- Spengler’s unconventional and creative technique of using imagination and intuition to divine the probable future by way of “physiognomic meaning” and “morphological” analysis rather than the more accepted “systematic” approach of compiling facts and dates was met with scathing criticism by much of the academic world. Nevertheless, Spengler’s difficult book became a sensation in Germany and quickly sold 90,000 copies, much to the chagrin of the experts. Throughout the book Spengler is attempting to write a “philosophy of history” as opposed to a mere recounting of the past devoid of intrinsic order or inner necessity. Instead, Spengler was seeing each fact in the historical picture according to its symbolic context. He wanted to set free their shapes, hidden deep beneath the surface of a true “history of human progress.” Yet there was no such thing as progress (in the evolutionary sense) according to Spengler. The entire book was a protest against Darwinism and its systematic science based upon causality. Instead, he regarded a “culture” as an organism and world history as its biography. The best metaphor for his “morphological” approach was the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter. The instinctive genius of a youthful, even barbaric culture in the springtime of its development would enable it to flourish. As it matured it would exult in all the potentialities of its creativity, reaching heights never before attempted. Great architecture, advanced mathematics, artistic innovations, technological ingenuity, statecraft, warfare, etc. would reach full flower well into its summer. Then, as the inner form world and imagination of such a culture began to lose its force it would enter an urban and worldly “late” (autumnal) period of rationalism and free itself from subservience to religion and dare to make that religion the object of epistemological criticism, thus opening the door to nihilism. Finally, it would go into its winter season or “Civilization” phase and begin its slow and inevitable decline. The West was already entering its Civilization phase by 1918 according to Spengler. It would not be a sudden collapse, but a gradual setting of the sun, a time of lengthening shadows, i.e., a “Twilight of the Gods.”
The most arresting thematic metaphors in Spengler’s imaginings were the three main cultures of Western Civilization, namely the Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian. Apollonian culture was classical civilization, i.e., the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hellenistic pagan culture of the ancients. Magian-Arabian culture encompassed Judaism, primitive Christianity, Mazdeism, Nestorians, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Islam. It was an eschatological and apocalyptic culture. It saw the world as Cavern, and our time on earth as limited. Submission to God was its primary ethos, but there was also the possibility of salvation, and of a coming Savior. By contrast, Apollonian culture did not see the past or even the present as being that different from the future. History as some linear narrative from which lessons could be learned was alien to the Apollonian mind. Instead, myth contained the essential, unchanging wisdom of existence. Character was fate. Pride came before the fall. The gods were capricious. But Faustian culture – which began around 1000 A.D. wished to extend its will into infinite space. It had built the Gothic cathedrals to realize this inward, willful striving for extension into the illimitable heavens, to flood the soul with light. Descartes, Leibnitz, Euler, Gauss, Newton, and Riemann, had pushed western mathematics to new heights. European artists had learned to use light and shadow, the color wheel, and the laws of perspective and vanishing points to create paintings that appeared three dimensional. The music of the Baroque and the art of the fugue had expressed the Faustian notion of limitless space. All this and much more are discussed in exhaustive detail throughout the book. - Reading The Decline of the West for a second time, I was left with a much stronger impression of the differences between the worldview of Classical Europe and that of Western or ‘Faustian’ Europe. Spengler convincingly argues that Classical culture is characterised by a metaphysical stasis and a somewhat limited temporal sense, whereas the Western culture is characterised more by a thrust towards the limitless and unattainable. The distinction manifests itself in art, myth and even mathematics. Spengler’s emphasis on the difference between the two is quite radical, overturning the conception among Western intellectuals since the time of Petrarch that our culture is a revival of the Classical.
