Where do the Anglophone interpretation of all and each of Spengler's cultures, prime symbols, and natural origins come from? From a secondary book? Spengler doesn't even talk about the Ganges river in DOTW, so I'm not sure why Spengler chart anon phrased it like that.
Atkinson's translation has a few charts in the back. It might be from there.
It's not. They don't even have the natural origins for each prime symbol.
The charts are not a good reflection of Spengler's actual philosophy or model.
For one, they portray that each high culture experiences events in the same way, and has the same kinds of politco-cultural events that always run analogously. This is not true, because each culture has its own symbols and metaphysical suppositions. What's absurd in one is possible in the next.
>This is not true, because each culture has its own symbols and metaphysical suppositions. What's absurd in one is possible in the next.
Did Spengler really say this, and where? Because I don't remember it.
Why are prime symbols supposedly singular to the exclusion of others?
Why do Spenglerians consider these symbols so unadaptable? Did Spengler really think they aren't able to expand their scope, or exist in degrees with others? Because human phenotypes are definitely able to combine with others so, as are human cultures.
For example, the Magian scholar class is able to understand western particle physics, despite that being topsy-turvy of ordinary intuition, without abandoning Magian ideals, or becoming Faustian.
Alot of things in Spenglerianism don't make sense.
Did you read the book? He wrote all of this in the first volume. It’s practically the whole point of the book. It’s weird to hear these questions from someone that read the book. Spengler thinks each culture arises out of a landscape and is in some sense bounded by the landscape on on hand, but history on the other. So in the revised version he concedes that Americans are Western, I guess because they’re people who were borne of the Western culture, which itself was borne by the W. European landscape. So the prime symbol only moves across landscapes in that way. In regard to a culture arising out of a different landscape with the same symbol, it’s impossible because the symbol is derived from the landscape. If the landscape changes, so too must the prime symbol change. These are his ideas. I don’t think he’s quite right, but this is what he said. His conception of race and culture has basically nothing to do with phenotypes, genes, any of that. Well, at least it doesn’t in this context. He would say all of that is also downstream of the landscape. Spengler is something like a historical pagan. He thinks there’s something mystical and unknowable about time and space. In so far as a pagan ascribes something mystical to a landscape, with its cornucopia of local gods and primitive agricultural deities, Spengler sees that plus something unknowable in history. And these two things interact to shape human life. He definitely gives pre-eminence to the space idea, probably unknowingly.
It’s not the case that he thinks people of other cultures can’t grasp ideas of other cultures. It’s rather that they can’t grasp them in the same way that culture grasped them. So an Arab might apprehend medieval Catholic ideas that arose in northern France and we can even say he understands them, but he won’t apprehend them in the same way that a medieval Catholic in northern France understood them. Similarly, we can understand classical geometry, but not in the way that Aristotle understood geometry. In so far as we can understand the other more than this would imply, it’s because of a pseudomorphosis. So even though an Arab could never conceive of the world in the same way, he could go to a western university set up in his country, study western ideas, attach himself to western ideas, and sort of westernize but for Spengler all of this is basically surface level. He predicted Russia would shed communism for this reason.
>It’s weird to hear these questions from someone that read the book.
I almost never retain the original positions of authors, because I find most thinkers are full of discrepancies that I linger on and blur memory of as my musings' memories tend to overtake them.
Yeah all landscapes are materially convergent, even with a reductionist material view of nature. Why Spengler seems to believe in prime symbol exclusivity is a bit strange.
Not “even with a reductionist…view”, “only with a reductionist view”. You’re just pointing out that universality exists and ignoring the existence of particularity. Although South Asia and Western Europe converge at some third place and even share common traits in some respects, it’s not true that South Asia and Western Europe are in no way distinct from each other. Where you have 3 places, 1 and 2 being distinct, and the 3rd their meeting place, all of them are necessarily distinct.
But again, all of this ignores the historical aspect. The Western culture is seeded in some sense by the late Roman Empire as a consequence not only by geography but also history and that can’t possibly be the case for South Asia.
If you’re curious about how exactly these cultural boundaries are drawn, it’s basically nucleating world feelings. This occurred when the nucleating Western culture and the nucleating Magian civilization came into conflict with the Franks turning back Muslims from Spain.
