’s really technology that is driving the phenomenon more than anything. The internet, for example, is mostly in English regardless where you are from.
The big problem with Spengler is that his paradigm is entirely 100% built on mysticism, which means that you either dig the aesthetics and believe it simply because it feels right, or you don't dig the aesthetics and there's nothing Spengler or his followers can actually say in order to convince you - there are no arguments which can lead to his view from some reasonable common ground. In that way, his teaching can only work as a teaching in the form of a literal cult.
Human history is a process of emergence, transformation and decline of cultural concepts, with all other elements of human condition emanating from those cultural concepts. Said concepts are defined by the qualities of symbols they utilize, and which in turn determine the mode of existence within those cultures.
It can be described as a deterministic interpretation of history through radical idealism, which sounds cool, but literally cannot be proven, refuted or applied. It's essentially philosophical poetry in melancholic tones, that some schizos take way too seriously.
>He also believed Russia was its own High Culture
Yes.
>and would overthrow Bolshevism and develop along a separate path to the West around the year 2000
>In The Hour of Decision, he stated that the completion of Faustian civilization will occur at the hands of the Russians by the end of the 1900s, in a manner isomorphic to the Hyksos Period of Egyptian civilization, if the Russian-led Bolsheviks were able to export their revolution to Western Europe.
No, he explicitly never stated that. This anon is trying to invent miraculous prophetic results that would validate your Great Teacher, which is an essential part of cult behavior. QED.
Spengler himself was very much convinced that right wingers are dumb.
That's also not what Spengler said.
huh?
He’s a pagan. He thinks the authentic Western spirituality is a form of vitalism and preaches that all is ultimately fate. But you’re right, simply appealing to fare doesn’t justify any claims. In fact, it can’t. So I don’t see how he thinks any of what he claims is reliable or true. And I pointed out the line above about the mother Virgin Mary cult but that is a Roman Catholic innovation and not a pre-existing thing.
>he's a pagan
>in the 20th century
more proof Spergler's inane "philosophy" deserves to be disregarded
Can you read? He’s a pagan in the sense that he preaches fate and a certain vitalism, not that he worships deities.
While back I was reading about buddhism, and I must say I felt it had similarity with Spengler's views. I haven't yet gone too far into rabbit hole, but both buddhism and Spengler speak about how out of nothing humans create world feeling, and abstractions and views that do not describe reality. He even mentions how subject and object disappear in when put under observation, just like buddhists do.
I’m not well-read on Buddhism but from what I can tell, Buddhism ends up concluding that natural reality is either meaningless or mere illusion. Spengler doesn’t believe that. He can’t believe that for his whole thing to make any sense. I think his worldview is essentially Christian, which is incompatible with Buddhism even though there might be some overlaps in particular instances here and there.
>which is incompatible with Buddhism
?
You don’t think Christianity is incomparable with Buddhism?
Only the part how there is no supreme creator god.
Here’s what I’d say
These are mutually exclusive worldviews.
This is not how buddhism works. You're mistaking it with advaita vedanta. Buddhism investigates conventional & ultimate realities. Still, politics and militaria are taken by buddhism as paths that lead only to more suffering.
Does Buddhism believe in an impersonal absolute? If so, it’s incompatible with both Christianity, which preaches a direct and personal relationship with God by way of a triad, and any philosophy that makes truth claims about the natural world, which presupposes that meaning is imminent in the natural world.
Spengler did say that Hyksos-Russia thing was possible. He didn’t say it would happen.
If you don’t believe in mysticism, it doesn’t really matter what you think anyway, even if you decide to believe ironically. It is the only move that matters.
Wtf does that even mean? This is totally incoherent.
Everyone eventually believes in mysticism to some degree whether they know it or not, so it's not "the only move that matters", or even a move at all. But everyone's mysticism is inevitably his own personal mysticism, which might can expressed, but not communicated - so while it can be something worth of hearing and admiring, it's never worth thinking about, analysing, internalizing, or trying to understand in general - because you never will.
I was impressed at the breadth of his knowledge, but he oversimplifies his analysis to the point of absurdity and draws all sorts of moronic conclusions from it. For instance, he claimed that the Greeks represented pure physicality, yet somehow ignores the fact that they also produced Platonism (which is almost the opposite, seeing the soul as trapped within matter). And just how the frick is Slavic civilisation supposed to be based on horizontal planes, or Arabic civilisation based on caves? He very often just jams the available information into these templates, regardless of whether they fit or not.