- Spangler’s writing style is thematic, that is, while he intends to discuss one aspect of his thesis, he necessarily brings in the others. Additionally, he will refer to this work of art and then that piece of music. While Heidegger’s Being and Time was written after the Decline of the West, his ideas regarding the mode being of a particular people at a particular time and how that corresponded to their philosophy, religion and modes of thinking had already been published in relation to philosophical ideas and to wide acclaim. Thus, he probably influenced Spengler, perhaps in a secondhand sort of way. Additionally, while Julius Evola did translate both volumes into Italian, that does not mean that Spengler was familiar with Evola’s ideas. Readers may be shocked to discover that, to Spengler’s way of thinking individuals always had free will. In fact, to Spengler’s way of thinking, even the one-celled animal had free will. Plants, however, no matter how large or small, did not have free will. Regarding his thesis individuals were the one-celled animals of the civilization but the civilization was a plant. Thus, things would be carried over by groups of individuals unconsciously long after the conscious conception had died out in a previous generation. Additionally, the “soul” of the people was ultimately a biological affair. And that soul would find ways of expressing itself even if it were using the language of another civilization. Thus, Faustian Man could use a Classical language (Latin) while reading books expressing classical ideas in that classical language, but his understanding of that idea would be Faustian. The Merovingian civilization similarly grew up in the space of the Classical Civilization. These several peoples would be contorted and shaped by the forms that were left behind by the Classical Civilization. Thus, a subsequent civilization could not appreciate Mozart as Faustian man had, because that subsequent civilization would not be motivated and guided by infinite space, etc. The same goes for calculus and oil painting. Here Spengler broke with tradition by separating Classical Civilization from Western Civilization. Read this book carefully. Classical languages (Latin and Greek) belong to the Classical Civilization. Classical music (Bach and Mozart) belongs to the Faustian Civilization. Additionally, later generations will find Wagner and Nietzsche more appealing than Bach and Mozart. Over time, particularly as the religious understanding declines the artform loses its appeal. That being said, I personally have never heard of anyone deriding the old master’s method of painting portraits with oil on canvas as making a brown sauce. Additionally, as the civilizational organism grows it becomes ossified and then hollow and then it dies. Death is inevitable. Death is natural. Civilizations cannot live forever just as individuals cannot live forever.
- Most history is taught as some sort linear progression, where humanity started off as primitive and tribal and eventually became more liberal, tolerant, and accepting, nearing us toward some sort of oddball utopia, where everyone is treated equally without any exceptions. It doesn’t matter whether one is a “liberal” or “conservative”, left or right, basically the mainstream view is that we’re “progressing.” Even so called “conservatives” believe this; they just believe it happens more gradually, while leftists like jamming through social and political change as quickly as possible. The point? Oswald Spengler’s view of history is that many cultures have gone through what the West is going through now, their own “culture wars”, and those “culture wars” are actually a sign that the society is crumbling and in a state of decay. Spengler’s immense work examines several of cultures and draws parallels of how every society has it’s birth and death, and how what the West is experiencing at the moment is nothing new. His work is dense and not something you can just sit and read in a couple of sittings. But it’s definitely worth it, as he examines cultures as intuitive outgrowths of various peoples and their tribes. Once cultures evolve into civilizations with officially codified rules is the precise moment when that civilization is on its way out. This work was published a century ago, only shortly after the first great war, so even without the unfolding events that mark the 20th century, Spengler felt that the West was already in its decadent phase, the phase which liberals and progressives claim is getting more and more “enlightened” with each passing years (it’s the current year man! We don’t think those things anymore!) So, as one cultural artifact after another is removed by the cultural elites, remember, as heart-breaking as it is to watching statues of Civil War Generals be removed, as Spengler wrote, it should not be surprising. The Arktos edition keeps the original text, along with footnotes, perfectly intact, once in a while explaining a footnote here and there for clarification. But, again, as important and engaging as Decline is, DO NOT try to burn through it in a few sittings. Universities should be studying Spengler, but alas, his work flies in the face of all those who deem themselves to be “progressive.”
- The Decline of the West puts forward a radically unconventional view of history. Spengler divides up world history, not into countries or epochs, but into “Cultures.” There have been only eight: the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Meso-American, the Chinese, the Indian, the Classical (Greco-Roman), the Arabian (includes the Byzantine), and the Western (European culture, beginning around the year 1000). Each of these Cultures he conceives as a super-organism, with its own birth, middle-age, and dotage. These Cultures all age at a similar rate, and go through analogical stages in the process (Napoleon is the Western equivalent to Alexander the Great, for example). Spengler believed that he had delineated these Cultures and traced their basic growth and aging process, thus providing a valid scheme for all future history as well, if any new Culture should arise.