No, you sound unfamiliar with general ontology. Materialism is one way to make these universal. Nobody's ignoring particularism, but you seem to be ignoring that perceptions of a landscape can be mingled, instead of Spengler's apparent belief that they're exclusionary, despite the clear contradictions many Spenglerians have identified with such a view.
They can’t be mingled. Is Germany not geographically distinct from India? It is. The landscape is distinct just as a matter of fact. If you’re concerned with whether or not an ethnic Indian can be Faustian or something like that, he can, but not as a consequence of his own landscape or culture. These are the author’s views.
They can.
You said basically that materialism is the only way they can be convergent, yet there are clearly other philosophical stances that allow this. Are you seriously being this much of a reductionist?
I didn’t say that.
Imagine two trees grow on two side by side fields. Each tree spreads its roots in one its field and its field alone. Can the trees adhere attributes, forms, stages of development, undergo the same changes at the same time? Yes. Can they be the same tree? No. This is is how his model of cultures works.
That I can get, but it's completely up to debate that the two trees are convergent, and from the universalist perspective, they are.
To illustrate, if you chopped branches off each organism and transplanted them to the other, wouldn't those branches successfully grow despite separate developments and mutations?
They might not be the same particular masses of tree genes, but they're convergible.
Trees can converge and Spengler addresses this but it’s not a real convergence. He calls it pseudomorphosis. It’s when one world feeling expresses itself through the more mature form of the world feeling of another culture. He identifies both Western Christianity and Russian communism as exactly that.
>He calls it pseudomorphosis.
It's, naturally speaking, the opposite of pseudomorphosis. This would be the same or similar tree species, just as the mineral analogy Spengler uses would mean a homologous rock outgrowth is natural and not pseudomorphic. You can accuse me of whatever, but it's like you don't even think about his terms.
Species is a category. That’s already implied in the sense that all of these cultures are cultures and share a common morphological development. Where two trees converge they don’t just become one singular tree. That’s just a fact.
>That’s just a fact.
No, that's the particularist view of ontology. Read philosophy and you'll finally understand Spengler and his incoherences for the first time.
> t. Idea man
>These are the author’s views.
Maybe I don't remember the text that well. Do you have citations for your claim?
Also what do you believe about this topic?
It’s everywhere in the book. It’s painfully obvious that you’ve not read the book. Just read the book. There are PDFs online.
I read the Bible too and so have many others. Doesn't mean it automatically leads to a Trinitarian view.
But nobody argues that the New Testament isn’t about Jesus. In other words, it’s impossible to miss.
>Did Spengler really say this, and where? Because I don't remember it.
He explains all of this in the introduction of vol. 1 of the Decline of the West. Such as, the Germans discovering the mechanical clock and Greeks such as Socrates never expressing the kind of inward world of a character like Werther or Parcival. He also points out the various industrial machines discovered (such as Hero of Alexandria's) which went unused by Classical man.
>For example, the Magian scholar class is able to understand western particle physics
Magian culture is terminated. Muslims become scientists in the same way a Gaul became a Roman statesmen. You'll find they don't understand our way of life as a matter of course, few of them matching our "innovations." At least, til the invention of new ways to transmit civilization: the radio, television, and the internet.
You'll find that Muslims true to their faith might acknowledge or understand Faustian scientific concepts. They just don't care. Their primary motivator is still that cavernous world picture. They have no inner drive to colonize space. Notice the ease their terrorists will destroy ancient cities, because of their different presumptive factors toward history.
Of course, Muslims today are "fellaheen," to use a Spenglerian term, and they've truly arrived. It goes a long way to explain their total weakness and impotence, geopolitically, akin to Latin America.
> They have no inner drive to colonize space.
> colonize
You know Spengler wrote during a time Europe contained several colonial superpowers, right?
Your point? None of them were Islamic. European colonial empires were a style of the West, and so is space exploration. Others may adopt this akin to Alexabdria or Antioch, but they're a cultural form unique to European history.
> European colonial empires were a style of the West
Why? Many countries have conquered others, imposed their legislation on them.
> and so is space exploration.