I only read the original English translation of vol.1 and that was way back in 2014, but those are the things which have stayed with me.
Platonism perfectly fits the physicality of Greek culture that he describes. Look at what Plato is actually doing. He reaches the idea of forms by extrapolating from physical phenomena. He sees a dog and assumes there is a stable eternal form of dog. He never actually goes beyond the physical and temporal phenomena.
In contrast this is what Western thinkers always do. The idea of evolution is totally the opposite of Platonism in that every being is always changing and in motion. Kant, who I see as the Western version of Plato, is also an anti-Platonist in that he goes right past the object in question to the mental faculties that represent it.
The history of our civilization is the gradual liberation from the Greek worldview.
If, as Spengler says, the whole of Greek culture is a culture of pure being and physicality, then there cannot be any outliers. Consequently there is no notion more alien to the Greek mind than that of becoming. Even Heraclitus, who is frequently mischaracterized as a "philosopher of becoming", is in actuality a philosopher of being just like Parmenides and Plato. His philosophy is not one of motion, but of recognizing the durability of being, of that which endures through movement. He saw how cold things became warm, and wet things became dry. What interested Heraclitus was what persisted through this motion, a single principle that united the Kosmos despite its ever-changing nature. This he called the logos.
The ultimate genius of Spengler, and Goethe, is that they look past surface features to the essential nature of things. They observed the unity of them and how they relate and interact with each other. They teach us to approach everything with the idea, 'does this fit into a schema?' If not, cast the schema away, or come back with a different perspective.
>He never actually goes beyond the physical and temporal phenomena.
You clearly did not read Plato.
Present a rebuttal or begone. Have you read Theaetetus, in which Plato presents a worldview which is indubitably static and corporeal? In which he regards the world as a closed system with man in the center as a passive partaker of knowledge? In this text Plato assumes that thoughts and ideas are separate objects from the corporeal objects they represent. From our Kantian point of view, this is fairly ridiculous. The Nominalist in us tells us that Plato got the idea of the chair from empirically observing the object that humans call a chair and forming a concept about it. Again, he never goes beyond the physical phenomenon.
Plato also argues that knowledge about objects cannot be reached through perception but only through mental reflection. Thus the potential for knowledge cannot exist in an object, since it is only accessible through knowledge of the forms. But again, using our Kantian common sense, when we reflect upon an object, we are in fact bound by empirical data. To say that an object exists is indeed a mental reflection on that object, but it is also a matter of fact observation. The notion of ‘existence’ has been created through the unity of the intellect and sense perception. Plato’s assumption is the Parmenidean eternality of knowledge, which does not allow the creation of new concepts, only the anamnesis of pre-existing ones.
What this all tells us only is the system that Plato, and the rest of the Greeks, wanted to establish. Their philosophical aesthetics clash with our own. I have zero love for Plato. I regard him, as all Greek philosophers, simply as emblematic of the Greek worldview. I am not interested in him as a philosopher but as an artifact of history. I have even less love for that Classicist myth that Plato is the wellspring of all knowledge just because he's an ancient philosopher.
I am not the lad you are replying to, but reading this made me sad because I read the critique of pure reason three times, and it fricked up my brain and how I think. So everything you said makes sense. But I have to remember that Kant is a moron because he was not initiated into the mysteries and he never experienced any elevated spiritual states of being. So he was blind to much of reality. This is the main thing to remember. Kant writes himself off in the eyes of traditionalists in the intro to the critique of pure reason when he denies spiritual perception.
Kant is an artifact of history too, baby. You got lapped. But at least you've got your own philosophical aesthetics to comfort you.
> Plato presents a worldview which is indubitably static and corporeal
I'm not sure I follow. Kant does the same thing, but then adds that we experience the world through categories. Which are also physical and tied to our senses? Isn't Kant even more of a physicalist - since Plato at least allows us to have direct knowledge of the forms innately (we only have to remember them) - whereas Kant is saying we can only know physical appearances.
>Kant, who I see as the Western version of Plato, is also an anti-Platonist in that he goes right past the object in question to the mental faculties that represent it.