Spengler is a cultural determinist and a cultural relativist. This means that he does not see these Cultures as dependent on the talent of individuals to grow; the individual is a product of the Culture and not the reverse. He also thinks that each of these Cultures creates its own self-contained world of significance, based on its own fundamental ideas. There is no such thing as inter-cultural influence, he thinks, at least not on any deep level. Each of these Cultures conceives the world so differently that they can hardly understand one another, let alone determine one another, even if one Culture can overpower another one in a contest of arms. Their art, their mathematics, their architecture, their experience of nature, their whole mental world is grounded in one specific cultural worldview.
Because Spengler is a determinist, he does not present us with a Gibbonian spectacle of a civilization succumbing to its own faults, struggling against its own decline. For Spengler, everything that happens in history is destiny. People don’t make history; history makes people. Thus, while often classed as a political conservative, it is hard to put any political label on Spengler, or to co-opt his views for any political purpose, since he didn’t think we directed our own history. To be a true Spenglerian is to believe that decline is inevitable: decadence wasn’t anyone’s “fault,” and it can’t be averted.
Much of this book consists of a contrast between what he calls the Apollonian (Greco-Roman) worldview, and the Faustian (Western) worldview. The Apollonian world-picture is based on the idea of definite form and definable shape; the nude statue is its most characteristic art, the delineated human body; its mathematics is all based on geometry, concrete shapes and visible lines. The Faustian picture, by contrast, is possessed by the idea of infinity; we make fugues, roving explorations of musical space; our mathematics is based on the idea of a function, an operation that can create an endless series of numbers. Spengler dwells on this contrast in chapter after chapter, trying to prove his point that Western Culture, far from being a development of Classical Culture, is entirely incompatible with it.
His own Culture, the Western, he traces to around the year 1000, at the commencement of the Romanesque. How or why a new Culture begins, Spengler doesn’t venture to say; but once they do begin, they follow the same definite steps. It was inevitable, he thinks, that the Romanesque transformed into the Gothic, and then eventually flourished into the Baroque, the high point of our Culture, wherein we expressed our deep longing for the infinite in Bach’s fugues and Descartes’s mathematics.
Sometime around the year 1800, the Western Culture entered its late, senescent phase, which Spengler terms ‘Civilization.’ This is the phase that follows cultural growth and flourishing; its onset begins when a Culture has exhausted its fundamental idea and explored its inherent forms. A Civilization is what remains of Culture when it has spent its creative forces: “The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization.”
The ‘decline’ that forms the title of this book is just this transition from Culture to Civilization, wherein major creative work is at an end. Civilization is, rather, the age of Caesarism, the consolidation of political power. It is the age of world cities, major metropolises filled with cosmopolitan urban intellectuals. It is the age of academics rather than geniuses, the Alexandrine Greeks instead of the Golden-Age of Athens. It is, in other words, the period that corresponds with the onset of the Roman Empire, a period of no substantial innovation, but of magnificent stability. The Western Culture, Spengler thought, was entering just this period.
Whereas those who are actuated by a Culture during its creative period feel themselves driven by inevitable impulses, which allow even mediocre artists to create great works, people within a Civilization are creatures of the intellect, not the instinct; and instead of being given creative power and direction by their Culture, they are left to substitute their own subjective tastes and whims for cultural destiny. Instead of, for example, having one overriding epoch in our artistic productions—such as the Gothic, the Baroque, or what have you—we have artistic ‘movements’ or trends—Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism—which, far from being necessary phases in a Culture’s self-expression, are merely intellectual fads with no force behind them.
Spengler’s theory does have the considerable merit of being testable, because he made very specific predictions about what the immediate future held. We had gone through the period of ‘Warring States,’ he thought, in which country fought country and money ruled everything, and were about to enter a period of Caesarism, wherein people would lose faith in the power of self-interested capitalism and follow a charismatic leader. This would also be a period of ‘Second Religiousness,’ a period of faith rather than reason—a period of patriotism, zeal, and peaceful capitulation to the status quo.