Do I have to remind you that the first rocket, the first animal and the first human in space was all done by Russians? Are Russians Westerners now? Is China Westerner even though it has space-faring programs?
>Many countries have conquered others, imposed their legislation on them.
If I have to explain the difference, you clearly didn't read the books we're discussing.
European colonial empires were completely unique forms of world conquest.
>Do I have to remind you that the first rocket, the first animal and the first human in space was all done by Russians? Are Russians Westerners now?
After they conquered Eastern Germany and took German technology like the US?
Again, if you haven't read the works of Spengler, I don't care to summarize all the concepts. Spengler wrote a very lengthy essay on Russia and the western 'pseudomorphisis' that's been exerted for centuries. High cultures are not the same things as polities or nations. Just as Gaulic, Persian, and Egyptian peoples played roles in the classical world as soldiers, philosophers, and even emperors, so do other peoples in western civilization. Which, should be noted in its final analysis, is the first ever global civilization.
The same things happened in every civilization, and this is a major component of analysis in Spengler, where what was once a "people" turns into a "population." (Republican Romans vs. late empire Rome) No wonder, Spengler saw the migrations coming.
The major players in the Mediterranean, for instance, weren't even centralized in Greece or Ionia post-Alexander. They were analogous to ex-colonial states, like the Ptolemies in Egypt.
> clearly didn't read the books we're discussing
Read enough to disagree.
> European colonial empires were completely unique forms of world conquest
Very short-lived forms of world conquest. It could be even said that the colonized profited more from it long-term than the colonizers, considering that the African ones did not even produce an annual surplus for the superpowers, just spendings that didn't even pay themselves off.
> After they conquered Eastern Germany and took German technology like the US?
The Russians wrote fiction about space in the 19th Century already, so situationaly speaking maybe yes, meta-contextually speaking no.
> Which, should be noted in its final analysis, is the first ever global civilization
It was, from the 1830s to the 1930s, if we were to be generous.
As I said, the context of Spengler was the colonialism period.
> The same things happened in every civilization, and this is a major component of analysis in Spengler, where what was once a "people" turns into a "population." (Republican Romans vs. late empire Rome) No wonder, Spengler saw the migrations coming
I must remind you that the ones who brought Rome to fall were not the brown Asian and African immigrants, but foreign invaders, tactically attacking the country with weapons and looting. So even if immigration goes on in Europe it definetly won't be the immigrants who will bring it to fall. At most, new inner conflicts will arise from it and a new form of politics.
You're being dumb. Ottomans pioneered the submarine. Ugandans wanted to reach space. It's sensible to extrapolate that the Ottomans would have had every intent to reach space.
I've come to the conclusion this poster is a Jared Diamond type of third world coper who never read Spengler. He does not realize that these objections hold no substance.
Greeks (Classical peoples) invented industrial machines and computer mechanisms. Their culture was such it would never be revolutionary technology.
This is a poster who thinks Polynesians moving aimlessly over centuries is identical to the European age of exploration, an act which created global civilization. This is a poster who thinks it's incidental that of all the peoples of the earth, it was those of the West who catalogued and mapped it all out, into a universal body of knowledge, sending expeditions to the furthest reaches of Antarctic and the South Pole to explore.
The Chinese once sent out such an expedition but once in their history. The Ottomans were seafarers? Nobody said only the White man sailed. Did the Ottomans go beyond the pillars of Hercules? And pioneered the submarine? Bullshit. But they have moons on their flag, which is just like actually going to the moon.
>But oh, if they really tried...
It's ridiculous brown people coping.
>Bullshit. But they have moons on their flag, which is just like actually going to the moon.
Kek
ive come to the conclusion youre a homosexual projecting their jared diamond type thinking because youre scared by brown people taking your land.
Taking our land? So the only way you brown shitskins can even "conquer" us is by crowding in boats and caravans as impoverished refugees? Wow, what warriors you are, living off of government handouts and welfare, only succeeding in society via affirmative action and forced diversity and inclusion. That's just like the fall of Constantinople! You're just like the marauding camel jockies brandishing scimitars under the Caliph! I'm sure Montezuma feels great pride in the grave, seeing his descendents reek of beans and cheese as they flip burgers for the local drive thru. He sure got one over on the White Man in the end!
obsessed
Autist kun's prime symbol: Impotence. Cultural expression: Memes that have no effect on israeli subversion.