Which is just wrong, because Kant's positing of the "thing-in-itself" is him trying to revive Platonism.
What I find a bit odd about Spengler's critics is that they often critize him for not being factual, but they never provide examples. Personally, I think Untergang is a work of genius, and it is my favorite book. But I am always curious to hear critiques of his work, but they rarely have any depth or substance.
the critique of his books not being factual is idiotic. Spengler himself lays out that there is multiple ways that history gets understood and one of those is in the way the 'fact man' looking for causal links describes history. This is not what Spengler is trying to do so of course 'fact men' seethe at him.
In the very first pages of his book Spengler claims that the Indians never had portraiture, but they did and it is featured in the single most popular work of Indian literature
Spengler bases his analysis on data, if the data is wrong we may question the analysis
Rene Guenon is leagues smarter than both of them..
Anyone who thinks real life is Middle Earth is a fool.
Wow you refuted Guenon. Amazing. Have an upvote. You are so smart. Way smarter than Ibn Arabi, Plato, and everyone else who believed similar things to Guenon. You have Scientific Knowledge. And clearly you have done an extensive reading of Guenon too. Chapaeu sir.
Rene Guenon, a Faustian who who has started to resent Faustian civilization just like Spengler predicted and seeks to flee to Magian and Indian civilization for refuge but uses Faustian methods to do it.
Deserves more (you)s. Guenongay btfo. On a similar note, what would you call a Magian with a Faustian spirit who tries desperately to keep up his cultural Magian LARP that is contrary to his true nature? Asking for a friend.
If their spirit was genuinely Faustian then he’d just call them a Faustian. This, I think, is possible in his worldview since Faustian civilization has essentially gone global, but I would question whether it’s really the case.
>A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the extinction of the old and the appearance of the new one.
From this, we can infer that his suggestion that a man of Arab blood born and raised in Germany is more likely to be Faustian than an the same born and raised in Germany but with some Western influence, though it could still be possible.
If you want to know what I personally have to say about it, I’m not sure I can offer much of anything. I don’t have an opinion beyond recognizing this is something people struggle with these days.
I think the green is interesting in the case of America, which despite being another continent is most definitely Faustian in his worldview.
Ive seen it proposed that if race is a consequence of environment factors and successive evolution across generations, then it would take about 500 years for a new and distinct race to be formed. That could explain why Americans are considered Faustian but one day may not be. Technology probably has some sort of effect here.
What do you make of the idea that Spengler had no way to justify his claims? I’ve read the book and it blew me away. I personally found it hard to dismiss very much of what he wrote in that book, but the critique that by virtue of his being a cultural, philosophical, and religious relativist, he doesn’t actually have any way to ground his logic seems to be right.
what's your guy opinion on his heir/succesor?
Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium I mean
Never read. Appears as more of a political polemic than comparative world history project.
I read a review on benespen.com that said he was a Neo Nazi who completely misinterpreted Spengler. Even Evola said Yockey had misread Spengler.
OH NO GUYS, EVERYTHING GREAT HAS ALREADY PASSED. WE'RE ALL GOING TO FRICKING HELL, CEAASSEEASRRRRR AAAAA
Frick anyone who takes this absolute pathetic dork seriously. He's just a nihilsitic decadent butthole
How is he inspired by Nietzsche when Nietzsche would never say ''Well the best art has been made, let's not think we're great guys''
lmfao
Spengler never said that. That’s how. You should try reading the book before you give a hot take on it.
>decline of the west
Prussianism and Socialism was better
A lot of his predictions in his essays seem to have been wrong. Decline doesn’t have so many obvious inaccurate predictions.
>'Man and Technics' exists
Absolutely not, maybe in his earlier years but by the end of his life he'd become a Cassandra
How does the 'Hour of Decision' compare?
very good
he predicted everything
The most overrated theorist.
Obligatory where to start with him?
> pic
I don't get it.
Just read Decline. It’s a dense and difficult book that nothing in particular short of the entire history of philosophy and and history itself can prepare you for.
"corporeal" does not mean "material" or "physical" you blockheads, it means corporeal, i.e things have to have bodies wether physical or spiritual. This is why platonism speaks of "partaking" of forms, whilst we as faustians think the absolute opposite, forms unite things in a quasi nominalistic way.