Aside from its breadth, one thing that sets this book apart is its style. Spengler is a remarkable writer. He can be poetic, describing the “flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you—a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence.” He can be bitter, biting, and caustic, castigating the blind scholars who couldn’t see the obvious, satirizing the pseudo-sauve intellectuals who populated the cities of his time. He can be lyrical or epigrammatic, and can write ably about art, music, and mathematics.
His most characteristic mode, however, is the oracular: Spengler proclaims, predicts, pronounces. His voice, resonating through the written word, booms as if from a mountaintop. He sweeps the reader up in his swelling prose, an inundation of erudition, a flood that covers the world and brings us, like Noah in his ark, even higher than mountaintops. Perhaps a flood is the most apt metaphor, since Spengler is not only overwhelming in his rhetorical force, but all-encompassing in his world-view. He seems to have thought of everything, considered every subject, drawn his own conclusions about every fact; no detail escapes him, no conventionality remains to be overturned by his roving mind. The experience can be intoxicating as he draws you into his own perspective, with everything you thought you knew now blurry and swirling. - The literal translation of Der Untergang des Abendlandes could be read as something like The Sunset of the Evening Lands or The Setting of the Twilight Realms, either of which nicely convey the lyrical touch that Spengler has liberally applied to his great work of poetic historical philosophy. It’s a text rich with erudition across a broad field of disciplines, rife with the dense structural elements of an organic Culture that is born, lives, and dies in a fashion both comparable and comprehensible to the human beings who constitute it. It is a work that proceeded from a burgeoning conception of the requirement for a combinatory application of the empirical and the intuitional, of the gaze both within and without, of the extended-material with the soul-spiritual, the organic with the inorganic, the dead with the living, time with space, magnitude with function, the become with the becoming—the unification of a bifurcation—if the essential truth—that is, the depth—of what constitutes History was ever to be understood. It is at once both a difficult and a delightful read, wildly overreaching and conceptually sound, profoundly insightful and intelligent and peppered with controversial claims and interpretations. It should be read if for no other reason than the stimulation it provides, for it is difficult to imagine that there exists a reader who would not emerge at the end having found himself been given much to reflect upon—even those predisposed to flatly disagree—or take issue—with Spengler’s conclusions.
Proceeding in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, Spengler posits an interpretation of history that has eluded all others, principally due to their being hampered by the conditions of the Civilization they live within. For the author, many years of study and reflection had lead him to the conclusion that History, of necessity linked with the direction and destiny of what we—lacking a better word—call Time (Becoming, Potentiality), has revealed itself within our world through the Higher Cultures: Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Classical (Graeco-Roman), Magian (Arabian), Mexican, and Faustian (Modern Western). Of these eight, one—the Mexican—had been extirpated; another—the Magian—was a pseudomorphical, or stunted Culture; and one more—the Russian, also pseudomorphical—at the time of the book’s publication had the possibility of achieving High Cultural status of its own. Each of these Cultures was organic, with a life cycle of waxing and waning stages comparable to the lives of the human beings who lived within it, stages in which similar periods of flowering or morphologies in the fields of art, politics, religion, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, etc. would occur; and each of which would— irrevocably, once the Culture had fully become and all of its potentialities or possibilities had been actualized—wither away, becoming Civilizations, inorganic, mechanical, existent fully in the material world of causality and measurement, effectively dead to the spirituality of History and dominated by the vast, sprawling Megalopolises that had arisen and from which the decline—at varying speeds and over varying intervals—would occur. These processes are inseparably engendered within History, in Destiny, and, whilst realized and carried out by the masses of individual humans whose blood and souls are attuned to that particular Culture, the Culture itself is also an organic unit, necessary within Time as we experience it and only capable of developing and actualizing as it actually does. The Culture enables and drives forward its human members; these same humans realize the Culture and allow it to blossom, and all the while proceeding from a state of Becoming in active Time to one of Become, dead (actualized) within the extended, material world. It’s a system of cyclical history that is inexorable and finite.