Do you think economic migrants living off benevolent visa programs are “taking land”?
He’s just a run-of-the-mill pseud, anon. That’s all. We didn’t need a whole essay.
He meant space like outer space. Arabs wanted to understand the heavenly bodies of astronomy. Westerns want to actually go to the heavenly bodies of astronomy.
> Westerns want to actually go to the heavenly bodies of astronomy
From the 19th Century onward, yes
The space race really takes off in the post-war, post-colonial 20th century. Aerospace travel before that was not necessarily shooting for the stars.
I hate when people invoke “the will to colonize space” in regard to Spengler, because that’s not what he meant and he didn’t think that was a good thing. If anything, we’re supposed to be aware of that impulse and realize there’s something misleading in it.
Where did he say that? Space travel wasn't a feasible goal in his time.
He encouraged young readers to embody the spirit of the age, and design machines and airplanes, expressions of the domination of empty space.
When he said space, he meant upward and outward external space and not necessarily celestial space. Celestial space is obviously one “area” of it but so are mountain peaks, foreign continents, oceans, horizons of all sorts. His philosophy implies, I think, that the will to celestial space is like a post-colonial cope, something we reach for in a world where we won’t let ourselves reach for oceans and continents. You’re supposed to understand that the will to colonize celestial space as the prime frontier is the most tragic and ridiculous sort of way to express the Faustian drive.
Well, yeah. The culture phase before the 19th century is directed inward and not outward.
> The culture phase before the 19th century is directed inward and not outward
Maybe. I see it as having emerged in the context of the European colonial superpowers. People in the 19th and 20th Century believed this status quo would go on indefinitely for hundreds of years.
This thread is about what the author saw, not what we see.
Well, Europe was definetly not directed inward during the early Middle Ages. Millions of soldiers were sent to Minor Asia and establish a Christian Kingdom in Jerusalem. Just because they ended unsuccessfully doesn't make it an inward culture. The aspiration to spread was already there.
That’s irrelevant to the author. The author believes there’s a sort of will derived from the prime symbol and that will in the Middle Ages was necessarily spiritual. So although it things occur materially in the physical world, they’re undertaken on a the basis of an inner spiritual will, like the erection of a towering Gothic cathedral or the dominion of a universal Catholicity. It’s only in the post-cultural phase that the directive becomes extensive for a materialistic sake. This is the difference between a Templar knight who swears a vow of strict asceticism and trains rigorously to ride to the Middle East and fight Muslims for conquest of the church as a matter of spiritual domination over the self and a British soldier in India mastering the art of trade commerce for the express purpose of furthering the secular British empire with basically no concern for the spiritual basis or inner-experience. The inner experience is largely ignored.
>They have no inner drive to colonize space.
This isn't true at all, and it's not as simple as you think. Ottomans were among the first modern pioneers of seafaring (hence our word admiral, influenced by amir), and their spiring minarets and moon symbolism show interest toward the cosmic.
Everyone seafares. The question is what is the impulse. Spengler thinks this intuitive drive to reach for horizons, the point where sky and earth blur into infinity, is a uniquely western trait and that you can see it everywhere in Western culture. He would say that the Ottomans were perhaps perfectly capable of using the stars to seafare and had a deep inter at in what we refer to as space, but they didn’t conceive of it as this infinite disembodied 3D expanse like we do. For them, it would’ve been something more like a dome with symbols, like meaningful paintings on the wall of a cave and this religious mandate to submit to a he boundary is obvious in Islam.
You're dumb. The Polynesians accomplished this long ago. Your narrow views are just some of many discrepancies of Spenglerianism.
For westerners, it was actually the circumstantial result of Ottomans dominating Europeans, and incentivizing them to find different trade routes. It's not really a unique Western trait, as we saw with Polynesians, but one that resulted from necessity.
Please stop misinterpreting reality and Spengler.
You can think I’m dumb, but you’re failing to grasp the essence of the argument. It’s actually almost like you’re not even reading the replies you’re receiving because you just invoked the seafaring of the Polynesians but this has nothing to do with what’s really being claimed. You don’t seem to be really interested in the replies to your questioning.