I see that I will not understand this. Thank you for trying.
This is correct. Western metaphysics (since Descartes) describe entities comprised of infinitesimal points (particles) related to each other by function (waves).
I've read a lot a philosophy -- majored in it in university -- and Spengler has unquestionably had the most profound impact on my worldview.
so he's not just a fascist meme like Evola?
Not really he isn't fascist he just like old prussia.
iirc he vote for NSDAP but completely regard them as plebians and not good enough compare to old prussia aristocract I guess.
He actually advocated that Germany transition from a monarchy towards a socialistic-technocratic state.
I haven't read prussia and socialism yet but how does that work? He reject both Marxism Socialism and Capitalist from being materialistic but what would his prussia socialism even suppose to look like compare to your average marxist socialism
He never spells an explicit ideological platform because he is writing to a German audience that he assumes are familiar with what he's talking about. Prussian socialism had already existed in praxis since Bismarck-era state capitalist reforms: socialized healthcare, minimum wage, state-controlled unions, etc.
>Thus we find two great economic principles opposed to each other in the modern world. The Viking has become a free-tradesman; the Teutonic knight is now an administrative official. There can be no reconciliation. Each of these principles is proclaimed by a German people, Faustian men par excellence. Neither can accept a restriction of its will, and neither can be satisfied until the whole world has succumbed to its particular idea. This being the case, war will be waged until one side gains final victory. Is world economy to be worldwide exploitation, or worldwide organization? Are the Caesars of the coming empire to be billionaires or universal administrators? Shall the population of the earth, so long as this empire of Faustian civilization holds together, be subjected to cartels and trusts, or to men such as those envisioned in the closing pages of Goethe’s Faust, Part II?
>he’s a dead straight white Europeans male, that means he must be right
His theories have been mostly debunked.
Spengler mixes in unverificable unfalsifiabke esoteric crap with his study of history, The Decline of Western Civilization has zero predictive power.
Read historians from the 20th and 21st century, these dusty 19th century academics have been surpassed and discredited for decades now.
This. The SCIENCE is SETTLED, folks. Now clear out.
>The Decline of Western Civilization has zero predictive power
You'll see Caesar in your lifetime, no later than the 2070s
>why is he not talked about
check the archives, he's talked about a lot.
So is the Second Religiousness really just Wokeness and not some kind of based Christian fascist imperialism? Is Caesar going to come draped in a rainbow flag?
He mentioned Anabaptism and thought it would be an early sort of Christianity and highly dogmatic, but he never said for certain.
Mormonism
To be clear, I don’t think he meant it had to be any one particular denomination. I think he identified anabaptism because for the most part, Anabaptists live in these small rural communities of piety. The second religiousness is an impulse of religiosity. It could allow for a wide range of denominations and syncretic religion, but it will have a lot of the features you see among the Amish who live basically like peasants because they live basically like peasants.
I think it’s more likely to be Western Rite Orthodoxy than Anabaptism personally but I really have no idea. It could be neither.
It won't be a doctrinaire moralism of the Civilizational period (Enlightenment ideologies), more like the mysticism of the pre-cultural period (800 AD - 1000 AD Sagas). Think of Sufism, but more Tolkienesque:
>That of the Second Religiousnessconsists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness - the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans... it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness - only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts, with Rationalism's fading.out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncrotism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase.
>But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long- buried' depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions .. folk- tale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjur- ings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart.
That last sentence makes no sense to me.
The cult-figures of early western Christianity were extinguished by Lutheranism in northern Europe (northern Germany, Prussia, Scandinavia). Consequently it was resurrected in the Romantic period by the rediscovery of Germanic myth, folktales, and the teachings of Meister Eckhart that were suppressed by the Catholic Church.
He’s assuming Mary was a cult figure of early Christianity and before that pre-Christian German religion but she wasn’t.
This is the final blackpill, all else us cope, the ultimate liberation through infinite space became individualism therefore LGBT freak globohomosexual libertarian ideology the moment that this iteration of civilization's Carthage (anglos) took power. It's fricking over
what elements are unique to the russian spirit?
Hating machines
BECAUSE THE WEST ISNT DECLINING ITS PROGRESS YOU HATE BIGOT
t. progress-utopian marxism cultist
Spengler was too smart for me.