To make the case for his impressively deep philosophy, Spengler draws upon a wide field of studies and knowledge, displaying a frightful erudition and forcefully, logically, compellingly producing his examples, making his analogies, drawing his conclusions, at all times aware of the reader and leading him through an encompassing vision that Spengler believes must, in the end, prove irrefutable. It is written in a poetic and baritone text, serious, beautiful, dense, and sprinkled with a mordant wit, blasts of caustic irony. It makes for a mesmerizing read, one that requires a slow and methodic pace if the reader is to absorb the seemingly endless barrage of details; but it is a wonderful, a fascinating, a compulsively readable journey. It is impossible to convey the breadth of information imparted by the book in the space of a Goodreads review, but several parts in especial stood out for me: his proposition of a Faustian mathematics that embraced the infinite through functions and spatial abstractions—abandoning purely magnitudinous calculations—and an art that sought the same through the usage of brush strokes, atmospheric colors, prolific and contrapuntal instrumentation, soaring architectures and blossoming spaces, that endeavored to capture the sum of a person’s—and hence a Culture’s—soul in a maturing era that accepted no limits or boundaries. There is also the interpretation of the Faustian God as coterminous with Destiny, with Time, with Becoming—in other word’s, God as Eternal-Potentiality-Eternally-Realized—and its juxtaposition with the Apollinian and Magian godheads that, for me, proved very enlightening; and his composition of the Magian world-view, its purview of existence as within a vaulted and glittering cavern, and his original outline of the conception and development of both the principal monotheisms and their pre- and post-birth offshoots, is first rate. His chapters, so brilliantly done, on the Soul-Image and Life-Feeling and Nature-Knowledge would, really, be worth the price of the book in and of themselves. Furthermore, when he speaks of a Civilizational Stage’s Dead Art, an art completely overwhelmed by the critical faculty, in thrall to overriding causality and the promotional whim, the solo genius of the individual untethered from the wings of an onrushing or soaring Cultural Destiny, the reader cannot help but cast glances at such entities as portions of modern literature, philosophy, theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, and the variegated offerings of modern art—the manner in which everything has been progressively compartmentalized and broken down and dissected into minute portions, such that the wonder or beauty or inspiration or meaning of the original, of life, of the magical creative power itself, seems to have become lost, replaced by sterile minutiae and plastic posing and semantic games—to feel that Spengler might actually have been on to something.
Anticipating that the majority of the attacks upon his work would come from the analytic school, at the outset of Decline Spengler cautions that an over-reliance upon a materialistic and mechanistic system of causality is what both has blinded modern man to the Historical Destiny unfolding about him and is a principal symptom of the Culture that has Become and, consequentially, is already in a process of decline and decay. In such a work there will inevitably be inaccuracies and forced analogies and manipulations of historical fact undertaken by the author, if for no other reason than the sheer size, the audacity of the task he has endeavored to carry out, the timeline depth and the events like grains of sand—some were apparent to me as I read along, others I only discovered when I went online, after particularly rousing chapters, to investigate the response to Spengler’s postulations. But really, this far removed from the period of its publication and with all the societal and cultural changes that have occurred, readers will almost surely have preconceived positions going into the tome, and it is unlikely – not impossible, but unlikely – that they will emerge at the end swayed in their opinion. Spengler is not just concocting a historical analysis here—he is engaging in philosophy, in establishing an ontology, dancing with metaphysics, in an effort to mentally place the reader into a position where the chain of events and interpretations that follow will seem of a plausibility that would elevate them to veracity. If the reader does not fully embrace Spengler’s depiction of being, of the unprovable claim of an organic Destiny that, functioning as History’s will, moves these cultures into the birth canal and ensures their fulfillment, then the entire affair cannot, in the end, hold together.