It's completely related. For the Polynesians, they also perceived a blurred boundless horizon. There was no reason to voyage that far without guarantee of survival unless they did. They weren't desperate to find alternative means of trade or survival; they did it from sheer will and pioneering spirit.
Spengler would say they did not but that it’s irrelevant anyway because the Polynesians never formed a high culture. They were what he called fellaheen.
>Spengler thinks this intuitive drive to reach for horizons, the point where sky and earth blur into infinity, is a uniquely western trait and that you can see it everywhere in Western culture. He would say that the Ottomans were perhaps perfectly capable of using the stars to seafare and had a deep inter at in what we refer to as space, but they didn’t conceive of it as this infinite disembodied 3D expanse like we do.
Let's for a moment assume this is the correct view. But then how can you prove this value judgment beyond any reasonable doubt?
Assuming proof means some sort of scientific proof, you couldn’t. But the book is partly about escaping the scientific worldview altogether and the author goes to great lengths to demonstrate flaws in this conception of proof anyway. Everything he says is speculation but it’s based on a comparative understanding of history.
Fine, as long as it's admitted to be qualified values.
Even if they're felaheen, they're Magian-formed fellaheen.
>Latin America
High culture in the very early stages of formation.
I am more than willing to debate this.
They all share a few characteristics in so far as their development goes. Enough that spengler managed to periodize them.
No, on the contrary. Fellaheens are people whose culture/civilizations already reached the end point of their life and sank into eternal stasis. (Egyptians before their conquest by the babylonians, China after the han dynasty, post mauryan India, Islam after the ottomans)
Polynesians, SEAmonkeys, naggers, etc fall on the opposite end of the spectrum. They are latent peasant people's who have yet to develop a worldview.
>1 fellaheen
>2 They are latent peasant people's who have yet to develop a worldview.
Please cite where these terms are clarified in the text.
>Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoological up and down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but in the last analysis, devoid of significance.
>The Decline of the West, 267.
Here Spengler specifically differences Fellaheen and primitive peoples.
Thank you. The first Spenglerian I've met on the chans who can actually page cite. This is a good precedent.
I'll admit I don't really understand Spengler's judgment here, as fellaheen peoples certainly contained members who remember the glory days and make efforts to usher renewals or new births, which makes such occurrences hardly devoid of significance.
None of these attempts succeed. Wether it be a bunch of savages trying their hand at empire every once in a while. Or a romantic trying to revive his museum civilization from stasis. It doesn't last long and doesn't lead to anything in the long run. I think that's what he means.
Did he really say China after the Han was fellaheen? I doubt it, since a few later dynasties expanded their imperial glory. Half of China's four great inventions were after the Han dynasty.
Pretty sure he does.
Autism.
If he did I really can't imagine why unless he had outdated sources.
Those things happen, but what's fascinating is that huge epochs of history will slow down, as happened in China. Centuries go by with few important events that affect the whole of civilization. And, after a time, it's business as usual. Which goes back to Spencer's point, which can be applied to things like Zheng He's expedition or the antikythera mechanism: there is a distinction between destiny and incident. Various peoples are certainly capable of doing things, from invention to exploration, but those things don't hold the same destiny for all peoples. Hence, Zheng He, despite all his capabilities, doesn't establish a new kind of global connection, because that's wasn't destiny for China (the Middle Kingdom). Contrary to some misunderstandings (which come from not reading the texts), Spengler did not say that people of different cultures were innately incapable of things outside their metaphysical presuppositions, but they don't mean the same thing to them.
Evola once pointed this out in relation to ancients conceiving things as marked epochs rather than linear time, things of significance relevant of great events, rather than by quantity of years.
Thanks anon, very inisghtful.
Yeah. The non-Zheng He eunuchs apparently seized dominance of the court and prevented China from continuing to extract tribute and incurring further influence, as was the Yongle plan. I can see why, since India was also vastly influential, and this stanched outsiders from being able to form a coup against them.
>Spengler did not say that people of different cultures were innately incapable of things outside their metaphysical presuppositions, but they don't mean the same thing to them.
I guess since he had real respect for other civilizations.
