/lit/ - Literature

>>18975705
...there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of "causes" or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a pragmatic handling of history would be nothing but a piece of natural science in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it - it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing.

Present-day historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in religious and social, or still more art-history, details to "illustrate" the political sense of an epoch. But the decisive factor - decisive, that is, in so far as visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul - they forget. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond politics to grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks, Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture, philosophies, dramas and lyrics, their choice and development of great arts, the detail of their craftsmanship and choice of materials - let alone appreciated the decisive importance of these matters for the form-problems of history.

Who amongst them realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and - what has perhaps been impossible hitherto - things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.

>>17883519
The Decline of the West. Even as I drift further away from it as time goes on.

>>16390967
You can't go saying things like that without having a proper philosophy of history. JBP is 100% the American Cicero. A master in the art of saying a lot without saying anything and disguising his inner poverty through learned rhetoric and argumentation.

>>16138520
>>16138692
Western civilization started with the Gothic cathedrals

"By the term "Caesarism" I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, Qin Shi Huang in China, Ahmose I in Egypt, and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar."

"Caesarism is not dictatorship, not the result of one man's overriding ambition, not a brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, centuries old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master."

"This is the period when the final restraints are removed. The international system has been so damaged, partly by war and partly by the interdigitation of the societies which compose it, that it loses all resistance to consolidation. Domestic politics in all major powers have lost whatever restraint constitutional forms may once have provided. The extraordinary cynicism and viciousness of political life is ultimately debilitating. For a season, however, it provides a reservoir of available energy, of competent people willing to do literally anything which seems to suit their interests, which can be harnessed by the right man. Against this force, properly directed by a single will, there is nothing in the human world that can stand."

>>15787300
It was just a massive coincidence, 2 fossil civilizations coincidentally reached the end of their lifecycle at the same time while another one was just beginning. The Sea Peoples were certainly Greek.

What are your rules for giving up on a book? When do you give up on books?

>>14669901
He is not talking about economic socialism. The idea that economics can be separated from the state is a Marxist idea. In Spengler and the idealist style of thinking the economic mode follows the structure of the state. Democracy creates capitalism, as we see capitalism emerging in parliamentarian Britain, the forerunner of democracy. Authoritarianism creates Prussianism, here meaning a Roman or Qin Legalism style fighting spirit.

"I have now reached the point when the definitive word must be said about "Prussianism" and "Socialism." In 1919 I compared the two, the one a living idea and the other the catchword of a whole century, and was - I am tempted to add: "of course" - not understood. People no longer know how to read - this great art, still known in the age of Goethe, has died out. They skim printed pages "mass-wise," and, as a result, the reader demoralizes the book. I showed that in the working class, as Bebel welded it into a powerful army, in its discipline and loyal subordination, its good comradeship, its readiness for the ultimate sacrifice, there still lived that Old-Prussian "style" which first proved itself in the battles of the Seven Years' War. What mattered then was the individual Socialist as a character, his "moral imperative," not the Socialism hammered into his head, which was a wholly un-Prussian mixture of foolish ideology and vulgar greed."

"But the shallow-minded cannot get away from the Marxian thought of last century. Throughout the world they think of Socialism not as a moral attitude of life but as economic Socialism, Labour Socialism, as a mass ideology with material aims. Program Socialism of every sort is thinking from below, building on base instincts, canonizing the herd-feeling which everywhere today lurks behind the slogan of "overcoming individualism"; it is the contrary of Prussian feeling, which has livingly experienced through exemplary leaders the necessity of disciplined devotion and possesses accordingly the inward freedom that comes with the fulfilment of duty, the ordering of oneself, command of oneself, for the sake of a great aim."

Preferably something that is not subversive/written to be Islamist apologia.

>>13985819
"cancelled" implies it existed, or was to exist, at some point. What has actually happened is that all the ideas Western culture has ever wanted to express have been actualized; the future isn't "cancelled", rather it has "concluded".

>>13893371
1) It's really informative and entertaining.
2) A lot of his prophecies are coming true despite Spengly's total lack of any sort of quantitative analysis or rigor. Almost the opposite of Marx, despite the fact that there's some marxist influence in Spengler if you know where to look for.

>>13888844
it's almost as if there's nothing left for western man to accomplish....

>>13463268
I've got a similar one I've saved

>>13378732
Most people have a preconceived notion of The Decline of the West based on the title alone, that the entire work is just about the literal decline of the West. For them the word "decline" implies catastrophe. The title is just the conclusion, but even then it's a misnomer. I think the publisher chose the title and Spengler just went with it because he was having serious trouble finding a publisher in the first place. The work is a new perspective on history and culture that would be much better described as "The Perfection of the West", because I think the word 'perfection' describes Spengler's theory of culture becoming and become much better. But all his perspectives and insight on culture get lost in the noise of perceived catastrophic decline by people who haven't read him.

>>13265034
Spengler actually predicted the mass infertility as well as the triumph of finance. However he actually predicted that religion would make a comeback after the year 2000 with the transition to Caesarism.