/lit/ - Literature

They may not be pretty but you can't deny that their eyes are full of soul

>>13201209
>>13201219
Most based thing I've read in years.

Where would you even go from here? Is western Civilization really on it's last legs? Is the end inevitable?

What a grotesque man

There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, and for the time permitted by money - and that, without the idealist amongst its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact. The great movement which makes use of the catchwords of Marx has not delivered the entrepreneur into the power of the worker, but both into that of the Bourse. The mistrust felt for high form by the inwardly formless masses is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its freedom - from all form - by means of dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up, which, moreover, in virtue of its mechanizing tendency, is acceptable to the taste of money - consider for example, the structure of the state-machine of France which Robespierre began and Napoleon completed. Money, being inorganic, wants the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. The concept of Socialism is set in effective motion only by money.

>>13015995
It exists, but it is not what people think it is

>>12990237
Race doesn't exist. It's a Western concept with no scientific basis that doesn't appear in any other cultures in history. Pic related was not only able to explain how racism appeared in the Western psyche, but also that belief in a universal "white race" is a symptom of the loss of personal identity in the formless masses of the modern West. It's ironic, those that think the "white race" is being replaced are just as decadent and misguided as the people they decry for not caring about it.

>mfw read Decline a while ago, also read Heidegger's commentary on Spengler and Adorno's commentary on him in Prisms.
>im starting to realize Spengler was right, but i am unwilling to cast off optimism
What is going to happen to the world if Spengler's predictions come true? What will happen to the world after the West?

People keep saying that Spengler was prescient, in particular his works 'Decline of the West' and 'Man and Technics'. But i cant see any really good quotes about phenomena that occurred exactly as Spengler predicted.

unironically

Where should one start with Spengler? Also, do people even read him outside extremely reactionary circles?

Does anybody know where Spengler talks about his idea of a "renaissance of the Medieval"? I know he's the one who came up with the concept, but I'm not sure where in his writings to find it.

Didn't Spengler also postulate a "renaissance of the Medieval," when there would be a rebirth of Medieval thought and learning just as the Renaissance was a rebirth of Classical thought and learning?

>ctrl-f Spengler
>0 results

cmon

Spengler's Decline of the West

>>8985668
>nobody mentioning Oswald Fucking Spengler
I can't believe you people. I leave for a day and everything goes to shit.

>>8598781
What you are saying is fine and well, and ironically fits very well into a cyclical conception of societies: what they experienced in the past is the same as what we are experiencing now, and we are not at all exceptional.

That is fine, but I want you to examine more closely the social forces at work.

Ever since the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution, we have seen an increasing popularization of all society. With mass education and mass production, the normally silent population of history that only rears up during the occasional riot now becomes the literary public: the consumer. Prior to this, books and works of art were written for a class of people who were trained into artistic traditions and who could comprehend the cultural currents at work.

The fact that the former peasant is now the target audience means that the great artistic traditions, the very literary-cultural link that defined the great literature of the past, has slipped away entirely. Our "nobles" do not compose works of literature. The kings and queens of our day are irrelevant icons. There are no court poets. There is no cultural voice that transcends whatever any other man can also give voice to. Our de facto aristocrats, the crony capitalists, are as literary as the genre fiction proliferating on the New York Times Bestseller lists.

In the past, there is reason for certain men to have complained. There are actual socio-historical reasons behind their complaints; and, the same very much applies to us. We have exterminated the culture class and replaced it with the extremely literate middle class. As everyone is the popular, so everything in our culture is popular.

"High art," as it were, has died--so has our culture, insofar as Culture articulates itself through its high artistic traditions. The endless sea of the vulgar--JK Rowlings and George RR Martins---that is our "culture."

sup

not really sociology, but whatever

Did he predict the state of academia in the late 20th and 21st centuries?