For myself, I am not in accord with Spengler’s philosophy. I cannot accept the removal of contingency, the all-bases-covered necessity involved in accepting such a High Cultural position: it both denies individuals the fullness of the genius they summoned to achieve the heights in their field that they did, and excuses the excesses and savageries committed by those who gave free reign to the baser or sanguinary side of their personalties—by stating that the Culture ensured that there were humans available to undertake the actions that needed to be taken, that what was required to be done would be done, by hook or by crook, provides too much cover for the deplorable and not credit sufficient for the glorious. It could be used to accept injustice or repression or brutality as simply being in and of the Culture under which it occurred. Responsibility and freedom are vital in my conception of humanity. Furthermore, it is an inherently untenable philosophy by his own standards: since he admits that every thinker is inescapably bound by the purview and mindset of his own particular Culture-in-Time, his own World-Image and World-Feeling, then it beggars any standard of truth outside of the Faustian flavor that his limit-seeking-and-testing analysis and perception of the past Cultures, of utterly foreign construction and timber, could be so patently slotted and fitted into a particular cyclical system that coincides with an interpretation aligned to his own Teutonic spirit. For notwithstanding Spengler’s assertion that History cannot be measured upon the scales of truth, but rather by its depth, the impressiveness of the latter in the German’s conception has actually been achieved, the layers built one upon another through this same Faustian perception, one whose profundity may be exaggerated to readers of the same Cultural milieu. With all of that said, the manner in which he interlocks the events and attitudes of Cultural eras across time is quite impressive and powerful, and the fact that in several of his conclusions and predictions—especially in the realms of religion, technics and politics—he proved chillingly prescient and accurate is but proof of the remarkable sagacity and judgement that filled his historical insight.
The conclusion? This is a work of unmitigated brilliance, and if I remained unpersuaded by the entirety of Spengler’s thought, I was blown away by its magnificence and given much to ponder and consider about the interrelations and possibilities of the analogies he made and the conclusions he reached. He has stirred the cup of my mind in a more vigorous manner than most of the books I have read in the past year or two. Conceived prior to the Great War, completed during its brutal undertaking, published just anterior to its cessation of hostilities, it is a work of Teutonic passion and mordant pessimism, a great celebration of the organic spirit and being, a somber meditation upon the material world, a deep penetration through the constituent tissues of known human cultures and societies, a crushing outline of the money-democracy triumph through enslavement and the looming specter of a blood-soaked Caesar, an ontological imprinting of Time, an Anti-Faustian Faustian tract birthed during the civilizational stage of the latter by a man seemingly forgetful of his own proclamation that his Culture had become and that he was penning not a tract driven by Destiny, but by the pervasive rational cause-and-effect whose suzerainty he mistrusted; that his philosophical thought ran a curious gamut of the infinite and the cyclical, evinced traits of the Magian mindset at work within the Faustian, a curious recession from infinite space to enshrouded cavern, that might help to account for the original and unique interpretation he brought to bear upon the events he recorded; the aethereal agonies of the star-slung and the earthy proskynesis of the entombed, peering into the depths of his conceptional cultures from such a towering, weightless height, such a cramped, crushed, gravitational embrace, that the vision-swept ofttimes blurred or shimmered out of focus and required a series of longing, heart- and soul-driven looks backward, away from the melting horizon, before their image sharpened itself through his complex arrangment of Platonic, Hegelian, Nietzschean, and oversized Goethean lenses set in their durable Spenglerian frames. It is a stunning work of art, a paean to the brilliance of man and his eternal quest to summon answers out of this question-bound cosmos: triumphs, profundities, mars and blemishes all. - Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was a huge international bestseller after the First World War for reasons that will become obvious, and for reasons that may be just as much so, Spengler considered his theories prophetic and completely justified given that he started this book in 1911 before the shit totally hit the fan. Spengler’s wide ranging theories on the subject of history writing include the repeated idea that the vast majority of historians can do no more than write history from from their self-centered points of view of a present they consider more important than any other time. Spengler turns out to be guilty of this charge himself, imparting a special meaning onto his own time that many others have seen in theirs- the End of Days. However, Spengler did not mean this in the completely apocalyptic Christian sense, but instead termed it the “wintertime of Faustian civilization.” In admittedly fascinating and frequently beautiful (if problematically rather mystical) language, Spengler divides space and time amongst dominant Cultures, which are definite entities with specific, distinct underlying motivations and perceptions of the world that differentiate each entity from the others. He concentrates mostly on contrasting the “Apollonian,” culture capturing the Classical age, which he sees as characterized by a perception of all time as Present and centered on the body, and “Faustian,” which is his name for current Western age, characterized by a precise conception of time and the continual and unfulfilled longing for the unattainable (in class we talked about the fact that if we are “Faustian” we should really discuss what our deal with the devil was- I don’t think we got an answer other than unlimited power). Each Culture has a natural and “inevitable” life cycle, which he articulates in terms of the seasons and life stages of men. In each great Culture’s “Autumn,” it becomes a “Civilization,” which is the signal of a definite and inevitable decline. Spengler draws a distinction between Culture, which is the “thing becoming,” and Civilization, which is the “thing become”, and symbolizes inertia and death and can only refine and push to the limits the ideas that Culture has put forward and then indulge an “expansion” instinct until the Civilization has exhausted itself and dies- as, he posits, Faustian civilization is on its way to doing, shown by the period of imperialism and expansion and finally “Caesarism,” which is the final sign of death. Each phase is characterized by certain symbols that appear at identical moments in each culture and civilization’s life phase, and tell us what phase the Culture is in. Therefore there is a kind of “code” that can be deciphered that will in theory be able to show an informed person what the next step is. He names about 8 great civilizations, but ends up collapsing it to Apollonian, Faustian, and Magian (Arabian) culture. He does not care about that which is not “world-historical,” and leaves many things outside his concept because, quite frankly, they do not matter. Don’t agree with him? Well, that’s probably just because of your Cultures shaping of you and the fact that you inevitably can’t- perhaps it is due to your Faustian need to beat a theory you can’t possibly prove wrong.