Still working through Virgil and Schmidt.
How is he not deterministic?
If he thinks religion is relative along cultural lines, how is anything he says justified?
Also, every culture-civilization in his model is distinguished along religious lines, so why is the West the only for which this is not the case?
It’s somewhat incoherent because on one hand, he says it’s a rural religiosity which gives rise to a culture but then he implies that religiosity itself is grounded in the culture and merely an expression of culture. At bottom, he seems to think everything is shaped by the land, but there are several things that don’t make sense if that is true. He sets up this framework but then it’s not even consistent.
So how is that Faustian Spirit coming along these days?
Not that well, is it?
I just read Kerry Bolton’s Perversion of Normality and I think it’s one of the best books I’ve read about how the west is fricking up. He mentions Spengler a lot so I think he’s based. His scholarship is really solid and he’s level headed.
he deformed oriental concepts, read Guenon's The Crisis of the Modern World for a real understanding of the fall of western civilization
It’s insane that some of you have read Guenon for years and still think he’s anything but a disaffected new ager occultist, but I guess that will happen if it’s all you read. For example, you’ve commented on Spengler’s book but if you’re honest with yourself, not with me but yourself, you know you’ve not even read the book.
you will never be a woman
Heidegger destroyed him and his ilk
How do you figure?
What are you on about? Heidegger said that he was right (although with no right to be).
Heidegger reacted against historicism and especially pessimists like Spengler by proposing the destruction of history into factical life. Spengler is just another nihilist, and a passive one at that.
Heidegger saw ”decline” and ”crisis” as opportunities for thinking anew
Heidegger seems like a total dead end to me. I’ll remind you that we are almost a century out from some of the stuff he wrote.
Subscribing to Spengler’s historical model and saying it’s over is a dead end
Heidegger shows how history is not a static “thing”, but a force that can be revitalised, changed and forgotten, and all of his stuff is still not yet published/translated.
Spengler never says it’s over. This is the sort of thing that makes people say Heidegger never even read the book.
I'll remind you that we are almost 25 centuries out from some of the stuff Plato wrote.
Yeah except I don’t recall Plato writing about epochal consciousness shifts 2 more weeks.
So did Spengler. Read him more carefully. Heidegger owes much of his own thinking to Spengler himself (he read Decline early on in his "career" and was clearly deeply affected); they are actually much more alike rather than apart.
You didn't read any Spengler whatsoever.
How?
He was briefly mentioned in Fukuyamas book
>debunked demagogue mentions debunked demagogue in his debunked book
Imagine my shock
Check out Russia and Europe by Danilevsky - literally a Spengler before Spengler, it's eery. But yeah, a true genius.
Comparing him to hacks like Evola and Guenon is just insulting.
spengler was a dumb moron and he wrote for chud right wing incels. have sex
Guys, do any of you feel a sense of decline even in merely 15 years or am I crazy?
That's your body slowly starting to fail
If Spengler was right, we are at an inflection point in our civilization just before the imperial phase, which is the final chapter so it would make sense.
I havent read TDOTW yet, though I do know Faust. Because of this I always wondered whether the Faustian spirit according to Spengler was a good thing and something to be defended. I also keep hearing talk about it fading or being subverted. I know Spengler writes alot about civilizations having "souls". But he was not Christian, so did he believe in the immortal soul of the individual? If not the entire concept of a Faustian spirit as I have imagined it would seem hollow. If having the "Faustian spirit" does not include the damning of ones soul, but only denotes alignment with what he calls "Faustian civilization", then the term is not so powerful and aweinspiring as Sperglers make it sound.
>According to Spengler, the Faustian culture began in Western Europe around the 10th century, and had such expansionary power that by the 20th century it was covering the entire earth, with only a few regions where Islam provided an alternative world view. He described it as having a world feeling inspired by the concept of infinitely wide and profound space, the yearning towards distance and infinity. The term "Faustian" is a reference to Goethe's Faust (Goethe had a massive effect on Spengler), in which a dissatisfied Intellectual is willing to make a pact with the Devil (Jews) in return for unlimited knowledge. Spengler believed that this represented the Western Man's limitless metaphysic, unrestricted thirst for knowledge, and constant confrontation with the Infinite.