I'll have to check an early 1900s German dictionary if he really said something as pseudy as "devoid of significance", but in my notes I've made a note that he means more like "sporadic of significance"
It's simple. Cite where Spengler said China was fellaheen after the Han dynasty, as their real peak was the Tang, and if he really did, it just shows he was wrong.
You should admit that you don’t understand anything…
> Polynesians, SEAmonkeys, naggers, etc fall on the opposite end of the spectrum. They are latent peasant people's who have yet to develop a worldview
They will never develop a worldview.
If the meso-americans could, everyone can.
The Meso-American civilizations were founded by Chinese and Hindu Polynesians, later continued by Islander and Greenlander Vikings who sailed down there.
In other worlds, they were created by people's who already had a worldview.
By themselves, the American populations would have never created civilizations by themselves.
So fucking true. Good one, anon.
>we wuz Mesoamerican cannibals
Ok, this post belongs in the hall of fame.
theres no hindu influence on the mesoamericans. they would have had a sanskrit based script.
theres definitely no old world influence on andean civilization. their derivation of high culture turned out to be completely unique and an improbable but still real fluke.
> theres no hindu influence on the mesoamericans
The consumption of lama and alpaca milk is a behaviour not known to any people's in the Americas, except for the Incas. Neither do the Chinese people consume milk. It is safe to assume that the ruling class of the Incas was at least partly descended from Polynesian or Indonesian populations who themselves saw themselves conquered by India at some point, importing the rite of milk consumption.
> theres definitely no old world influence on andean civilization. their derivation of high culture turned out to be completely unique and an improbable but still real fluke
Their society has lots of the caste system of the Hindus, except for the poverty of the civilizers. It must be said though, they were preceded by a society more advanced than their own, the Titicaca culture, and the Incas were nothing but copyists.
Why does Spengler attract schizo pseuds like you?
>By themselves, ... by themselves.
Brilliant style, you're a natural.
The real red-pill is that amerifatism as a societal form in the West started way prior to the discovery if America and industralization in Europe, way back from the 3rd to 5th Century AD onward.
From the Late Roman Empire until today, Western culture has been a culture of full-blown amerifatism, but only few people know this.
It’s good to know we live a comfortable rent free life in the minds of the world
I think they’re chud charts. I think Spengler does outright say or perhaps imply that the Ganges did influence Indian man, that the Nile influenced Egyptian man, etc. iirc. When I read the book, I remember thinking it was weird how Western culture and Russian culture were the only ones that weren’t influenced by a body of water. So I think it was in there somewhere.
There are definitely degrees of compatibility between these world images. To say that every possible combination is pseudomorphic is utterly incoherent, and to be frank, pretty stupid philosophizing. Spengler studies need to be dissembled and rebuilt from the ground up.
https://www.writingtoiq.com/
What’s the IQ of someone who challenges the views in a book they’ve never read?
see
You mean someone who thinks critically at the highest level.
You’re the biggest homosexual pseud I’ve ever encountered on this website. By the way, it’s painfully obvious that you’re not white or western and are just seething about the perceived implications of a book you’ve clearly never even read.
The fact that you're behaving so insecurely and yet praise me with a superlative says more about you.
Yours is the materialist reductionist view of the world limiting itself. Textbook midwittery.
I’m not remotely insecure. I just couldn’t refrain from letting you know how gay that was.
>I’m not remotely insecure. I just couldn’t refrain from letting you know how gay that was.
You clearly are. Otherwise there'd be no reason to insult me. Most people simply ignore anons who post minimal opposition to them.
>Where do the Anglophone interpretation of all and each of Spengler's cultures, prime symbols, and natural origins come from? From a secondary book? Spengler doesn't even talk about the Ganges river in DOTW, so I'm not sure why Spengler chart anon phrased it like that.
>Britannia, where did you pull this crap out of?
>the Sea, my dear
>*sips tea*
Don't believe the people who try to turn Spengler into some bullshit mystic. The "cultures" he talked about was purely historical, there is no such thing as prime symbols that capture the civilization yadda yadda.
This thread has enough nonreaders, especially ones that make unwarranted mass imperatives.
You didn’t read the book if you think he doesn’t assign mystical importance to landscapes and history. He literally refers to it as an unknowable destiny.
.