- Spengler does not like the rational. The rational to him is where the urban elite (he calls them ‘megapolitans’ or something like that) consensus uses the abstract to take away from the real facts in the world; in addition he’ll blame money, commercialism and controls foisted upon us by democratic processes which will inevitably lead to our own downfall. He desperately wants to bring back the wonder and awe of the Homeric Greeks and the gratitude that they would say we owe to the universe all of which we have misplaced today (1920ish), and he wants us to re-embrace pride in ourselves as individual parts of a Nation greater than ourselves; our foundation for meaning must come from something greater than ourselves such as national pride therefore allowing us to embrace an exclusive patriotism, a Nationalism tending towards fascism in the mode of Benito Mussolini. Truth, for him, would emanate from the nation not the individual. The individual needs the state with a great leader and each individual’s meaning can only come from a state as lead by a great charismatic leader.
The author inverts all of the lessons of The Enlightenment: rely on your feelings not reason, be exclusive not inclusive, nation trumps the individual, certainty in one’s own truths that comes from pride from one’s own tribe and anyone not a member of your tribe is not as good as you; and truth comes from the authority of one’s leader who you have elevated to a charismatic status. All of these items are within this book and wrapped in weird mysticism that the author definitely has. For example, he’ll say Euclidian spirit is finite and relative to all the other morphological shapes, while Faustian truth is infinite and absolute and leads to the death of the civilization. - Spengler is officially my second favourite mainstream philosopher, after only Nietzsche. Spengler, rather like Nietzsche, wrote like a poet and with the profundity of a sage. Nearly every single page filled me with intellectual ecstasy. There is not a single topic under the sun that Spengler does not offer insight into and synthesize into his overwhelmingly elegant thought-system. Much like Nietzsche, Spengler is deliberately rejected by academia simply because they are afraid of him. People and especially the various species of Liberals do not want to have their presumptions challenged. In order to keep Spengler out of mainstream discussion they will deliberately ignore and twist his words to obfuscate him. Calling Spengler a mere “Prophet of Doom” is like calling Nietzsche simply a “Nihilist” – not only are either of those statements superficial, but they fail to even come close to the core of what either of them said or believe. Anybody who says either of those things to you should be immediately disqualified from being “Intelligent” in your mind.
Spengler is the only philosopher of history who ever mattered, recognizing that other philosophical historians before him like Hegel are themselves only the products of a civilization experiencing a particular turning of the wheel of birth-growth-death-rebirth.
Spengler is the single most self-aware Westerner who ever lived, penetrating more deeply than anyone into the core of the unique psychology of Western Man. His process of differentiating between Classical and Western Man as well as Western Man and “Magian” Man (“Magian” Spengler’s term for the religious ethos of the Middle-East) really make you feel, in your very blood and bones, how as a Westerner, you are a unique being with a way of looking at the world that is utterly without precedent and thoroughly exciting.
