/lit/ - Literature

What should I read before picrel in order to best understand it?

>>18172637

>>16502180
Maybe Japanese culture wouldn't be so interesting if western culture wasn't so shit.

the only parts i enjoy are the ones where he talks about art & architecture. more books for this feel?

This book didn't predict shit

Anyone with half a brain could determine that mass immigration would occur in western countries - that is a result of rampant Colonialism.

Ahead of his time, or just wrong?

Since Vico/Hegel, it seems like it has become a tradition for philosophers to make their magnum opus a "metaphysics of history" projects.

Which ones have you read that were interesting?

>Spengler's Decline of The West
Everyone knows this one, a somewhat biological-mystic narrative that asserts history is a series of civilizational cycles and human manifest religion due to geographical locations which trickles down to their math/architecture/art/music

>Evola's Revolt against the modern world
Meme book but a neo-pagan estoteric/gnostic narrative of history founded on Hyperborrean myths and cosmic hindu cycles

>Vico's New Science
The first "metaphysics of history" project ever written, a Christian-Catholic narrative of God's "divine hand" and spiritual civilizational cycles

Which ones have you read? I'd like to get to Hegel and Chesteron's history projects

Is Spengler's concept of history only true if you believe in Darwinian theory?

His concept is that all civilizations rise, peak, and decline in a parallel fashion. This is a scientific, materialist, biological theory, as opposed to a Christian Hegelian philosophy of history which is guided by God's providence in a linear progressive manner.

This also aligns with Spengler's personal view, as he was an atheist.

Is it any good?

I'm on the 2nd chapter and was following at first but he lost me when he started ranting about all of these old mathematicians and mathematical process I'm not familiar with

What is exactly the overall point of this chapter? Just explaining how math has been viewed at different points in history?

>In physics as in chemistry, in biology as in mathematics, the grand masters are dead”
Spengler said this when Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, etc. were all still alive.
>“The very possibility of a real philosophy of today and tomorrow is in question”
Spengler said this in the time of Whitehead, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, etc.
>”after Wagner no great musician”
Spengler said this in the time of Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, etc.

This is a good read, OP. Provides good insight into the concepts explored in other peoples works.

now's not the time for panic....that was 100 years ago.

is reading the abridged fine?

>>13096515
To explain modern art we first have to look at what art is, and how it relates to the culture that creates it. Art is the purest expression of the soul; a complex form-language of nonreciprocal communication between the artist and the viewer. High cultural art took form in grand artistic epochal movements that evolved from one style to the next (what we call common practice), each epoch a pure expression of the Western soul, the yearning for infinity. There are less grand epochs for painting and sculpture, which take a backseat to music in Western culture, than with classical music. Indeed we possess no concept of sculpture epochs at all in Western art history, for sculpture is a form-language romantically appropriated from antiquity and meaningless for the Western soul outside of aesthetics. In classical music, something constantly moving and changing and filling the empty space all around us, the Western soul expresses itself to the fullest. The sculpture, something stationary and present and able to be inspected from all sides, inherently has no meaning for us. The painting, which is meant to be seen from one point of view only and acts as a window into the infinite, takes second place to classical music in Western form-languages.

Western high art eventually concluded, its ambitions of artistic infinity finally actualized, sometime in the late 19th century. Since then all art has been culturally meaningless and finds meaning only through the individual. Today, anything can be art as long as someone believes it is art. Art since about 1900 has slowly been detaching itself from the cultural epochs of painting and classical music that came before it. It's no coincidence that American music, and by extension Western music as a whole, began to be heavily influenced by African American tribal music at around the same time as the conclusion of the final epoch of common practice classical music. Today art is made in "styles", not epochs, made only to excite the bored urban masses rather than to inspire a spiritually and culturally youthful society. Art will continue to become more and more depraved and ridiculous in an effort to entertain, to create success via controversy, not to impress upon a healthy culture the meaning of its soul as it once was. This is your "modern art", your superhero movies, your hiphop and rap, your glass roofed Notre Dame.

If only you knew how bad things really are

Is this the most underrated work in modern history? It has fundamentally changed how I view the world. It's a complete dissection of Western and ancient Greek culture and basically answers every single question I ever had about "why" the world is as it is. It's absolutely criminal that this book has been forgotten about, it should be mandatory reading for everyone.

I just read Spengler's Decline, Yukio Mishima's novels, all of Graham Greene and Houellebecq, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Eliot, and Yeats.

Where next?

>>12922426

Is this total shite or actually worth a read /lit?

go back to /pol/ until you’ve read spengler

I'm looking for a good edition of Decline of the west?

Classic Reprint Series has Volume 1 for $20. Does anyone know if this is any good?

What is the best English translation of Spengler's "Decline of the West"? There are a lot of garbage tier translations out there and I'm trying to wade my way through them. I've heard that the work is beat read in its original German prose, but I simply don't have the time to learn German. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.