He subscribes to some sort of worldview that seems to imply that to any extent he believes in divinity, it’s imminent in the natural world. This is where he derives his vitalism from. It’s all a mysticism that’s ultimately rooted in nature, literally the land. Now, you could argue that a lot what he wrote presupposes a Christian paradigm but he never endorses it or says he believes in it although he seems to have some particular regard for the figure of Christ. So his spirit isn’t a Christian spirit per se I guess but like a natural spirit as something imminent in the land and people. The Faustian thing has been interesting for me because he book marks the start of the West at Charlemagne, and it was that time in Christian heresy which became infamous for many of the innovations which would lead to schism of the Christian church. Carolingian theologians made all sorts of theological arguments that, to me, seem obviously not in line with church dogma to that point. So the question is why. If you study the politics of the time, you start to feel that was essentially about power. It was a bargain with literally Christian heresy for the sake of power. This is my own interpretation. So the Faust myth is built in from the very beginning. Still, tjay supposes some relationship to Christian dogma, doesn’t it? So Spengler was a Christian, a heterodox, even heretical one. He didn’t realize it, but he was a Christian. He had to be. And if you look at Wester civilization, it’s not so much non-Christian, as anti-Christian. So much of Western culture is about reaching beyond, going further, past horizons and breaking taboos but these are precisely Christian taboos. To Spengler’s credit though, we can ask just how distinct Western pre-Christianity and Western Christianity are. In a certain sense he’s arguing that they are one in the same.
>Read historians from the 20th and 21st century, these dusty 19th century academics have been surpassed and discredited for decades now.
I hate it when Anons Ironically bait — it still makes these boards shitter as people buy into it
We forgot how to deal with trolls.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you're not the smartest person in the world? And that IQfy (particularly the boards you frequent) isn't a reliable source for wisdom? Whatever obstacle and reasoning you endured was likely batted around over two thousand years ago.
My issue with Spengler is how he can possibly justify that America and this current epoch is still Faustian. If everything is ultimately rooted in an imminent natural spirituality, then people of an entirely distinct and far away continent from Western Europe should be nothing like them. The invisible force of the land that he describes should be constantly working on Americans to make them less Faustian, not more Faustian.
Iirc in civilization phase the land does not affect the cultures world feel that much, since they're urbanites at that point, the universal state in other words. And America was colonized around 1600-1700s, around when faustian culture was turning into civilization.
But how does that make sense? This invisible force he describes just turns off? Either it’s imminent or it’s not.
So we could say that for example the people of Faustian culture are rooted in the soil, shaped by it, and it exerts a spiritual force upon them, and then they harden into a civilized people where upon the force has less effect, in which case you could say that North Americans arrived as hardened Faustian and remain harden Faustian by virtue of their being civilized but that force of the land would presumably still be working on them. That should mean that Americans are in a constant process of being de-Faustianized, not the Faustian people
par excellence.
America was founded by one half of the Faustian spirit, namely the Viking. Of want of plunder and status, which rolls through to hyper imperialist capitalism
SpenglerBlack folk actually use terms like the “Viking Faustian spirit” with a straight face
yes and?
Wait until you hear about non-Euclidian Wotan.
its funny cos trads pretend to be faustian and at the same time advocate rolling back technology, simple living, traditionalism and try to project what are actually faustian traits to their enemy figure of a israelite.
>pretend to be faustian and at the same time advocate rolling back technology
Nah, clearly wouldn't roll it back. Just reconsecrate it (and likely line up a few of my former colleagues against the nearest wall for gross cognitive incompetency).
>I don’t see how that makes any sense.
The US always had a constant influx of people, up until recently primarily from Europe. It should be evident that such a "blood transfusion" has an effect. Btw don't say Spengler was right here but the US are a comparably exceptional case within the framework of such theories.
That doesn’t matter. For Spengler, spirit is imminent in the natural world and he even refers to the land exerting an invisible force on a people. The spirit of a people, and race, is inexplicably linked with the land. That Americans inhabit a land entirely different from the original Faustian culture and civilization implies that they should be in a constant state of becoming less Faustian. That alone doesn’t disrupt his ideas, but considering America the most Faustian, which it clearly is, does disrupt it. I don’t see how that makes any sense.
Spergler was a moron and is overdiscussed