Days after opening this book I could feel the Spenglerian thought-system refining my mind, and it is hard not to see the world from a Spenglerian lens after reading it. It is best to be able to see the world from as many lenses as possible, but without falling into the delusion that all lenses are equal. The Spenglerian lens is a particularly illuminating one. - I read Spengler decades ago, as a wanna-be member of the urban proletariat, as a make-shift ” Leftist”. My first reading was one of being swamped. His erudition is mammoth, exactly like a tsunami. Now, as a conservative, and a city dweller, but still identifying as a peasant, as a man ” outside history”, I find Spenglers mind not as a thing to be feared but some thing to enjoy, to experience. Spengler isnt joyful, isnt even pleasurable. His truths are hard truths. His truths are the oyster shells you bite into , bleed your fingers with, tear your flesh on and finally open and swallow the salty delicacy. Not constantly, or youll be sick. Balance with poetry, a travel book. Balance with long walks. He will haunt you. This eagles view, sees everything large and of the land and sea, the curve of earth itself, of history, and even the smallest creature under a bush, his views come like Law, like a sun or weather, and also like magic, a formula for the future, for every civilization, every culture. We may think we are important, we arent. Only a few minds are great, everyone has a list, if you are well read, Spengler should be on your list, whether you are liberal, conservative,a proletarian, a capitalist, leftist, rightist, urban, rural peasant, whatever…his mind is teeming from the first page to the last, you will drown, and drowning is good. That piece of flotsam you are holding onto? It isnt hope. One cannot hope after Spengler . One can only pray. Or walk.
- the Dusk of the Evening-Land – read all through a gnostic lens – metahistory as the archonic scar of reality, metahistory as how people in history saw themselves in history, spirit unfolding – the creation of Spheres to immunize from the Real: all responses to death, all morphologies of a blossoming Vishnu — a bored Demiurge using civilization itself as a board game on a rainy day. O weep, dance of millenia.
an ur-Text marking the rise of the new unified field theory of metahistory. if there is indeed a gnostic thrownness and a Spenglerian Dasein: this opens the door for entire new dimensions of thought hitertho unremarked. the Platonic Idea of a plant mirrored in the waters of history with which we swim: the non-object of the amniotic fluid that builds this simulation before we even begin to interact with it: forming our a priori foundations of the Mind. Spengler unconsciously began to describe the astral garden of the Death-Rose – the Negative Rosarium – where the gnostic is tested by Oblivion’s vitriol. The spine-bearing limbs of these abyssal flowers bind and penetrate the Seeker: winding out of a substrate of annihilation, mechanization, Limitation – the form-problems of our world-image, our death-feeling coalescing with space-feeling: the ur-Symbol of each civilization manifesting in it’s architecture, art, number-world, philosophies, Polis, body social, soul-image and so on and so forth. The development of perspective in painting turns into the dissolving of the figure to the pure background; thus borne the Dutch landscape painting – then the hyperdimensional object of surrealism and cubism all tending towards a higher understanding of the space-feeling of the West; at once Spengler here predicts the moon-landing and the Internet by noting the early intimations of aviation through Da Vinci. The metaphysical residue of our death-feeling in our mathematics, our Art gleaning off our God-idea, the resonant echoes of the soul-image in our atom-idea, motion and force – the colossal dimensionality of the Rose shaping everything: the phenomena of the Self awakening to the Light of Day. Recall that the Rose thrives on bone, blood and ordure – geniuses are the obverse forebrains of civilization – the rest are pulled by the vector of humanity. All nodes on the network of the metahistorical Rose – its blossom and decay.
America is a worm hole into the future. The Omega Point. You have entered into the final phase of what might be called homeostatic obsolescence, what Spengler saw as the inevitable decline of cultures into twilight of civilizations: the sedentarization of a once-vital species, or: dusk as ontological principle, when you put down your spears and planted your roots in the earth: agriculture neotenized your skulls, made your forms and thoughts and beings more baby-ish, you were laid by the Death’s Head, and grew bored in your yokes. Punched through the Egg’s shell into the mirror-ball of the self. I believe the Cut was made with the first man bored of creation. After that you were never yourselves again. What cities do is convert White Noise into Platonic fantasia. Dead grey time into technicolor. Contraction into the tech singularity. Your Throat is getting narrower and narrower. You are children locked in your father’s closet.
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